Epub suport export

[Relaxing Daily Books]

When or if is Affinity publisher going to have a way to export to a Ebup format. It seems like more publisher are requiring you to use Ebup as the ebook format as choice, and not letting you use a PDF file, it would be great if you had a export to Ebup it would make E-book publishing so much easer.

[MikeTO]

2 hours ago, Relaxing Daily Books said:

When or if is Affinity publisher going to have a way to export to a Ebup format. It seems like more publisher are requiring you to use Ebup as the ebook format as choice, and not letting you use a PDF file, it would be great if you had a export to Ebup it would make E-book publishing so much easer.

Hi and welcome to the forums. Serif recently announced that ePub development is in the works. There's no timeframe for it yet but it's nice to know that it's coming.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/press/newsroom/affinity-and-canva-pledge/

[Relaxing Daily Books]

Thanks, it just a pain converting everything to epub, the version of pdf export in affinity does not convert cleanly but mostly trash, so i have forced to find another program for my publishing, 

[JKSam]

On 5/29/2024 at 1:01 PM, Relaxing Daily Books said:

Thanks, it just a pain converting everything to epub, the version of pdf export in affinity does not convert cleanly but mostly trash, so i have forced to find another program for my publishing, 

I agree; it is a big pain and dissapointment that we cannot create a reflowable EPUB. I'm currently exporting the formatted layout to .pdf and then importing that into Kindle Create to make a .kpf file for upload to KDP.

Until epub support is ready, it would be great if we could at least export to a .docx file, which could then be used to create a reflowable epub.

[loyukfai]

Is there any updates on this?

Am going to work on some book projects with both printed and ebook options.

Cheers.

[MikeTO]

There hasn't been an update since the spring when it was announced that this feature was in development. Version 2.6 needs to be released first and it's not included in the 2.6 beta.

[loyukfai]

Thanks! Let's hope it's coming in 2.7 then.

It certainly baffles me... thought this would have been implemented years ago.

Cheers.

[dsnaps12]

I hit up Canva and Affinity on twitter (X) and asked about their statement back in March about picking up the pace. I did get a response that we should start seeing features added at a faster pace starting with 2.7. We shall see.

[Affinityconfusesme]

Hi @dsnaps12,

On 12/5/2024 at 8:00 PM, dsnaps12 said:

I hit up Canva and Affinity on twitter (X) and asked about their statement back in March about picking up the pace. I did get a response that we should start seeing features added at a faster pace starting with 2.7. We shall see

Are you able to share with us either a screenshot or a link from twitter/x where they said that we will see this starting from 2.7?

Edited February 9 by Affinityconfusesme
missed a word

[Kolorion Studio]

I bought it and when I realized that I did not even have it in a minimum draft capacity to edit in another program, you are super disappointed just that I had no RTL support.

In fact I hope they can implement an official part or page to vote for characteristics.

[PhoDesPub]

The problem with creating e-books is apparently not solved in Publisher. Whatever may come from Affinity, there may be no way around creating a special layout that is epub-compliant. 

The idea of an e-book and the specially developed hardware eReaders have, among other things, the ability to adjust the font size. This means that text wrapping, if not set to continuous, takes place on the device and is not specified in the document. This means that all the beautifully designed pages are completely jumbled up. The generated table of contents in the Publisher also seems unnecessary to me because a real e-book has its own specially generated table of contents. This is just to show the difference a little. You can also set the margins etc. yourself.

So I have come to the conclusion that I will create the text in a new layout suitable for e-books and then use this as the default for the e-book creation. The graphics are placed separately between the text and are not flowed around etc.

As I have no experience and would like to have e-books as well as the printed book, I'm asking here if I'm right or if I'm missing something.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to export the text from Publisher alone. So you also have to be careful when copying the text manually to avoid introducing new errors into the text.

Many thanks for any advice!

[JKSam]

I'm using Atticus for e-books (epub), Affinity is great for print

Edited March 21 by JKSam

[loyukfai]

On 3/21/2025 at 11:52 PM, PhoDesPub said:

The problem with creating e-books is apparently not solved in Publisher. Whatever may come from Affinity, there may be no way around creating a special layout that is epub-compliant. 

The idea of an e-book and the specially developed hardware eReaders have, among other things, the ability to adjust the font size. This means that text wrapping, if not set to continuous, takes place on the device and is not specified in the document. This means that all the beautifully designed pages are completely jumbled up. The generated table of contents in the Publisher also seems unnecessary to me because a real e-book has its own specially generated table of contents. This is just to show the difference a little. You can also set the margins etc. yourself.

So I have come to the conclusion that I will create the text in a new layout suitable for e-books and then use this as the default for the e-book creation. The graphics are placed separately between the text and are not flowed around etc.

As I have no experience and would like to have e-books as well as the printed book, I'm asking here if I'm right or if I'm missing something.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to export the text from Publisher alone. So you also have to be careful when copying the text manually to avoid introducing new errors into the text.

Many thanks for any advice!

I wonder how does InDesign handle this?

[Bound by Beans]

2 hours ago, loyukfai said:

I wonder how does InDesign handle this?

InDesign supports both Reflowable and Fixed Layout ePub export. It can export directly to reflowable ePub, where typography, reading order, and the table of contents are controlled via styles and the articles panel.

The layout needs to be structured for e-book output from the start, of course.

[PhoDesPub]

It would be a great help if Publisher could export the text with title and footnotes alone. With this information, you could simply rebuild an ebook. 

