Publisher workflow proof of concept

[DoublEdge]

Hello all.  I would like to know if the following is possible in Publisher and generally how I might approach accomplishing this.

I need to create a specifications document.  This consists of two parts.  The first half of the document is simple hierarchal formatted text.  Following the text I need to insert multiple PDF files which can each contain multiple pages.  I would like to setup a workflow where I could reference the PDF files so as we update them it will easily be updated in Publisher.  This includes add or deleting PDF files as the project progresses.  There is no specific number of PDF files or pages.  Sometimes it amounts to 25 or 30 total PDF pages across however many files and sometimes it's hundreds.  The entire document will also need to have a common header and footer, which I know is not an issue.

Basically I am hoping to setup a template that can be told to look at a folder for the PDF files and simply pulls them in to some degree.

 

Is this possible in some form or another?

 

Thanks!

Greg

 

[firstdefence]

I could be wrong but I don't think that's possible, I thought you could use the Book option whereby you can have separate documents as chapters but it looks like the chapters need to be afpub files as PDF was greyed out when I tried opening a PDF as a chapter.

https://affinity.help/publisher2/English.lproj/pages/Advanced/creatingBooks.html

[Dan C]

Hi @DoublEdge,

Unfortunately as firstdefence has confirmed, this isn't directly possible within Publisher currently, my apologies.

If you could add a PDF as a chapter in a book, then it would automatically have each page of the PDF as a page in the document, and it would update if you modified that PDF, but the book function can't look at a folder and dynamically pull in multiple PDFs from there.

Therefore I will be moving this thread to the Feedback section of the forums for our team to see and consider adding such a workflow in the future.

I hope this helps

[DoublEdge]

Thanks @firstdefence and @Dan C for your comments. This is very helpful.  I've been playing around with the book feature as well as the autoflow with picture frames to see if I could come up with a workflow that was at least better than what we currently do via MS Word.  What I found is the following and please correct me if I'm mistaken as I only spent so much time play around.  

1) The book feature is nice except that you seem to have to manage your master page(s) in each file you've made a chapter rather than being able to apply a single master to the entire book. So if you applied that concept to importing PDFs as chapters and wanted a header and footer on each page of this combined document you would have to do that for each file.  That's not worth it.  We're often working with 40-50 PDFs.  If the book were able to have masters that could be applied to each chapter that would do the trick.  I think that if the feature allowed the user to override all masters in a selected chapter with a book master that would be ideal as it would provide options for how to work.  If you need the granularity of many masters you simply do it in each chapter file but if you want a unified look across the entire book or for a specific chapter you could make that happen too.  Im my case, assuming PDFs were supported, I would only need to use the book masters across each chapter.

2) Using autoflow with picture frames seems to work pretty well, although while testing this Publisher had to be force quit a few times when trying to Place a PDF.  It simply became unresponsive for a long time.  

Linking the PDF files does allow for updating any changes to the PDFs however that seems to be with some limitations.  If I changed the number of pages in the PDF Publisher did not like that.  Deleting a page from the PDF file and updating made it duplicate what was the new last page in the PDF so it occupied the same number of frames.  Adding a page to the PDF did nothing.  I also got unpredictable results trying to replace the asset via the Asset Manager.  Sometimes it worked sometimes not and the number of pages was an issue here too.  It had to be the same as what there was previously as far as I could tell. 

On a final note, I noticed that autoflow will overwrite existing content in a frame.  The conditions were that I wanted to insert a multi-page PDF between other pages that already had their frames filled.  If I did not insert the correct number of blank pages with frames autoflow would simply continue through the already set frames.  Autoflow needs an option by which it will not overwrite what is already in a frame when you are inserting a multi-page PDF or set of images in the middle of a document.  Much like it will automatically add pages with frames at the end of a document if you don't have enough to support what it's inserting, it should be able to do the same mid document if you want it to.   

 

Thanks!

[Old Bruce]

The easiest way to solve problems with PDFs not working properly is simply to not use PDFs. I realize that this is but one man's opinion but PDF is not a suitable format for this sort of work.

[DoublEdge]

I appreciate your point of view and I've seen you say this elsewhere on the forum.  However the issue is not that I am using PDF.  The file format is irrelevant.  It's an Affinity Publisher workflow limitation due to the issues I described above which apply to any file format I use.   You simply can't achieve what I want.

The relevancy of the PDF format is a topic for another thread.