Features that will not be in Publisher V2 this year

[PaoloT]

Hi,

I'm in the dark hour of having to plan the forthcoming work for my team. Some of us were confident to be able to switch from InDesign to Publisher during this year, but at the moment this looks unlikely.

While Serif doesn't reveal the future features, let's see if they can at least say what will not, for sure, be implemented from now on. At least, we will know if a fundamental feature will never be implemented, and think to possible solutions (or lack of them).

This must be clear: we expect that Publisher will also include things that InDesign has stopped developing, after switching to subscription. But, at the moment, feature parity is an absolute priority.

What we need to replace InDesign is the following.

- Export to IDML, and continued support for IDML import. This is needed both (a) to maintain compatibility with the team members wanting to remain with the Adobe suite, and (b) to interface with translation support software. Members in the CJK and Middle East countries can't, at the moment, even think of switching to Publisher. This might look a niche problem to most users, but it is a major one for some. While the Affinity Suite is labeled as a "design" suite, the sad reality is that from the time Publisher was released it also had to deal with text…

- Export to DOCX. This is needed for reusing the text content for advertising, videos, and even translators preferring to work in Word or LibreOffice. And it is the needed link for ePub and HTML, being the accepted file format for programs that can help generating these outputs. For example: we heard that Publisher will export in fixed ePub sometimes, but we need reflowable. And there are already tools that can help us with it.

- Long tables, extending over multiple pages. We have tables extending over many pages. There are no viable workarounds that I can think of, apart for – using InDesign…

- Object Styles. We have to adapt our visual styles to the different products and output targets. One of the most common situations is the difference between printed materials (with fewer visual effects, less dark areas) and onscreen ones (richer in visual effects).

- Text Variables. These are really huge time savers sometimes. Text Variables make adapting a manual to a different product a matter of hours, instead of days.

- Conditional Text. This is another of the things making adapting a book to a different context something quick and error-free.

Are these features for sure excluded from development, in the next months or so, or even excluded forever?

Paolo

 

[MikeTO]

I have no knowledge of what's coming but I'm hoping that variables will be added at the same time as scripting. It's hard to write complex scripts without document variables for storing data in the file.

[joe_l]

1 hour ago, MikeTO said:

but I'm hoping that variables will be added at the same time as scripting.

Variables, just a basic need for that. I want to create forms!!! PDFLib used in the Affinities is capable of handling / generating them. So the needs vary from user to user.

[Patrick Connor]

On 5/25/2023 at 3:59 PM, joe_l said:

Variables, just a basic need for that. I want to create forms!!! PDFLib used in the Affinities is capable of handling / generating them. So the needs vary from user to user.

Hi joe_l,

Text variables have just been added to the 2.2 beta if you wanted to give it a try: