[Publisher] : Hide / Unhide Pages

[avclubvids]

It is an extremely common thing to have a couple different versions of certain pages while working on a presentation or deck, and every other tool used for such things (InDesign, Keynote, PowerPoint, Google Slides, etc. etc.) has the option to hide a page so that it does not show up in the exported or printed document, but it's available for reference or to make a decision between two options. Affinity does not have this option, and it's super frustrating. 

[Pyanepsion]

Hello, @avclubvids,

1. The best method. Just go to the Layer tab of the page and uncheck the group of objects you do not want to appear. When your page is finished, don't forget to remove the unnecessary objects.

2. Good method. You can also create several pages and put each one in a section, with renumbering, and the following section, that you show or hide on export.

3. You can also duplicate the page version 2 and place the versions 1 and 3 on the work board.

[avclubvids]

I tried all these techniques and had this reaction to each:

• Layers - I use a combination of master pages and page-specific layers, so this breaks quickly. It also creates a situation where comparing two options for a page involves either duplicating the page and toggling the layers you want for each option, or toggling layers on and off. Both take a lot of extra clicks and prevent quick and easy comparisons (or exporting, if you actually do want each option for different outputs)
• Sections - I ended up doing this, but it is a total PITA if you have a page in the middle of a section that you want to hide from export. I ended up making a section at the very end of the document and putting the page alts into it, but it was annoying
• Work Boards - certainly offers the best view of the options, but I found this to be clunky to put the option that I wanted into the export. It was clunky
• Page Layers (Groups) - same issue with the first option, this breaks immediately when using master pages if you make updates to the masters, which I do a lot of

Still nothing as simple as every other app's "hide this page" option...

[loukash]

You can create additional Master Pages as non-printable variants, sketches, notepads, different sizes, page orientations, whatever. Since they can be named, you can always keep track of what is what.
You can then apply any other multiple master pages to your "non-layout" master page.
The currently selected and viewed master page will also export separately, without including anything else from the document.

The APu master page features and possibilities are still being massively underestimated…  

[avclubvids]

I'll try it out, I'm already using the heck out of the master pages and loving how they are presented and handled as layers.

Still, there's a checkbox to exclude sections from export, is it impossible to add that at the page level...?

[loukash]

20 minutes ago, avclubvids said:

there's a checkbox to exclude sections from export, is it impossible to add that at the page level...?

You can specify which pages you want to export.
(I'm not at my Affinity v2 installation at the moment, so this is from v1 export window, but the principle is the same.)