Linking and embedding text

[Michael Lloyd]

Serif team,

For God's sake, please make it possible to link (vs embed) text documents.

The Affinity Publisher team seems disinterested in supporting document collaboration.

Affinity Publisher is not a reasonable choice in most corporate environments, since reports, user guides and similar documentation requires multiple contributors, necessitating some form of collaborative capability.

As a technical writer I have worked in multiple corporate environments, currently for the US Government. In each environment I advocate using Affinity Publisher ─ since the alternative is Microsoft Word 😒.

While exploring the feasibility of using Affinity Publisher for the Government I ran into the same issue ─ the only major issue, no collaboration capability. Affinity Publisher is mature enough for collaboration to be a high priority.

 

The following is a Serif Affinity sponsored video explaining linked and embedded resources in Affinity Publisher. At 30 seconds it explains: "an advantage of using linked resources is you can utilize collaborative workflows. It allows colleges and other users to make changes to the image files separately":  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5YIUkksr4Q

With publications, collaboration needs are primarily for text, not images.

Please make Linking and Embedding work with text documents!!!

 

In June 2022 I offered the following suggestion, which is more comprehensive and complex to implement, but would also satisfy this need and may further distinguish Serif Affinity as an innovator.

[Dimmo]

1 hour ago, Michael Lloyd said:

Serif team,

For God's sake, please make it possible to link (vs embed) text documents.

The Affinity Publisher team seems disinterested in supporting document collaboration.

Affinity Publisher is not a reasonable choice in most corporate environments, since reports, user guides and similar documentation requires multiple contributors, necessitating some form of collaborative capability.

As a technical writer I have worked in multiple corporate environments, currently for the US Government. In each environment I advocate using Affinity Publisher ─ since the alternative is Microsoft Word 😒.

While exploring the feasibility of using Affinity Publisher for the Government I ran into the same issue ─ the only major issue, no collaboration capability. Affinity Publisher is mature enough for collaboration to be a high priority.

 

The following is a Serif Affinity sponsored video explaining linked and embedded resources in Affinity Publisher. At 30 seconds it explains: "an advantage of using linked resources is you can utilize collaborative workflows. It allows colleges and other users to make changes to the image files separately":  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5YIUkksr4Q

With publications, collaboration needs are primarily for text, not images.

Please make Linking and Embedding work with text documents!!!

 

In June 2022 I offered the following suggestion, which is more comprehensive and complex to implement, but would also satisfy this need and may further distinguish Serif Affinity as an innovator.

I agree 100%, I use InDesign and have tried out Pagemaker and Quark in the past and the one thing they all have in common is that they are all first and foremost a LAYOUT program designed to work with multiple contributors, this is almost impossible to do without the ability to link all documents not just photos.

[Michael Lloyd]

The Affinity Publisher promotional page (https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher/) states the following:

Quote

Collaborate like never before. Package your document alongside all used image and font resources before transferring to a colleague, or collate multiple files to create one large document like a book or annual report.

Being able to package and send publication files isn't collaboration.
Collaboration is working on a project simultaneously.

Come on Affinity team, support your claims and your users, and increase the Affinity Publisher acceptance rate by making it possible to link (vs embed) text documents.

Actually, implementing my June 2022 suggestion would qualify as "collaborate like never before".
That would be exciting!

[walt.farrell]

48 minutes ago, Red Sands said:

Have you verified if Affinity Publisher actually creates accessible PDF files if your output is PDF?

https://www.section508.gov/create/pdfs/

How is that relevant to this request?

[Michael Lloyd]

@Red Sands, though accessibility is important, it is not a concern for my audience and output requirements.

And as suggested by @walt.farrell, not relevant to this request.

Quote

That @Michael Lloyd may not be able to use Affinity Publisher at all for PDF publications in a US government context... US accessibility requirements may be a showstopper.

@Red Sands, thank you for your heartfelt concern for my employment, but my supervisors disagree ─ not an issue.

Quote

There is no need to focus on this request if that is the case.

Of this I couldn't disagree more. The need for Affinity Publisher to support collaborative efforts is a requirement for implementation in many environments.
Regardless of whether or not I and my supervisors are successful in getting Affinity Publisher approved, the need to focus on this request persists.

 

 

[Catshill]

If I am live collaborating predominantly text documents, I’ll use Google Docs. I then use the content from these in APu. This is saved as pdf on Google Drive for the authors to comment. I then update the APu file and save it as version 2, again as pdf for others to comment. 

