[Designer] Help online or as PDF/EBook?

[blue_heron]

The help function Designer requires me to leave the drawing.

I'd rather have an EBook or PDF that I could open in another app to switch quickly. An online manual would also be ok.

 

 

[G-Ramps]

I’ve also asked for this feature for Photo. It is VERY inconvenient to leave an image to go to the Help section then back to the image. Makes it almost impossible to experiment with a feature that requires multiple trips to Help. 

[MikeW]

https://affinity.help/

Pick yer poison...

[Alfred]

15 minutes ago, MikeW said:

https://affinity.help/

Pick yer poison...

The problem with the current online Help is that it only covers the desktop versions of the apps (and it’s very Mac focused).

[MikeW]

16 minutes ago, αℓƒяє∂ said:

The problem with the current online Help is that it only covers the desktop versions of the apps (and it’s very Mac focused).

The majority of current users are desktop-based.

I would suspect that the iPad versions will show up at some point. As for Mac-focused? Dunno. I rarely use the help system in-application or the on-line versions. I also suspect I could separate the wheat from the chaff...

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, G-Ramps said:

I’ve also asked for this feature for Photo.

I have asked for some kind of help for both iPad apps that can be accessed independently from within the app, but the staff have said this will require too much work for them to do it for now. (The online desktop version of the help that @MikeW & @αℓƒяє∂ mentioned is based on the Mac apps' built-in help, which is already HTML formatted, so it was relatively easy to convert it to the online version.)

What I have been making do for now is taking screen shots of selected help topics in the iPad apps, sending them to my Mac, & saving them as jpeg or png files so I can open them on the Mac while I am working on the iPad. Far from ideal, but that might be an acceptable workaround for those of you that have a Mac & PC handy while learning the iPad apps.

[Alfred]

1 minute ago, MikeW said:

The majority of current users are desktop-based.

That’s true, Mike, but this thread is in the ‘Affinity on iPad Questions’ section of the forums.

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, MikeW said:

The majority of current users are desktop-based.

Be that as it may, this topic was posted in the Affinity on iPad sub-forum, so that is the context we probably should confine ourselves to here. 

Alfred beat me to it!

[MikeW]

20 minutes ago, αℓƒяє∂ said:

That’s true, Mike, but this thread is in the ‘Affinity on iPad Questions’ section of the forums.

Oops. Kinda hard to see which section I'm in on the phone in portrait mode.

I don't have an iAnything. So I am assuming that the help system covers the screen?

Can an iPad help file be opened on a desktop or laptop Mac?

 

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, MikeW said:

I don't have an iAnything. So I am assuming that the help system covers the screen?

Can an iPad help file be opened on a desktop or laptop Mac?

Yes to the first & no to the second. The only way to access the Affinity help topics on iPads is to go to the "Home screen" (where there are thumbnails of the documents currently in the app's sandbox) & tap on a "?" icon in the upper right corner of the screen. That opens a screen with a list of topics on the left, separated into categories sort of like the online help pages for the desktop apps, & the currently selected topic on the right (which may be long enough to require scrolling to see all of it).

To get back to a document that was previously being edited, you have to tap the "X" in the upper corner of the help screen, which takes you back to the Home screen, & from there tap on the document you want to edit. Neither the current help topic nor the previously edited document is remembered, so going back & forth is tedious.

[MikeW]

Cannot you open help in split screen?

[G-Ramps]

I can’t make it open in a split screen. I believe this implies a second instance of the same program (Photo) running at the same time thus it is prohibited by iOS?

[R C-R]

44 minutes ago, MikeW said:

Cannot you open help in split screen?

No. The Affinity iPad apps only run in full screen mode. Even when another app like Safari, Notes, or such is dragged into a panel on the left or right,  that covers part of the Affinity app screen & there is no way to resize either app or run both in true split screen mode. Among other things, this makes it impossible for both Affinity apps to be on the screen at the same time -- dragging one of them up from the Dock completely replaces whatever other app was there.