[PaoloT]

May I ask to the OP ( @Relaxing Daily Books ) to fix the thread title? The discussion is interesting, but that typo makes a scratching sound…

 

 

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, PaoloT said:

May I ask the OP to fix the thread title? The discussion is interesting, but that typo makes a scratching sound…

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m more bothered by the repeated references to “Ebup” in the original post. The word “support” with the desired double p occurs several times in this thread, so the typo in the topic title shouldn’t have a huge impact on its discoverability.

[PaoloT]

33 minutes ago, Alfred said:

I’m more bothered by the repeated references to “Ebup”

That's why the right name is ePub: so that you can easily see where the consonants must go!

Paolo

 

[Medical Officer Bones]

On 3/23/2025 at 2:14 AM, PhoDesPub said:

It would be a great help if Publisher could export the text with title and footnotes alone. With this information, you could simply rebuild an ebook. 

Markdown file export would be all that we'd need to easily convert to a reflowable ePub file...

[fde101]

On 6/9/2024 at 10:00 AM, JKSam said:

we cannot create a reflowable EPUB

I haven't seen any indication that Serif is actively working to make reflowable ePub exports work.  They may only intend to support fixed-format at first, as there isn't really any support for flexible layouts in the application at all, and that would be a whole other can of worms to try to implement.

We probably won't know that until the feature is in beta.

Also, we only know they are working on this because of an accidental leak, and Serif as a policy does not discuss timing, so we don't know when this will finally show up in a beta version - it may or may not be at the end of this year.

[PaoloT]

16 hours ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

Markdown file export would be all that we'd need to easily convert to a reflowable ePub file...

If they are really working on an ePub exporter, I still think that they are doing the things in reverse order.

Having an export option for reusable file format would allow for immediate reuse in existing, mature tools. I, for example, would reuse materials exported from Publisher in Apple Pages to generate ePubs, and that one is probably the best ePub editor available at the moment.

The same materials could, at the same time, be reused to create a web site. All with just a single export command. Without having to wait until the native options are mature enough to be usable.

Paolo

 

[PhoDesPub]

I am also of the opinion, having tried various specific ebook creators/editors, that it would be better for Publisher to allow reusable export. Most ebook-editors have the ability to process Open Document or Word files. I think it makes more sense to use this interface than to integrate the very complex topic of ebook export into Publisher. 
These specialised programs, although they have been on the market for a long time, still have their specialities and problems. Whether it makes sense to load the Publisher with them is very questionable for me.
But that's just my personal opinion. 
What could certainly be done with little effort would be the export of reusable file formats. Whether it's Mark Down, Open Office or Word, I don't know. All three are probably best. 🙂

[fde101]

Word processing documents, such as Word files, have a sort of primary text flow - the document is structured around a single story.  Publisher has no such concept.  It is likely that any given Publisher document exported to a Word file would need to use text frames for every bit of text, which is not particularly friendly to the kinds of tools that might try to process those files for any practical purposes.

Additionally, some of the layout and typography capabilities that Publisher has probably don't map well to features available in such document formats.

Not sure that I agree that exporting a Publisher document as a whole to a Word or ODT file would be practical at this time.

Markdown would be impossible.

 

What would be possible, and should be considered, would be exporting individual *stories* (series of linked text frames) to such files... but that would not accomplish the same function that the requested ePub export is intended to support.

For a "reusable" export format, that would be more likely to take the form of IDML.

[PaoloT]

2 hours ago, fde101 said:

Word processing documents, such as Word files, have a sort of primary text flow - the document is structured around a single story.  Publisher has no such concept.

It's a conversion to a different format, so it is expected that there will be differences and some loss.

It is also a matter of starting from the lowest common denominator. It is unreasonable to want to convert to reflowable ePub a complex magazine layout. It is more likely that one will want to export to that format a linear work, like a book – the typical publication for which ePub has been conceived.

I would think that Publisher is aware of the sequence of frames of text in such a publication. If not, it would be responsibility of the author to make the publication a single flow of text for each file. I would expect this to be the natural way of dealing with the text flow in any case.

In perspective: there are scripts for InDesign that can export all the text frames of a document as a single RTF file. Maybe it can be adapted to the forthcoming Affinity scripting language. But I guess it could be integrated in the main code right from start.

Typography finesse is really not an issue with ePubs. Most likely, they will be flattened and shown with the default font of the Kindle reader. It wouldn't also be an issue if having to rebuild a publication for the web, where you will have to adapt the source materials to the available web fonts.

What would be an issue is having to relink all the images, if the book contains several of them. And I suspect another issue would be dealing with footnotes. This is where Markdown would be the real savior. It is made for shorthanding HTML, therefore ePub. It links to images and footnotes like magic.

Paolo

 

[fde101]

24 minutes ago, PaoloT said:

I would expect this to be the natural way of dealing with the text flow in any case.

As would I, which makes me question why Publisher is being used in the first place if ePub is the primary target - it seems it would be useful mainly for printed works and for works which will exist both in print and in electronic format.

For the specific situation of exporting to target a reflowable ePub, if all you need is the story and objects embedded within that text flow, just export the story instead of the entire document, as I suggested in my post you are replying to.

However, the part you quoted is referencing Word documents, which someone was suggesting as a more generic target while arguing against prioritizing ePub at this time.  In a more general sense, independently of the specific use case of a novel or other similar document, this is not a good format to serve as the target of exporting an entire Publisher document.  An individual story, yes, but a full Publisher (or other Affinity app) document, no.