[walt.farrell]

9 hours ago, Michael Lloyd said:

The need for Affinity Publisher to support collaborative efforts is a requirement for implementation in many environments.

I think that the main collaborative function that V2 currently provides is the Books feature, Michael. This allows, for example, chapters of a book to be easily created by different team members, using Publisher, and the resulting .afpub files are assembled into a final publication by another member.

Other users have also asked for Linked text files, and perhaps they will come, someday. But I think there are other functions that will also be needed before Linked text files can truly be useful. For example, importing DOCX files gives you a new set of Text Styles, in many cases, which may then need to be adjusted. With a naive implementation of Linked text files, you would have major rework in the main document whenever one of the Linked files changed, and was re-imported.

So, in addition to supporting Linked text files, some significant rework on Text Syle importation would be required, too.

[Dimmo]

3 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I think that the main collaborative function that V2 currently provides is the Books feature, Michael. This allows, for example, chapters of a book to be easily created by different team members, using Publisher, and the resulting .afpub files are assembled into a final publication by another member.

Other users have also asked for Linked text files, and perhaps they will come, someday. But I think there are other functions that will also be needed before Linked text files can truly be useful. For example, importing DOCX files gives you a new set of Text Styles, in many cases, which may then need to be adjusted. With a naive implementation of Linked text files, you would have major rework in the main document whenever one of the Linked files changed, and was re-imported.

So, in addition to supporting Linked text files, some significant rework on Text Syle importation would be required, too.

So if linked text documents are considered not that important then what makes linking photos so important apart from file size if embedded.

[Michael Lloyd]

@Catshill, two things:

1) My position requires a security clearance therefore Google Docs is not an option.

2) I'm not interested in a workaround. I'm interested in a solution, consistent with Serif's claims of unprecedented collaboration, and for Affinity Publisher to include text document linking, so the application provides a level of collaboration similar to nearly all other professional desktop publishing applications.

It was not an accident that I put this suggestion under the Suggestions section in this forum.

I am not seeking assistance in working around an issue, I'm offering a suggestion that I believe will increase the application acceptance, and help in my work environment.

[Michael Lloyd]

16 hours ago, Dimmo said:

So if linked text documents are considered not that important then what makes linking photos so important apart from file size if embedded.

@Dimmo. 

Damn, on topic and intelligent.

As mentioned in my 2nd post... Affinity Publisher promotional page boasts "unprecedented collaboration" with the ability for others to modify graphics using the link feature.

Obviously Serif understands using the link feature for collaboration.

[Catshill]

14 hours ago, Michael Lloyd said:

I am not seeking assistance in working around an issue, I'm offering a suggestion that I believe will increase the application acceptance, and help in my work environment.

That’s fine. And as someone who also needs to work collaboratively I am sharing how I do things. 

[Michael Lloyd]

@Catshill I understand, and I like to help out as possible myself.

Hope I didn't come across too sharply.
Just concerned that the Affinity Publisher team might consider this issue resolved, and not address the suggestion.

[Michael Lloyd]

@walt.farrell interesting option. I wasn't familiar with the Books feature. I'll explore that and see if it helps.

Regardless Publisher needs the link feature to work with text.

Regarding:

Quote

importing DOCX files gives you a new set of Text Styles, in many cases, which may then need to be adjusted. With a naive implementation of Linked text files, you would have major rework in the main document whenever one of the Linked files changed, and was re-imported.

If Serif is neglecting text linking support because they first want to handle Word styles I'm disappointed in them.

Limiting linked text document integration to ASCII/unformatted text would make the feature functional and sufficient for environments needing collaboration. Formatting can be managed in Affinity Publisher. Also having several contributors formatting parts of a document is chaotic.

Reminds me of a suggestion I made (that was ignored) after realizing why Affinity Publisher doesn't have scanning capability on the Windows platform. They were having issues supporting 32-bit scanners, since Windows 10/11 doesn't support them natively, and there are multiple standards. Serif's solution is to neglect their Windows users.
My solution was to support 64-bit scanners (a feature built into Windows 10/11), and document: '32-bit scanners are not supported'.

[Old Bruce]

13 hours ago, Michael Lloyd said:

Limiting linked text document integration to ASCII/unformatted text would make the feature functional and sufficient for environments needing collaboration. Formatting can be managed in Affinity Publisher. Also having several contributors formatting parts of a document is chaotic.

