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[Petar Petrenko]

Hi,

very positively surprised of the new Forum look and the additional info. Finally, there is some info about Publisher and here are my requests regarding it:

1. Master pages must have the same funcionality like those one in Quark. It means that you can select, edit, move, delete... them on the workout pages. If you don't want some of them to be editable, movable... it can be done on master page(s).

2. Paragraph and Character styles should work the same way like in InDesign. Characters attributes are part of the Paragraph Styles and can be, also, defined in Character Styles. Why is this so much important?

• If you have some words in a paragraph with local formating (bold, italic...) and you ALT click on a paragraph style, these local formating will be lost.
• If you create a character style with style "Bold" and all other attributes are left as "------" or "None", then whenever you change the font in paragraph style, the text formated with this character style will take the same font and ALT click on a paragraph style won't change it..
• If you create a character style with font "Myriad Pro" and style "Bold" and all other attributes are left as "------" or "None", then whenever you change the font in paragraph style, the text formated with this character style will always be Myriad Pro Bold and ALT click on a paragraph style won't change it.
• Quark's Paragraph and Character styles are very confusing to work with.

[MikeW]

I agree ID has the most intuitive p.styles & c.styles system. Dead easy for how complicated all the various settings can seem.

But Q can operate pretty much the same. The right-click on a p.style name is key (Apply Stylesheet & Retain Local Type Styles). Italic/Bold/Bold Italic  will be retained. Change the font and the bold, etc., and update the p.style and these attributes will also switch to the new font...as long as you are not defining character styles for those. This is a source of confusion (I even get confused once in a while).

Back to APub. I know the text styles are getting a change. What that means, I dunno. But presently text styles work more or less like Q's text styles.

[Petar Petrenko]

1 hour ago, MikeW said:

I agree ID has the most intuitive p.styles & c.styles system. Dead easy for how complicated all the various settings can seem.

But Q can operate pretty much the same. The right-click on a p.style name is key (Apply Stylesheet & Retain Local Type Styles). Italic/Bold/Bold Italic  will be retained. Change the font and the bold, etc., and update the p.style and these attributes will also switch to the new font...as long as you are not defining character styles for those. This is a source of confusion (I even get confused once in a while).

Back to APub. I know the text styles are getting a change. What that means, I dunno. But presently text styles work more or less like Q's text styles.

I can't agree with you, Mike. ID has the best p/c styles structure. It's also very intuitive vs QXP. In other way, QXP has some features that ID can only dream about them, like composition zones, job jackets, possibility to adjust kerning pairs of fonts, importing PDF, AI, XLSX... as native objects. Also, menues and measurement palette are very unintuitive. Real mess.

[MikeW]

I did agree with you, ya know!

Because they are different, it takes using Q's styles differently than ID. But this discussion would be better on the Q FB group or on the Q forum.

[Petar Petrenko]

I've already discussed this on QXP forum but, of course, they don't agree with me. They need to engage someone to clean their mess and it will take a long time. QXP has a great potential, but it is not very intuitive for a novice.

[MikeW]

ID isn't very intuitive for a novice. Neither is Scribus, PagePlus, or Viva Designer. And our beloved Ventura wasn't either. Of these, I only find Scribus obtuse in use even over a period of time. It's an application built by committee.

APub can only be more intuitive at its inception. As its capabilities grow to even approximate that of the mature applications, it will become less so.

Here's some screen shots from Q. I have two different paragraph styles, one using TNR and the other using Arial. I have applied bold & bold italic to two words. Initially both paragraphs have the Mikey style applied and it is defined as using TNR. Cursor is in the second paragraph.

Now I am going to use the Mikey Two style which will both change the font to Arial and apply text shading.

The font switches and is proper in the bold & bold italic instances.

Now, I am going to change part of the paragraph to use Courier locally like so:

And now I am going to reset that paragraph back to Mikey Two style using the right-click option I mentioned previously:

So while Q doesn't work like ID in that a character style used for the bold, etc., attributes will retain the font as defined in the c.style when the base paragraph definition is changed, it does work well.

As I have written on the closed FB group, in the Q forum, directly to the people at Quark and here, I would prefer that how text styles work should follow Adobe's method because it is simpler. But that doesn't mean Serif's (which is similar to Q's method already) also cannot work. And as I mentioned, how styles work is being worked on and hopefully how they work will move more towards ID's.

 

[Petar Petrenko]

15 minutes ago, MikeW said:

...

As I have written on the closed FB group, in the Q forum, directly to the people at Quark and here, I would prefer that how text styles work should follow Adobe's method because it is simpler. But that doesn't mean Serif's (which is similar to Q's method already) also cannot work. And as I mentioned, how styles work is being worked on and hopefully how they work will move more towards ID's.

 

Yes, that's what I'm saying. Simpler, intuitive and reliable.

I hope Publisher will follow Adobe's method.

[MikeW]

Simpler doesn't necessarily mean more intuitive nor more reliable.

Q's method is reliable. And for some is as intuitive as ID's.

I've taught both applications to people new to layout applications. They stumble over both applications in most of the same functions. Style usage is one of those functions mostly due to the misuse of local formatting in word processors.

[Seneca]

We just have to wait and see for Affinity Publisher to experiment with the way it handles styles.
But I couldn't agree more with Petar that ID styles are rather sweet.