Open Publisher pages in Designer as artboards

[elguapo]

I need the full power and convenience of Designer's Export Persona to be applicable to Publisher documents. After many unsuccessful attempts, I'm currently resorting to opening two application, creating all the necessary artboards in Designer, and manually copying page by page using Cmd-A, swap, Cmd-V. And only then proceeding to Export all necessary bits the way I want.

Is there any way to simplify this meaningless manual labor? Perhaps there is a way to open Publisher pages as artboards from a start? I would appreciate any suggestions you may have. Thanks.

[R C-R]

21 minutes ago, elguapo said:

Perhaps there is a way to open Publisher pages as artboards from a start?

If the document already has pages & not artboards, I don't think there is any way to do that.

However, it is not clear why you need to convert pages to artboards so if you could tell us exactly why you want to do that, maybe we could help suggest an alternative....

[elguapo]

The overall workflow is as follows. I create the design of a presentation in Affinity Publisher, but then I need individual elements (usually headings and vector shapes in SVG, but sometimes PNGs) that I can easily transfer to the format required by the client (website, Keynote, Pitch, etc. There's something new every day). So I specifically need these separate pieces.

Currently, accomplishing this task quickly is a manual labor nightmare.

I would like to set up exporting in a similar way in Designer so that I don't have to manually rename each item and perform other unnecessary, time-consuming tasks.

[v_kyr]

Why using APub then at all here (?), when you finally always have to transfer things (the whole) over to ADe Artboards either way then, in order to extract individual elements for some export and the like. - Sounds to me somehow counterproductive and much too cumbersome. - Either do all in ADe Artboards, or instead export individual selected layers from APub here then.

[elguapo]

Obviously, because it suits the task of design best. I'm dealing with 70+ pages with logical structure with the need to add a section or two in-between.

Had it the option of exporting to Designer as artboards, it would've even better.

If you don't have any constructive suggestion other than stop using Publisher, than perhaps you can bring much more value somewhere else?

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, elguapo said:

I'm dealing with 70+ pages with logical structure with the need to add a section or two in-between.

I guess I am missing something about what your logical structure needs to be but why can't you do that using 70+ artboards in AD?

[elguapo]

12 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I guess I am missing something about what your logical structure needs to be but why can't you do that using 70+ artboards in AD?

Smart master pages, quick page view with cmd-arrows, 3 Personas, auto-flow, all text frame features, data merge, adding comments to preflight check, etc, etc

+ it's like a book or pitch deck, everything is ordered, I can quickly move sections if needed, export wip to client to discuss and tons of other subtle things that even funny to say out loud.

Guys, really. There is some small benefit in using Publisher for this kind of work.

[walt.farrell]

For some purposes (but probably not others) you might try:

1. Export the file from Publisher as a PDF.
2. Open the PDF in Designer. Each page will be an Artboard.

Alternatively, you can Open the Publisher .afpub file in Designer, and you have all the data as Pages but you can use the Export Persona. The limitation is that you can only use it on one page at a time.

Those are your only options, as far as I know. If you need something else, feel free to make a request in the Feedback forum, where the Serif planners look for them.

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, elguapo said:

If you don't have any constructive suggestion other than stop using Publisher, than perhaps you can bring much more value somewhere else?

Personally for presentations, I would aready (re)use some presentation software tool for such tasks, ideally one which is suited to support all that what I commonly need here right out of the box. - But the sort of presentations I do (... technical software dev workflows, design patterns, training employees in certain software & software design ...etc.) might be possibly different from what you do, or what you have in mind here with presentation designs.

[elguapo]

13 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Those are your only options, as far as I know. If you need something else, feel free to make a request in the Feedback forum, where the Serif planners look for them.

Thank you for suggestions. Exactly what I'll do.

[BBG3]

I faced the exact same problem. I need to export my pages with different names; this can only be achieved with Affinity Designer.

[loukash]

1. save the afpub
2. create a blank afdesign with as many artboards of the size of your pages you need and name them as you like
3. place the afpub pages on your afdesign artboards
4. voilà

[BBG3]

Nice! Thank you, @loukash! I did that.

[loukash]

To streamline this workflow in certain scenarios, e.g. if you need to place many pages, you may want to:

1. save afpub
2. create afdesign with only 1 artboard
3. place the 1st afpub page
4. duplicate the artboard as many times you need and name them
5. adjust each placed (duplicated) afpub object to display the page matching the respective artboard

I just quickly tested the whole workflow on the iPad, so it should work even better and faster on desktop.

