Using sections

[Gianni Becattini]

I am having lot of troubles with AP2, perhaps because my document is rather big (?), especially managing pictures.

Splitting the document in sections could be a good idea or am I going into worse problems?

Thanks

[NotMyFault]

Hi, a bit more details would really help us to understand your question and give advice.

Which Affinity App are you using?

It sounds like Publisher. In that case, if you have the option to split the document into sections of independent documents, go for it. It will save at least  half of your expected life. But portioning a document requires you to manage some aspects that unavoidably span across sections, like page numbers, table of contents. 

It really depends on what you are trying to achieve.

[MikeTO]

52 minutes ago, NotMyFault said:

It sounds like Publisher. In that case, if you have the option to split the document into sections of independent documents, go for it. It will save at least  half of your expected life. But portioning a document requires you to manage some aspects that unavoidably span across sections, like page numbers, table of contents. 

With Publisher v1 you have to manage things like page numbers and table of contents across the documents but not with v2. The new Books feature allows you to split up a document and have everything synced automatically.

[Gianni Becattini]

Thanks for yours replies.

The point is that my current work (a book with 420 pages and 600 photos) has been completely ruined by my stupid idea to pass to Publisher V2, for its total instability.

I don't claim anymore for that: Serif set a trap and I fell into it.  But I am very practical and the point is to survive now.

I am ready to accept anyything: to lose the hyperlinks, to have a different page numbering etc, but I can't live with this anguish that every time I can lose everything I've done.

So the point is: using sections can I split the document in more files? Is this an advantage for the application bugs, dealing with smaller documents? I tried to use section, but the document remain exactly the same, it seems only an internal logic distinction. Am I wrong?

Thanks

[Gianni Becattini]

Or perhaps "books" instead?

[MikeTO]

I've moved my very large book into Publisher v2 and have no regrets, it's working very well for me. I realize your experience may be different.

Sections vs. chapters - for clarity, let's use the official terms. While sections and chapters may be virtually identical terms in normal life in Publisher a Section is a division of a document into logical groups for page numbering purposes, accomplished with the Section Manager. A Chapter is a regular Publisher document that has been added to a Publisher Book.

For a document that is not part of a Book, you can manage different forms of page numbering within that document with the Section Manager. But you will always have one big file. In v1 if you wanted to split a big file into multiple smaller files, then you would have had to update the starting page numbers for each file manually. And it was virtually impossible to automatically create an index or TOC when dealing with multiple files.

In v2, you can split your big file into multiple smaller files and then add them to a Book as Chapters. Publisher's Book feature updates page numbers across all of the Chapter files automatically. It can also synchronize text styles between Chapters. The best part is that it can generate a combined index and TOC from all the entries in all of the Chapters. It really is very powerful however it's a brand new feature. If you've been working on a project for a long time and want to publish very soon I'd stick to the old way of keeping everything in one file - if your document is already working why ask for trouble by breaking it up into separate files? If you're starting a new project now then the Book feature would be a great choice.

There are two advantages to using the Books feature. The big one is that your files will be smaller. I don't think this is as important today as it was years ago, our computers are so powerful now that they can handle a very long book with hundreds of linked images. But if you don't have much RAM or if you are embedding your images, it may be an important factor. The other advantage is that you can collaborate with others by sharing the chapter files. Your editor could be revising chapter 1 while you lay out chapter 2.

I recommend that you experiment with the feature before committing yourself to it for your existing project. I've taken my huge document and broken it up into Chapter files which I added to a Book. It works but I don't need a smaller file and I'm not collaborating with anybody else so there isn't an advantage to me for using it, so I just did this as a test. Try this yourself with a test copy of your project but keep your single file as your master copy until you are sure you want to commit to the Book approach.

Good luck!

[Gianni Becattini]

Thanks for your very valuable information.

I started splitting the document and... miracle! It seems returned stable. It is too soon to express an opinion, but eventually I can work on a chapter without a crash every two minutes.

I will report here updates, to help if possible other unhappy users.

[Gianni Becattini]

Nothing to do. Now the editing seems normal but exporting book is a continuous crash. When it does not crashes, the produced pdf is corrupt.

This Publisher 2 is a true nightmare.

[PaoloT]

I would really love a more radical idea of Book in Publisher. The current coexistence of Book and Sections could be consolidated into a Book with the same nested structure of a Table of Contents.

