Save Publisher v2 document for Publisher v1

[mandrael]

Hi,

I noticed there is NO support for opening Publisher v2 documents with Publisher v1. Not everyone has upgraded or intends to upgrade to v2. So how can I save Publisher 2 documents that a Publisher 1 user can open it? I don't see it in the "save as" or "export" section.

Thanks for your help,

Michael

[walt.farrell]

32 minutes ago, mandrael said:

So how can I save Publisher 2 documents that a Publisher 1 user can open it? I don't see it in the "save as" or "export" section.

You can't.

If you will need to share with users who have V1, you should keep V1 installed and use it when saving native Affinity documents for those users.

[mandrael]

Okay, that's a bummer. If the document was saved with Publisher 2 it's lost forever for version 1. With a "save as version 1" all would be good ...

[PaulEC]

Maybe you could send it to other people as a PDF, rather than an APub file, it depends how much editing they need to be able to do!

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, mandrael said:

With a "save as version 1" all would be good ...

Except that if when opened it in V2, it uses some feature V1 does not support, it might not be able to include that feature in the saved V1 version.

Anyway, if you still have V1 installed, you can at least reuse some of the V2 content by copying it from the V2 version & pasting it into a new V1 document, but there will still be the same limitation that features V1 does not support won't paste into the V1 document in the same form.

[mandrael]

On 2/9/2023 at 4:07 PM, PaulEC said:

Maybe you could send it to other people as a PDF, rather than an APub file, it depends how much editing they need to be able to do!

Yes, that's an option, since Publisher is good in importing PDFs, but still, a lot of information would be lost. If no save as V1 is available, this would be the only option. Rebuild from a pdf.

[mandrael]

On 2/9/2023 at 8:38 PM, R C-R said:

Except that if when opened it in V2, it uses some feature V1 does not support, it might not be able to include that feature in the saved V1 version.

Anyway, if you still have V1 installed, you can at least reuse some of the V2 content by copying it from the V2 version & pasting it into a new V1 document, but there will still be the same limitation that features V1 does not support won't paste into the V1 document in the same form.

Sure, V2 may contain not supported content. But better an save option, which removes the potential not supported elements than not have any openable document for V1.

Rebuild via copy & past would be an option for small documents perhaps.

In the end it's the choice of Serif, if they want to have compatibility between the versions. Adobe solved this via IDML.

[h_d]

12 minutes ago, mandrael said:

it's the choice of Serif, if they want to have compatibility between the versions. Adobe solved this via IDML.

Yeah well Serif is a tiny company in Nottingham England and Adobe is a super-humungous world-straddling mega-controlling application-monopolising conglomerate in Silicon Valley CA. Go figure.

[mandrael]

True 😅 But considering this they should have less bugs, better looking more modern software. Like Affinity has.

[PaoloT]

9 hours ago, mandrael said:

Adobe solved this via IDML.

… and this could be the same solution that Serif could adopt, considering that Publisher 1 also reads IDML files.

Paolo

 

[R C-R]

4 hours ago, PaoloT said:

… and this could be the same solution that Serif could adopt, considering that Publisher 1 also reads IDML files.

Do you mean yet another Affinity format like IDML, or adding an export option to IDML ... which only offers partial support on the input side?

[PaoloT]

30 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Do you mean yet another Affinity format like IDML, or adding an export option to IDML ... which only offers partial support on the input side?

And, a new interchange format by Affinity would be able to carry to V1 all the additional features of V2?

Paolo

 

[R C-R]

42 minutes ago, PaoloT said:

And, a new interchange format by Affinity would be able to carry to V1 all the additional features of V2?

If a feature is unsupported in V1, how could a new interchange format make that possible?

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

If a feature is unsupported in V1, how could a new interchange format make that possible?

PaoloT asked that as a question (in case you missed that).

Clearly a new interchange format would not allow earlier releases to support a function they don't understand. But it might conceivably make it easier to ignore those functions, unlike the current all-or-nothing implementatoion.

[R C-R]

21 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

PaoloT asked that as a question (in case you missed that).

No, I did not miss that. I just thought it was obvious that the answer was there is no possible way it could somehow support a feature in V1 that V1 did not already support.

24 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

But it might conceivably make it easier to ignore those functions, unlike the current all-or-nothing implementatoion.

OK, it might be able do that, but how useful would it really be vs. the time & effort it took to implement it, which would mean less time to work on the many issues that still need work in V2?

[PaoloT]

9 minutes ago, R C-R said:

OK, it might be able do that, but how useful would it really be vs. the time & effort it took to implement it, which would mean less time to work on the many issues that still need work in V2?

A couple of reasons would be (a) the ability to interchange data with the current (and for the foreseeable future) standard file format, and (b) the ability of using Publisher in a workflow including professional translation.

A third reason would be (c) being able to exchange data with those who are forced to stay with V1 for some time still (schools, small print shops with machines that are hard to update, users in developing economies).

And there is another reason, that might or might not be too niche, that is (d) being able to support all the file formats supported by Pandoc.

Paolo

 

[R C-R]

I still do not see how this could somehow support anything in V1 that V1 does not already support, nor how they could create an interchange format that would support all possible future features added to later versions.

[PaoloT]

33 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I still do not see how this could somehow support anything in V1 that V1 does not already support

You can't, because it is not possible!

33 minutes ago, R C-R said:

nor how they could create an interchange format that would support all possible future features added to later versions.

And this is even less possible than the above!

But most people would be happy if only V1 features are supported when going from V2 to V1. Or even someone less.

Paolo

 

[R C-R]

5 minutes ago, PaoloT said:

But most people would be happy if only V1 features are supported when going from V2 to V1.

I am not at all sure that most people would be happy if some feature they relied on in V2 was not somehow supported by an interchange format.

[walt.farrell]

8 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I am not at all sure that most people would be happy if some feature they relied on in V2 was not somehow supported by an interchange format.

The interchange format needs to support all the features. It would just be that V1 would ignore features it didn't understand. 

(Or, really, Vn for n >= 2, since this clearly can't apply to V1.)

[R C-R]

1 minute ago, walt.farrell said:

The interchange format needs to support all the features. It would just be that V1 would ignore features it didn't understand. 

But would most people really be happy with that? What if say I used a warp group in AD V2 on a Text layer to keep it editable, that was an important part of the design, & it it wasn't included at all in V1? What about anything that relied on AP V2's non-destructive RAW development feature?

Even if these things were converted to their destructive equivalents, & V1 users needed to change them, they would have to rebuild them from scratch. I just do not see that many users being happy about that.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

But would most people really be happy with that?

In all cases? Probably not.

In many cases, as "better than nothing", probably yes.

But again, it comes down to "if you're trying to share files with someone using application X then you should be using application X." There's almost never 100% compatibility when you use a different application than your colleagues are using, and some amount of rework will be needed once you discover what the incompatibilities are in that specific document.

[R C-R]

23 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

But again, it comes down to "if you're trying to share files with someone using application X then you should be using application X.

Yes, I think so too.