Epub suport export

[PaoloT]

12 hours ago, fde101 said:

As would I, which makes me question why Publisher is being used in the first place if ePub is the primary target

As you know, it is very common (at least in commercial publishing) to release a work in both print and digital format. Being able to do most of the editing in a single source document, and then output it to multiple formats, with the minimum effort for reformatting, would be ideal.

I've been personally tempted to start with pure text, and then reserve formatting to the last stage. In practice, I've found that it is hard to ignore all the typographic care that goes into a traditional printed book, if you want to preserve the expressivity of the printed page. The visual appearance of the book can give shape to the content – hence the multiple corrections and amendments writers make to the first copy.

I'm all with the Markdown movement – and I'm myself writing my first drafts in Markdown. But I'm also someone who comes from the compositing table, so I feel the pleasure of a well formed page (even if having to live dealing with very little inspiring content.…). So, I'm also for the page layout document as the master document from which to derive all the other formats.

Copying and pasting text from Publisher can be done, and the content of the clipboard is RTF. Paragraph styles are preserved. Character styles apparently not. Text formats are, depending on the target app in the copy. So, you get part of what you would have if exporting to Word. Minus the images. Minus, it seems, the footnotes. I would appreciate something on which to immediately start formatting, without having to rebuild a good part of the original.

Paolo

 

[PhoDesPub]

10 hours ago, PaoloT said:

Copying and exporting text from Publisher can be done, and the content of the clipboard is RTF.

Have I overlooked something in Publisher? How can I export the RTF text? I understand copying and going through the clipboard. But exporting...

I agree with your description. I designed a book in Publisher and had it printed. Now I thought I'd quickly make an e-book. Yes, I was very much mistaken. The more I delved into the e-book topic, the more I realized how difficult it is to create a good e-book.

Once the book was in print, I said to myself, next time I'll just write the title and the text. I'll revise it, have it proofread and edited. Only when the text is 99% complete should I switch to the publisher and do the page layout.

This way, I have a text source from which I can create the printed book with the publisher and create the e-book with a second program (e.g. Jutoh, Atticus, Sigil, Kindle, Calibre). My goal is to create a functionally good e-book that also allows the reader options to be used.

But now that I've gone all the way through to the finished book in Publisher, I was looking for a way to get the 100% finished text into an e-book. It seems that the only way to do this is with Copy and Paste.

So, for me, it looks like my creation process will have to be redesigned in the future. First, finish the text in an editor and from there, via the publisher, the printed book and via another program, the e-book.

I am very grateful for better, more concrete ideas and suggestions!

[PaoloT]

2 hours ago, PhoDesPub said:

Have I overlooked something in Publisher? How can I export the RTF text? I understand copying and going through the clipboard. But exporting...

Sorry, I used an ambiguous word. Fixed.

As reported, I followed the route you are following. Not sure it worked for me. But it depends on the expected final result. Happy to read about the others experience.

I must say that one of the biggest issues I had in going from Markdown to page layout is having to go though the Word file format. What I did is Markdown --> DOCX --> Page layout.

Going from DOCX to InDesign or Publisher means having to rebuild links to images, hyperlinks, cross-references. There is not always time to do such a work. In the end I had to do page layout in Word, and I'm still looking for psy help about this experience.

If Publisher could read Markdown, going from Markdown to page layout would be a straight process, and going far in drafting a project would be easier. Publisher could be the front-end of a single-sourcing project, and before proceeding to nuanced local typographic changes it would be a 1:1 match to the Markdown original.

Paolo

 

[PhoDesPub]

Why is mark down a good format? How do you use this for ebooks? Which programmes can be mentioned here? 

[Bryan Rieger]

3 hours ago, PaoloT said:

Going from DOCX to InDesign or Publisher means having to rebuild links to images, hyperlinks, cross-references. There is not always time to do such a work. In the end I had to do page layout in Word, and I'm still looking for psy help about this experience.

If Publisher could read Markdown, going from Markdown to page layout would be a straight process, and going far in drafting a project would be easier. Publisher could be the front-end of a single-sourcing project, and before proceeding to nuanced local typographic changes it would be a 1:1 match to the Markdown original.

There's tons of room for improvement when importing and updating .docx files in Publisher (and InDesign), but I'm not convinced that migrating to markdown is automagically going to fix everything. Links to images, hyperlinks, etc may not always be interpreted as desired (or required) depending on your specific workflow. Where are images sourced from? Are they local, absolute or remote references? Is markdown exported from Google docs (or similar) sufficient, or should it be written by hand and maintained in a git repo that can be integrated directly into your publishing pipeline; complete with pull and push support. What flavour of markdown should be used?

Keep in mind that the vast majority of folks in publishing still (for better or worse) rely on Word as the primary writing, editing and exchange tool in their workflow. While forcing them to move to markdown might in theory be a fantastic idea, what you're more likely to do is push them into other software that works the way they want to work.

That said, if you want to use a markdown based workflow there are tons of tools available (many free and open) that (when combined) can provide excellent workflows from markdown to published PDF, ePub, and HTML.

Markdown import in the Affinity apps would be a wonderful and welcome addition, but it should not replace support for the Word .docx format.

FWIW I currently use Vellum (macOS only) for reflowable ePub (and print-ready PDF) which is fantastic, along with Sigil when I need to dig into the inner workings of an ePub. For fixed layout Pages is nice, but I tend to use InDesign (along with Sigil) as it gives me a little more control. If Serif/Canva do add ePub export I sincerely hope a) it's not a buggy, convoluted mess and b) it's significantly better than other available options. Many folks have waited a very long time for ePub support in the Affinity suite, and by now many of them would have found other ways of achieving their goals.

