Publisher 2: Document with sidebars, best practice?

[Lutz Pietschker]

Hope I got the right forum for this … I am looking for best practice recommendations to create a document with sidebars. I use facing pages and want to have a main text area (about 2/3 of the print area inside the margins) and a sidebar on the outer sides of the spread that is 1/3 of the print area minus the gutter. The sidebar is meant to comment, illustrate and explain things that are mentioned in the main text (a boardgame rulebook, in this case).

Originally I tried to work with linked frames for both the main column and the sidebar but it dawned on me that then I would have trouble to keep the side bar items aligned with the main text they refer to. Currently I experiment with individual text frames that I place  with the aid of the magnetic margin and then pin them to the text they refer to. I found that pinning has an option to respect left/right pages, so it looks like I am on the right track.

So, just before I wander off into a blind alley: Is this the way you would do it? Has anybody created a best practice text or video for this use case? Looking for "sidebar" on the web gives me a lot of hits but all of them seem to refer to the tool sidebars of Affinity … so, useless for me right now.
I think a problem with my approach could be exporting the Publisher document as text … but of course Publisher does not even have a text export option (I do not consider PDF as text, in this context) … my main reason to remain lukewarm in my enthusiasm for this product.

[walt.farrell]

For the text hints: that's what Sidenotes were designed for. Help: https://affinity.help/publisher2/en-US.lproj/pages/Advanced/aboutNotes.html

For images, you could simply Pin the images to some piece of the text and put them where you want them. Help: https://affinity.help/publisher2/en-US.lproj/pages/ObjectControl/pinning.html 

 

[Lutz Pietschker]

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

 

Thanks for the heads-up! As I said, I know about pinning, but I guess I'll have to look into sidenotes. Always easier to find if one knows the correct term. Thanks again for the prompt reply!

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, Lutz Pietschker said:

Thanks for the heads-up! As I said, I know about pinning, but I guess I'll have to look into sidenotes. Always easier to find if one knows the correct term. Thanks again for the prompt reply!

If you use sidenotes, note that the marker (normally 1, 2, 3...) will be visible unless you hide it.

I used sidenotes for the sidebar tips in the PDF manual I shared (you can download it from the link in my signature). I changed the marker from numbers to # and before exporting to PDF I changed it from # to blank.

You want to have a marker visible while you're editing or it's painful to find the markers but you don't want a wide marker or when you blank them it will impact the text flow too much. I found # was a good compromise. Work with Text > Highlight Fields turned on so the markers pop a bit more while you're editing.

When I created the first version of the manual, I had a couple of dozen sidenotes that were custom formatted because the "Tips:" and "Definitions:" labels were inserted automatically by Publisher. That was a mistake because I couldn't find them easily to replace the # with blank before exporting and I missed a few. In the second version I made them all document-wide formatting and typed Tips and Definitions into the sidenotes manually.

You can find detailed instructions for sidenotes in this manual.

Cheers,

Mike

[anto]

1 hour ago, MikeTO said:

I changed the marker from numbers to #

Is it possible to have all markers #? Because each new note changes marker.

[MikeTO]

25 minutes ago, anto said:

Is it possible to have all markers #? Because each new note changes marker.

Just set Notes > In Main Text > Number Text to "#" or any string you want and then there will be no numbers in the main story text. The default value of \# inserts a number but that is optional.