Each nested section could be a separate document. In the end, the individual documents could be smaller than entire chapters, and this would make much easier managing individual sections, by freely rearranging them and being able to show/hide and export smaller atoms of a project.

Paolo

 

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, PaoloT said:

I would really love a more radical idea of Book in Publisher. The current coexistence of Book and Sections could be consolidated into a Book with the same nested structure of a Table of Contents.

Each nested section could be a separate document. In the end, the individual documents could be smaller than entire chapters, and this would make much easier managing individual sections, by freely rearranging them and being able to show/hide and export smaller atoms of a project.

I think the v2 Book feature already does what you're proposing. The individual documents can be as large or small as you like. You can re-arrange them at any time and Publisher will re-number the pages, footnotes, and more as well as updating the TOC and index. If you want to hide one you can just remove the chapter from the book. You can print or export a single chapter or the entire document.

The Section Manager feature needs to remain separate from the Books feature because not every document will be a Book. I do think the Section Manager could be improved someday.

[PaoloT]

47 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

I think the v2 Book feature already does what you're proposing.

Very different things.

- Sections in the Book can't be nested. It's very rare that a document has a single level of nesting, and no long document can be limited to it.

- Removing a document from the Book is not the same as hiding it. Hiding it, it would remain part of the project, but not included in a version. Take for example a Basic and a Luxury version of a product, both sharing the basic features.

- Section are redundant, now that we have the Book. They are justified by the Book not being able to nesting sections, but that's the core of my proposal.

The current Book is cloning the aging Book of InDesign. It would be much more useful if it could mirror the ToC/Outline of the full project, offering a centralized place where to manage each section of the project.

Paolo

 

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, PaoloT said:

Sections in the Book can't be nested. It's very rare that a document has a single level of nesting, and no long document can be limited to it.

It's true that sections can't be nested and I agree that the Section Manager could stand to be improved. I disagree that no long document can be limited to a single level of nesting - I think most books sold in a bookstore have straightforward page numbering.

1 hour ago, PaoloT said:

- Removing a document from the Book is not the same as hiding it. Hiding it, it would remain part of the project, but not included in a version. Take for example a Basic and a Luxury version of a product, both sharing the basic features.

I see your point. Hiding a Chapter file that's in a Book could automatically renumber all of the remaining pages. This would be a good feature addition.

1 hour ago, PaoloT said:

- Section are redundant, now that we have the Book. They are justified by the Book not being able to nesting sections, but that's the core of my proposal.

I disagree, users shouldn't be forced to split a document up into Chapters and create a Book just to change the page numbering of front matter.

[PaoloT]

8 hours ago, MikeTO said:

8 hours ago, MikeTO said:

Section are redundant, now that we have the Book

I disagree, users shouldn't be forced to split a document up into Chapters and create a Book just to change the page numbering of front matter.

The problem I see is that we are still tied to an old, if not even obsolete concept: the smaller atomic unit is the chapter. It was quite an innovation when InDesign was created, but it is inadequate today. It was based on the idea that the main concept was the file, and not the project.

Let's try to ignore files for a moment. Just imagine our focus is on the project, that might be a novel or a textbook. How Publisher would articulate it internally shouldn't be our matter. What we would see are the project, and the many articulations we see inside it. Just one level, like we might be happy with a novel and its chapters? Several nested levels, as it may happen in a textbook? That's fine, we can deal with all of this in something called the Section Manager, the Outline, the Book, the ToC, or whatever you like.

Individual sections could be individually imported or exported. If we need a separate contribution, it will happen by importing or exporting that section. The file, again – but this time not as the component of our project, but as a way of exchanging parts of it.

Publisher projects would be cleaner (just what looks like a single file), more flexible (the internal articulation would be free), more granular when having to exchange sections.

Paolo

 

 

[Gianni Becattini]

For the moment, book is enough for me. I hope I am not too hasty, but it seems that hailed my ultra-huge problems with Publisher 2, that probably is unable to manage large documents. 

Converting my document to book was almost straightforward, but I had an extra problem, because with books there is another bug when you use hyperlinks with too long URL addresses. When you try to export, you have a crash or, more often, you get a corrupted pdf. It took hours to understand this problem.

But now I can work almost as normal. When I save, I still have heartbeats, but respect having a crash every two-three minutes is a giant leap forward.

I see the limits of Affinity, but I accepted them when I started to use it instead of Adobe (that I still have and pay). What I cannot accept is that they released V2 without a minimum test, practically not valuing the work of their customers. Surely a big strike to their image.

Thanks.