Publisher Suggestions

[Jack PM]

Here are a few suggestions for Publisher as I see them. However I realize I'm still learning and don't know all the features, so if they are available please let me know. Also, apologies if these have been covered. (By the way, 2.0 is a huge improvement. Hats off to everyone.)

• More contrast or other colors throughout the interface. I appreciate subtlety but being a man of a certain age sometimes it’s hard to distinguish slightly dark gray from dark gray. I've taken the contrast as far as it will go in the preferences, but it's still not enough. A gutter line in the page icons would be helpful too.

• Universal layers. In Indesign layers aren’t just for master pages but for live pages too. I can see why each page would benefit from their own layers, but organizing a complicated document rather needs universal layers outside the master. Or have I missed something?

• Right click to completely detach something from a master page. I can Edit Detached, cut/paste but that seems a little awkward.

• Transform by percent in the Transform Panel.

• Add a top bar button to rescale proportionally. Clicking on a side image box is one of those “hidden features” that took a long time to find.

• Add “date created” and “date modified” options in the Resource Manager.

• On export, the second window only scales from the center. I’d like to move it off to the side sometimes.

 

Those say "Layer". Oops.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Jack PM said:

Universal layers. In Indesign layers aren’t just for master pages but for live pages too. I can see why each page would benefit from their own layers, but organizing a complicated document rather needs universal layers outside the master. Or have I missed something?

You may have missed that you can have multiple Master Pages, and especially that you can apply multiple Master Pages to a document page. And that each document page can incorporate items from its Master Page(s), but also can have unique items on the Master Page layer that are not shared with other document pages. These can handle many different scenarios.

But no, there are no Global Layers in the sense you're asking for.

1 hour ago, Jack PM said:

Right click to completely detach something from a master page. I can Edit Detached, cut/paste but that seems a little awkward.

Once you've invoked Edit Detached, you can drag an object out of the Master Page layer on the document page and make it unique to that document page. thus, it does not require cut/paste. Perhaps makes it less awkward?

 

[Jack PM]

Thank you Walt. I wasn't aware that you could do those things with master pages, and that might be a solution to my workflow. I'll definitely look into it!

[Ash]

Thanks for that feedback. 

Just want to check - currently you can just type a % into the transform panel (e.g. typing "50%" in width box should reduce width by half) - is that what you mean or something else?

[Jack PM]

<< currently you can just type a % into the transform panel >>

Ah ha! I wasn't aware of that. Thank you. I'm so used to a separate entry in Indesign I just assumed it wasn't available in Publisher. 

This goes to a bit of rant for me. I know there are many features to programs and there must be a learning curve. But sometimes the blatantly obvious is good to have too. I also work in Glyphs app and the interface is kept so minimal that at times it's infuriating that they don't have tools which tend to be standard in other drawing programs. 

[Pšenda]

6 hours ago, Jack PM said:

I wasn't aware of that.

https://affinity.help/publisher2/English.lproj/pages/Workspace/expressions.html