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I expect to see a table object in Affinity Publisher, but whether we’ll see it in the first release and whether it will subsequently be added to Affinity Designer is anybody’s guess.

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Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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I seldom use them, even a page-layout program. I construct my tables with tabs and proper paragraph styles.

FreeHand had an unobtrusive little feature in its text engine called a wrapping tab. I've never seen it in any other program, but it is such an elegant solution for much of what one typically does with tables.

Now, if the program had a "table" feature that could actually function as spreadsheet or calculator for purposes of data-driven text and graphic content; I could go for that. ;-)

JET

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On 8/20/2018 at 2:54 PM, JET_Affinity said:

I seldom use them, even a page-layout program. I construct my tables with tabs and proper paragraph styles

That may be tough going if you have a lot of tabular data... but right, in AD it should be the way to go.

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I am speculating on some advanced features like stripe sets and table themes, which I could define and apply. Those layout tricks easily become ugly, when you are working with just tabbed content. Recently I had to resemble some explanation graphics for a spreadsheet - it was cumbersome to align and format all the rectangles all the time. That was the moment when it came to my mind that a sophisticated table editor would be really cool. ;)

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On 8/20/2018 at 4:54 AM, JET_Affinity said:

I seldom use them, even a page-layout program. I construct my tables with tabs and proper paragraph styles.

FreeHand had an unobtrusive little feature in its text engine called a wrapping tab. I've never seen it in any other program, but it is such an elegant solution for much of what one typically does with tables.

Now, if the program had a "table" feature that could actually function as spreadsheet or calculator for purposes of data-driven text and graphic content; I could go for that. ;-)

JET

Ventura Publisher always had what are called side-by-side paragraph ability (mid-1980s). Basically it applied a no-break on the paragraph styles and one used indents to separate the pseudo-table-like columns. I still use VP for some work, mostly updating manuals to newer software.

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One could have how many ever side-by-side paragraphs as required for what I often called "tableless tables.

It is a great feature. And by using rules, it had the appearance of horizontal table rules:

capture-002140.png.8c749a95b7fcca2a42cc67fde79bfb7e.png

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One could have how many ever side-by-side paragraphs as required for what I often called "tableless tables.

Yep. That's the kind of functionality FreeHand's wrapping tab provided; effectively rows that auto-fit vertically the text in any column(s) that are defined by the wrapping tabs. The beauty of it is the simple elegance of its implementation (typical of FreeHand). It's simply another kind of tab settable in the text ruler, just like left, center, right tabs.

I never had opportunity to use Ventura Publisher. But I've always considered its discontinuance to be Corel's largest competitive disadvantage re Adobe. Corel's bundles offer much more than Adobe's for the price. But the lack of a page-building application dissuades too many graphics users.

JET

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26 minutes ago, JET_Affinity said:

Yep. That's the kind of functionality FreeHand's wrapping tab provided; effectively rows that auto-fit vertically the text in any column(s) that are defined by the wrapping tabs. The beauty of it is the simple elegance of its implementation (typical of FreeHand). It's simply another kind of tab settable in the text ruler, just like left, center, right tabs.

I never had opportunity to use Ventura Publisher. But I've always considered its discontinuance to be Corel's largest competitive disadvantage re Adobe. Corel's bundles offer much more than Adobe's for the price. But the lack of a page-building application dissuades too many graphics users.

JET

Yep, I think I am still a little sore at Corel Corp for not continuing VP. My understanding/recollection from the time was that moving the code to be Unicode-compliant was the main hurdle. It certainly wasn't user-base at that point in time when the decision was made. So instead, it went the way of the Dodo bird like FH did. Both of these applications (and oh so many others) prove the fact one doesn't need to build the best application in order to gain/grow/maintain a leading market share.

From a layout person's perspective, the paragraph style method was/is a great method. Combine that with VP's ability to select discontiguous paragraphs, tagged text (very similar to Quark's great & simple format as opposed to the verbosity of ID's), the ability to import text from a wide variety of word processors & keep track of them within a story so those individual chunks of placed text can be updated when the source changes, etc., etc., etc., made VP a large document dream. But. oh well.

Mike

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