Surely you can see that every time there is a change to the linked text file the text in the Publisher document will be reimported, as unformatted text.

[walt.farrell]

41 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Surely you can see that every time there is a change to the linked text file the text in the Publisher document will be reimported, as unformatted text.

And then, any work that was done to format the text will need to be redone.

Linked plain-text files would provide a benefit to only a small subset of users, I think. Linked DOCX files would provide much more benefit, but only if the text styles can be handled better than they are today. Otherwise there will still be too much manual effort to reformat the text.

 

[Michael Lloyd]

Yes @Old Bruce I understand text would be unformatted each time updates are made to linked text files. Not ideal, but collaboration would be supported, and using styles from within Affinity Publisher would guarantee formatting consistency and eliminate the possibility of conflicting style definitions.

 

I was also thinking about Affinity Publisher supporting Markdown. Using Markdown would eliminate styles issues from other applications ─ but that's a different topic.

[walt.farrell]

7 minutes ago, Michael Lloyd said:

I was also thinking about Affinity Publisher supporting Markdown. Using Markdown would eliminate styles issues from other applications ─ but that's a different topic.

I would say it's an aspect of the same topic. The formatting must be handled in a reasonable way, in my opinion, or the function is not usable and won't be appreciated (or used) by the majority of users.

[Dimmo]

21 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Surely you can see that every time there is a change to the linked text file the text in the Publisher document will be reimported, as unformatted text.

I do it all the time in In Design and it keeps the original formatting no problem, that's why I need to keep using InDesign. As I have stated before it is a LAYOUT program not a word processor if simple text linking can't be achieved properly then it is useless to most people who receives external documents.

[walt.farrell]

17 minutes ago, Dimmo said:

I do it all the time in In Design and it keeps the original formatting no problem, that's why I need to keep using InDesign.

The post you replied to was about linking plain-text files. They would not have any formatting to maintain, which was the point being made in that post 

[tomas cisar]

Hello,

I totally agree!

This feature is essential, as it is crucial to link documents from copywriters while maintaining formatting and styles, even after updates.

In InDesign, this functionality has been available for a long time.

It is hoped that this feature will be incorporated in the near future.

Fingers crossed.

Tomas

[cyberlizard]

I must say I concur with the idea of being able to link text files, particularly as I work with long form text.  As someone said earlier, we can link graphic images but not text, which begs the question why not.  

Can this be added to the list of requested tools in the current or next beta releases.

 

I'm pretty sure anyone using Publisher for working principally with text (rather than images) will be very grateful for the addition.

[fde101]

On 6/13/2023 at 11:54 AM, Michael Lloyd said:

Using Markdown would eliminate styles issues from other applications ─ but that's a different topic.

Not an entirely unrelated one though, as it connects to one of the two sensible ways I can think of to support styles being described for imported plain text files.  Allowing Publisher styles, as they currently exist, to be applied to linked text files (plain or not) would be a mistake.  As was pointed out, they could be lost at any time if the file changes, so in my opinion Publisher should prevent them from being applied in the first place unless the text is converted to being embedded, or the user is editing the actual, linked-to file, and the formatting can be represented there.

One of the two reasonable ways to handle the styles is to have the linked text file itself identify what styles to use, which Markdown provides a nice way of handling for simple styling.  For document formats such as DOCX which have their own text styles, Publisher should probably either offer to map those to native Publisher styles (by name) so that when the linked document is updated it is using the Publisher text styles but still allowing the document to specify where to apply them, or ignore the Publisher styles and use the ones from the document instead (without actually importing them as Publisher styles, to avoid polluting the list).

The other option is to add support for conditional formatting, which has been requested in other threads, so that the required formatting can be applied algorithmically based on the established rules.  The same rules could be applied to updated text from the linked files, so this would work as a nice alternative to bringing the styles in from the linked file itself.

 

If plain text linking were supported right now, without other features to support it, it would need to be supported as text that remains "plain", with no formatting support at all except what can be applied to the entire frame as a whole, requiring the text to be converted to embedded before it can be formatted internally.

To get usefully formatted linked text, we would need one of Markdown (or other similar text format) support, improvements to DOCX support to offer a more feasible form of style mapping (or the ability to use styles from the linked file without importing them and polluting the list), and/or conditional formatting to be implemented.  Each of these is additional plumbing work above and beyond the ability to the link the text files at all.