Importing a WORD document together with images

[Mark Pyman]

Hello,

I am an absolute beginner user of Affinity Publisher. I've bought Affinity Publisher v2 because I am self publishing a document, both print and online. I want the print version to look better, using Publisher,  and the online version needs to be an ePub format. It's currently a big document in WORD: 310 pages of text, including about 500 photos and images. I know I can get it into Publisher by stripping out the photos, importing the text and then replacing all the photos: I've experimented with doing this and it's OK. But sooo slow.  I'm so hoping that there is a quicker way than that. All advice, suitably dumbed down, will be greatly appreciated. Mark

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums, @Mark Pyman.

First, Publisher may not help you with your requirement for epub, as it does not produce epub. It can produce PDF, and if you can accept a fixed-format epub, there are converters that might be able to take the PDF and produce that more limited form of epub file for you.

Next: Have you tried setting up a Publisher document with the appropriate Master Page(s) and Text Frames, and then Placing your .docx file into the Text Frame on page 1, and Shift+Clicking on the linking triangle? If everything works, that should transfer everything in. But if that doesn't work, then the slow way may be all you can do.

[David in Яuislip]

What I found with a quick check on an A4 doc with 25.4mm margins all round was the docx file is placed at ¼ size so with the Text box selected
Lock aspect ratio
Enter 210-50.8 into the W box and click <enter>

There was some unwanted hyphenation across the image so I turned hyphenation off, this will be dependent on the wrap setting but my Image is wrapped Tight

The Word margins around the image are not carried across so these need setting

But even with this extra work it must be miles quicker than importing text then all the images individually

[Mark Pyman]

Thank you Walt. But, please, you have to be joking about Publisher not producing epub files, surely. It's a 'publishing' product??!! I confess I didn't even bother to check this when looking which product to buy.

And thank you very much David from Ruislip, I'll try this way forward.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Mark Pyman said:

But, please, you have to be joking about Publisher not producing epub files, surely. It's a 'publishing' product??!

Not joking, sorry.

[David in Яuislip]

You may like to look at https://calibre-ebook.com/
which is free and can produce ebooks in various formats from docx files. Presentation varies depending on file format, document can be edited using calibre but you'll need to know some html & css

[Mark Pyman]

🤕☹️😰

[Mark Pyman]

Thanks very much David, I'll take a look at Calibre

[Dan C]

Welcome to the Affinity Forums @Mark Pyman 

Just to provide a little further information, our team have previously confirmed that we're working on ePub export (see below), though unfortunately we don't have any specific dates for this currently - 

I hope this clears things up!

[Mike Perry]

Many, many thanks for the news that Affinity is working on epub export. I would like to make a suggestion.

As someone who's created a number of of books in epub with InDesign, I'd stress that for most of those needing to generate epubs, reflowable is more useful than fixed layout. Amazon can take an reflowable epub and convert it to their proprietary (but epub-like) format. Given the size of the Amazon market, creating books for the Kindle is crucial for almost every publisher and writer. It's the lack of epub support, particularly reflowable, that's keeping me from leaving InDesign altogether and recommending Affinity to others. I'd suggest reversing that timeline. Create reflowable epub before creating the fixed format. It should also be much easier to do.

You might also want to contact the Kindle team and explore the possibility of creating a direct-to-Kindle export for Publisher. Adobe InDesign used to do that but abandoned the feature for some reason. Having Publisher do that would be a big plus for Publisher over InDesign.

--Mike Perry, author of Untangling Tolkien.