Regex replacement by section

[skyzyx]

I want to do some regex pattern replacements, but ONLY in one specific "section" of the project. As far as I can tell, there isn't a straight-forward way to do this. I would love to see better support for this in a future version of the product.

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

Other than using a technique like the one I describe below, there is no way to limit the scope of Find/Replace today in Publisher:

 

[skyzyx]

Thanks, and I understand. That's why I'm posting this in the Feature Requests section.

[walt.farrell]

You're welcome.

Pragmatically, it will be a long time before your requests are fulfilled, assuming they ever are.

In the meantime, you will need workarounds, and we cannot tell which workarounds you already know about (or others reading your request might know about), so we have to tell you about them here

[sfriedberg]

@skyzyxAt a bare minimum, it should be possible to restrict regex matches to the current selection.  But even that is lacking, as you have found.

[skyzyx]

Appreciate the input.

I've done a lot of work with ePubs, which can be easily done with VSCode and Pandoc. I'm looking at Affinity Publisher as a more affordable alternative to Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress.

Comparatively, Pixelmator is a fantastic alternative to Photoshop; Sketch is a fantastic alternative to Illustrator. I was hoping that Publisher would also be a fantastic alternative. It's not that the product is bad — it's pretty good for the first 90% of the project! But it definitely lacks tools for the final 10%. I was really hoping that the staff would care enough to participate and engage in actually working to solve customer problems.

If it's true that "it will be a long time before your requests are fulfilled, assuming they ever are", I don't know how much I should bother investing here.

[sfriedberg]

Serif's Affinity team used to post a roadmap, but they got about 99% abusive responses from unprofessional users.  So they have stopped discussing their development roadmap.  Now we get what we get, and we learn about it in a beta release, no sooner.

Having evaluated Scribus for myself, I'm entirely confident that the Affinity suite team is moving much faster than the Scribus team (although that's a terribly low bar to exceed).  The major question for me is "Are Serif serious about addressing the professional market, or will they be content to stop with the casual desktop publishing market?"  As we are still on version 1 of the entire Affinity suite, it's far too soon to say.  However, it is not too soon to say that version 1 of AffPub does not provide quite a few professional features: scripting, tagged input, footnotes, bidirectional text, vertical text, robust running heads, robust color management and prepress support, plugin support, etc., etc.

I used Ventura Publisher (nee GEM Publisher), before Corel consigned it to a deep, dark hole.  VenPub 10 had some annoying bugs and needed some very significant fundamental upgrades (e.g., to handle Unicode) but it was a very nice system to use.  When AffPub achieves the capabilities of VenPub, I will be pleased indeed.  And AffPub has the potential to go quite a bit further.