[MikeW]

Bummer.

[blue_heron]

The help as a PDF (or even online) in an overlay would be fine for me.

I can quickly pull it in from the right. Maybe the format should be so that is readable in that window.

 

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, blue_heron said:

The help as a PDF (or even online) in an overlay would be fine for me.

I am sure it would be fine for many of us, myself included, but as has been mentioned, the staff have said that unfortunately the documentation team currently does not have the resources available to convert all the help topics into PDF files. Hopefully, they will at some point in the future, but for now we are stuck with workarounds.

[blue_heron]

19 hours ago, R C-R said:

I am sure it would be fine for many of us, myself included, but as has been mentioned, the staff have said that unfortunately the documentation team currently does not have the resources available to convert all the help topics into PDF files. Hopefully, they will at some point in the future, but for now we are stuck with workarounds.

I wonder what format they’ve used to build the current version of the built in manual.

 

[DM1]

I'm in the process of building a PDF version of Help, for my own use, and provided the guys at Serif have no objections, I would be happy to share the file with members here. Having to exit the project to research then go back into project is a pain (especially with my memory!).

[R C-R]

8 minutes ago, DM1 said:

I'm in the process of building a PDF version of Help, for my own use, and provided the guys at Serif have no objections, I would be happy to share the file with members here. Having to exit the project to research then go back into project is a pain (especially with my memory!).

How large a file do you think that will end up being? 

[DM1]

I'm just finishing the Closing, under Get Started..... so a long way to go. So far 8mb but when converted to PDF even that would shrink.

[R C-R]

14 minutes ago, DM1 said:

I'm just finishing the Closing, under Get Started..... so a long way to go. So far 8mb but when converted to PDF even that would shrink.

I asked about file size because to be comparable to the built-in help, there would need to be 10 versions, one for each supported language, or some way to combine them all into one file. I am not even sure that is possible in a single PDF file, but if it is I imagine it would be quite a bit larger & harder to create than single language versions.

[DM1]

To be honest I am limiting my endeavour to English language!

[R C-R]

5 minutes ago, DM1 said:

To be honest I am limiting my endeavour to English language!

British or US English, or possibly an Aussie variant? 

More seriously, aside from yanking your chain a bit, I was thinking about this after @blue_heron asked about the format of the built-in help. I don't know the answer to that but I do know that there are ways to avoid certain redundancies like duplicating every image or every word that is the same in different English language versions of text.

[MikeW]

4 hours ago, R C-R said:

...or some way to combine them all into one file. I am not even sure that is possible in a single PDF file, but if it is I imagine it would be quite a bit larger & harder to create than single language versions.

Maybe not with the tools they are using. In general for multi-language documents we are using layers in the layout application and there are scripts we use to generate separate PDFs that turn off all layers except language A, generate a PDF, turn that language layer off, turn on language B and so on. But we could as easily generate a multi-layered PDF and one then would need to turn on the visibility of their language and turn off the other (the default one). All in all pretty messy.

I have no idea what Serif is using to generate their help files. All help authoring tools I have used can do this easily enough, though, as they are author once, publish in several formats tools. And if they are actually using some home-grown HTML authoring application, they could likely script it to do so.

There isn't a lot that cannot be done.

Heck, if one is willing to pay the money, there is good software out there that can rip a Windows help file (or HTML help, or ...) to PDFs with hyperlinks all working, etc. If Serif's help authoring tool has issues in easily doing this, there are other options. I'm taking donations. I'll tell ya when it's enough...

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, MikeW said:

All help authoring tools I have used can do this easily enough, though, as they are author once, publish in several formats tools.

But it may be that they are using whatever authoring tools Apple provides to generate the help topics in a format that can be compiled directly into builds of iOS apps along with the rest of the code & resources, using whatever method(s) those tools provide to support multiple languages, generate keywords for searches, or whatever. I don't know much about that but browsing through Apple's developer documents regarding generating help topics suggests that might be the least messy, least labor intensive way to do that.