Affinity Publisher – tagged text export?

[Steelfinger]

Hi there, I have a question that might seem unimportant, but bear with me and you might see there is some merrit to that question.

Is serif planning to include some kind of page-description format / tagged text format as we have it in InDesign or QuarkXPress?

The reason I am asking is, that, having worked for the publishing industry in Germany for more than a decade and typeset something between 800 and 900 books by now, I heavily depend on InDesigns tagged text export format. Depending on the publisher I have scripted a number of scripts that I use with an ordinary text-editor, to search and replace format names with GREP routines and reimport that altered tagged text into a book template. Instead of applying formats by hand which is time consuming and prone for errors, that method is pretty much fool-proof and much faster. Instead of several hours I usually get a pre-typeset book within mere seconds. Especially on scientiffic works this is of immense importance, especially if there are footnotes involved.

I could not find any export format for any kind of tagged text, though, that’s why I am asking.

Best wishes,
Peter

[DM1717]

I too am very interested in the topic of tagged text. Having worked years with Quark and InDesign, I developed scripts to generate the tags when exporting from a database so it could be imported into chapters of reference-type books fully formatted. REALLY speeded up the time to create the book.

At the start, I learned what the formatting was like by exporting fully formatted text from a document, then studied how the header text and tags were formatted. i don't see any way to export text out of an Affinity document except copy and paste which does no good. I'm new to Affinity and just got the version 2 bundle and this is one of VERY few omissions compared to the others.

Looking forward to this feature being added.

Dave