The cost of switching is not negligible.

[PaoloT]

4 hours ago, Bryan Rieger said:

Keep in mind that the vast majority of folks in publishing still (for better or worse) rely on Word as the primary writing, editing and exchange tool in their workflow.

I wouldn't want Word compatibility to be removed. On the contrary, I would also want exporting to DOCX to be implemented. It's a consolidated file format, it's still probably the most common exchange format for text.

But it is not a matter of looking too much in the future to recognize that most of current writing is made in blogs and online repositories, therefore in Markdown. That's currently the most common text format for writing.

The format is now consolidated around CommonMark. This is the format used by Microsoft VSCode, and software engineers are for sure already aware of it. There are still variants, but these are limited to some particular aspect of the format.

4 hours ago, Bryan Rieger said:

That said, if you want to use a markdown based workflow there are tons of tools available (many free and open) that (when combined) can provide excellent workflows from markdown to published PDF, ePub, and HTML.

For PDF, they are rudimentary. Most of them use LaTeX as the typographical engine, with templates that were modern in the 50s. I was hoping that the appearance of Typst would have made some more modern template appear, but as of now there is nothing going over the style you can find in Overleaf. I've tried to design some myself, but my lack of competence in coding has showed in full colors.

In other words: nor LaTeX or Typst are replacements of InDesign or Publisher. You have to get what is offered, and forget to do your own design.

I've had great success with HTML, going through Quarto. But I only had to do an online help website. Doing something different, like a literary website, would probably not work. It is not the intended goal of that system. I can however be happy of it, since it is fine for my job. But I would be happier if I could reuse materials made in Publisher for my websites, without having to rebuild everything for each output channel.

As for ePub: I've only experimented with Pandoc, and found no reason to replace Apple Pages with its rougher results. In any case, the PDF/print version would have to be a parallel project, rebuilt from the original materials. No way to single-sourcing.

5 hours ago, PhoDesPub said:

Why is mark down a good format? How do you use this for ebooks? Which programmes can be mentioned here? 

Markdown is plain text with simple formatting codes. It can therefore be exchanged between different writing and coding systems without worrying about formatting. It is inherently structured. As a lowest common denominator, you are sure that it is always interpreted in the correct way.

Conceived as a shorthand for HTML, it is as a consequence also a good starting point for digital books (based on simple HTML). Write in a humanly readable way, and let the formatting program take care of the formatting.

Any text editor can generate Markdown files. There are several dedicated editors (including the popular VSCode and Obsidian). Ulysses has been the first writing programs based on it. Scrivener can export advanced Markdown. GitHub is based on Markdown. Several blogging platforms use Markdown. Pandoc can translate it to/from several formats, with varying degrees of sophistication.

Funny thing: as far as I know, no page layout program is currently capable of directly interpreting it. The lively world of online writing is diverging from the aging world of printed paper.

Paolo

 

[Relaxing Daily Books]

when i started this topic never thought it would get so much quality responses and great help, I agree about the format issues, I never do my text directly into publisher I import it, the only nice format was to use a RTF file to get it flow right, the program I now use for my text is Atlantis word processor it has worked great all my formatting transfers correctly and it's native file format is RTF. As I do picture books I still hope we get a nice way to create a easy way to publish a epub format right from publisher.

I dislike that you need to use all the work arounds that we need to now to do the job.

[MikeW]

2 hours ago, PaoloT said:

... Funny thing: as far as I know, no page layout program is currently capable of directly interpreting it. The lively world of online writing is diverging from the aging world of printed paper.

QXP added what appears to be rudimentary MD import in their latest update. Likely it will languish unless enough people will actually use it and clamor for greater support.

Me? I just run a script in my text editor and convert it to tagged text.

[PhoDesPub]

Just by the way, I noticed today that there is a plugin in the pipeline for the MD Editor Obsidian, which should make it possible to export from Obsidian to ePub. 
https://github.com/patrickchiang/obsidian-binder

The plugin is said to be in the release process and therefore does not yet appear in Obsidian itself. 

[Bound by Beans]

Serif is guilty of supporting far, far too few formats — and the world is guilty of offering far, far too many formats.

That whole thing about balance... well, it’s not exactly humanity’s strong suit — to put it nicely. Serif is no exception. They have a lot to straighten out before Affinity’s heavy list — caused by numerous shortcomings — is a thing of the past.

[fde101]

6 minutes ago, Bound by Beans said:

Serif is guilty of supporting far, far too few formats

Serif said early on that they were initially focused on publishing primarily for print, rather than for electronic formats.  Support for ePub would therefore have been out of scope with respect to that initial focus.

[Bound by Beans]

22 minutes ago, fde101 said:

Serif said early on that they were initially focused on publishing primarily for print, rather than for electronic formats.  Support for ePub would therefore have been out of scope with respect to that initial focus.

They actually did, but regardless, Serif is behind, and the imbalance is a clear reality. Their plans were dreams—little more than that. Customers can’t be expected to gamble on that. Waiting for them to deliver something... what if it turns out to be a bad solution? Or doesn’t arrive at all. Let’s say Uncle Canva cuts that feature out anyway.

Serif has been living in the future with products of the past. Potential customers have been using other future-ready tools for ePub long ago—and now, in the present. Trends are starting to settle, and potential customers have gotten comfortable with ePub tools that are gradually becoming routine and well integrated, making a switch to something else far less likely. Personally, I chose something else what feels like ages ago—and if it works, don't fix it.

Initial is a long time ago. The air has gone out of Serif’s hyped first-year momentum and the customers’ dream of getting Adobe for pocket change. Time is no longer on their side.

[loyukfai]

Is there any updates on this?

Thanks~