[Catshill]

What would happen if you used the Edit in Designer option from APu?

[R C-R]

48 minutes ago, Catshill said:

What would happen if you used the Edit in Designer option from APu?

If you are asking if there is any way to convert an Affinity document opened in Affinity Publisher that has pages instead of artboards or a canvas by using Edit in Designer then no. In APub you can convert a document that has artboard to pages, but not the other way around.

[walt.farrell]

14 hours ago, Catshill said:

What would happen if you used the Edit in Designer option from APu?

From Publisher I would Export to PDF and Open the PDF in Designer (as mentioned above). That will give you Artboards directly.

[loukash]

6 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Export to PDF and Open the PDF in Designer (as mentioned above). That will give you Artboards directly.

But it will mess up the original formating.

Whereas when you simply place your Publisher pages, on double-click you can edit the original instantly within Designer.

Or even better, simply change the artboard document's suffix to afpub. Then you have the cake and you can eat it too, everything in Publisher.

[R C-R]

6 minutes ago, loukash said:

Whereas when you simply place your Publisher pages, on double-click you can edit the original instantly within Designer.

Or even better, simply change the artboard document's suffix to afpub. Then you have the cake and you can eat it too, everything in Publisher.

I may be missing something but how does this open a document that has pages as artboards, as per the title question of this topic?

[loukash]

3 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I may be missing something

Obviously.  
Please re-read my workflow above.

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, loukash said:

Please re-read my workflow above.

I have tried that but when I try it with a document that has pages, no matter what I do it still has pages, not artboards. IOW, as I understand what the OP was asking was not about being able to edit the page objects' contents but about somehow turning them into artboard objects.

So when you wrote "Or even better, simply change the artboard document's suffix to afpub" I must still be missing something because it is not an "artboard document" to begin with. As the OP mentioned in the first post, these are Publisher documents:

On 6/27/2023 at 12:17 PM, elguapo said:

I need the full power and convenience of Designer's Export Persona to be applicable to Publisher documents.

For example, this 4 pages.afpub file is a very simple example of what I think this is topic about.

[loukash]

@R C-R, the premise of my workflow is that you work with two documents: an initial afpub with pages, and an afdesign with blank artboards on which you place pages from your afpub. Now, to streamline this workflow while you still may be building up and designing the pages (placed on the artboards already), you can (but don't have to) change the suffix of the latter from afdesign to afpub so that it opens directly in APu while it's in progress. APu doesn't care if your document is based on pages or on artboards, you can do whatever you want with it, switching APu/ADe/APh personas to use the tools you need, yada yada etc., you know the drill. To edit content of the pages placed on artboards, on double click they will open in a new tab, fully editable, just like any such placed content. 

No rocket science involved. Here's my iPad "proof of concept" test documents from yesterday, now in APu on desktop:

(Yep, and that's my bass on the photos )

From here, as a last step you only need to Edit in Designer → Export persona and do your thang.

[loukash]

Speaking of which, I've been doing similar things in the 1990s already when doing my page layout in Freehand, exporting as EPS and placing those in QXP. Because FH had the design tools I needed, but QXP had the final export tools I – or rather my print guy – needed.

[loukash]

On 4/27/2025 at 10:40 PM, Catshill said:

What would happen if you used the Edit in Designer option from APu?

You'd have the pleasure to spend a lot of time creating and exporting slices in the Export persona manually one by one, from one page/spread at a time. 

[Bound by Beans]

Have you ever paused to marvel at the curious phenomenon that you — that tiny handful — always seem to band together in championing some failed concept, one that, quite predictably, the rest of the world's population has flatly rejected?

In their little hobby room, Serif has cobbled together a cluttered, bewildering, and often illogical UI design, topped off by truly dreadful UX copywriting. Exactly what such a doomed venture needed: the fanatical defence by a few of what is so plainly a mistake. Perhaps, once upon a time, early in Affinity's life, Serif might have been able to rethink the architecture — but now, after ten long years, it is all set in stone: fossilised within Affinity, within the minds of Nottingham, and, it seems, within yours.

No one — absolutely no one — is going to adopt these instructions or these tragically misunderstood Affinity concepts. This, historically, is precisely how software begins its slow stagnation, before eventually withering away under its own weight. Congratulations.