How can I open Indesign (indd and idml) Files in Publisher?

[7dwarfs 2]

On 8/30/2018 at 5:38 PM, pet_r said:

I think you need particularly the import from InDesign CS6 format. Many users do survive with this last perpetual version hoping and praying to be able to finally switch

Absolutely right. We are hanging on to MacOS Yosemite, as it is the last one where fully paid version of CS6 is actually running under. Would be nice to update the OS.

[7dwarfs 2]

On 9/2/2018 at 1:54 AM, nezumi said:

......
Treating Affinity software as something that should work seamlessly with Adobe isn't the way in my experience. When Publisher will reach certain maturity - work within it. Instead of "but in Indesign I could do this! When it will be possible in Publisher" be little more flexible. Indesign was released in what? 2002? And was build up on PageMaker from 90's, right? Imagine all the time they had to polish it (and in my opinion they still failed at one very important thing - making it pleasure to work with). We will get there, but not with first beta Publisher is not made to kill everything that exists for years now at release. It is beginning and for what I see - it will pay up to support Affinity. Because they managed to make daily work (almost :D) a pleasure.

You are soooo right about Aldus PageMaker, which allowed us a full 8-page layout in the first iteration, if memory serves me right. The first InDesign was nowhere near as complete as Publisher beta. In fact it was almost unusable for us. We moved to Quark for two or three years.

Thanks Affinity team for a very promising beta.

 

[Whitedog 22]

7 hours ago, 7dwarfs said:

Absolutely right. We are hanging on to MacOS Yosemite, as it is the last one where fully paid version of CS6 is actually running under. Would be nice to update the OS.

InDesign CS6 works for me in El Capitan and Sierra. Haven't tested it much in High Sierra. If you're not sure about that you can clone your OS to an external drive/partition, upgrade that and test it. It's how I go about testing upgrades. But there is nothing special about Yosemite. Far from it. If you need a reason to upgrade, at the moment macOS El Capitan is the latest version to be under Apple's security umbrella, meaning Yosemite no longer gets security updates. When Mojave comes out later this month, that umbrella will move to Sierra. That said I've found Sierra to be perfectly sound—El Cap as well, for that matter. High Sierra is another matter. But in my experience there's no reason to linger in Yosemite.

[woefi 56]

12 hours ago, 7dwarfs said:

Absolutely right. We are hanging on to MacOS Yosemite, as it is the last one where fully paid version of CS6 is actually running under. Would be nice to update the OS.

Well, I'm hanging on CS5, which I managed to get to work in Sierra, In High Sierra it worked too, but crashed every time when quitting the program...

[Seneca 371]

On 8/30/2018 at 4:35 PM, pinky said:

Good luck forcing people to work without templates.

Nobody is forcing you. You stipulate that a program should have templates. I say thank you for not forcing me to work with templates.

I'll create them myself.

[Fixx 630]

1 hour ago, Seneca said:

Nobody is forcing you. You stipulate that a program should have templates. I say thank you for not forcing me to work with templates.

I'll create them myself.

They are templates too :-)

[Kellyebailey 2]

This is an absolute MUST feature for my company to make the switch. Which I so badly want to!

[kirknurse 19]

On 9/4/2018 at 11:18 AM, nwhit said:

Yes, very familiar with workflow. Our media production company does a lot of it. But I am also concerned as to whether the APub PDF output will have the fidelity required or any other issues. Although we use Photo and Designer, we've never sent any of their PDF exports to a printing company, so not real interested in possibly blowing a print job for a client. On screen, the APub pdf looks fine, but you never know. May decide to wait until others have done it without issues.

Just for the record, I have sent numerous files to print originally produced in Affinity Designer, no issues. As long as you know what you're doing it should be fine.

 

[nwhit 83]

3 hours ago, kirknurse said:

Just for the record, I have sent numerous files to print originally produced in Affinity Designer, no issues. As long as you know what you're doing it should be fine.

 

Good to hear. I might just give it a try on this business card order! 

On this b-card, I did simply copy and paste from the ID file, so for a simple job like this, can use legacy ID files. Might be tougher to do with many of the multi-page pubs we do.

As I mentioned in another posting, I tried to import an ID-generated PDF into APub, but many of the text blocks were joined together from across the page (headlines, subheads, body text, etc.), thus making it a really tough job to go through and recreate all the new separate and properly flow-linked text blocks.

But for a simple copy-paste document, looks like it will work.

The other issue we have (besides the normal flakey beta issues) is the lack of hyperlinks within a pdf from APub. Much of our work today is producing publications distributed as PDF's, and hyperlinks to websites are a must, not an option.

[Zoot 20]

Just wanted to point out since I didn't see it in this thread that if you open the Help (F1), expand Introduction, Click "Key Features" and scroll down to "Import/Export", the first supported import/export format listed is "Adobe® Indesign (INDD, INDT)", so this is clearly a "when" question, not an "if" question, and it sounds like it will be in before the product is released for sale.

[onamac 10]

On 9/6/2018 at 12:30 PM, kirknurse said:

Just for the record, I have sent numerous files to print originally produced in Affinity Designer, no issues. As long as you know what you're doing it should be fine.

 

Does it take care of the trapping?

[kirknurse 19]

3 hours ago, onamac said:

Does it take care of the trapping?

It does a decent job of trapping but at the end of the day you're still at the mercy of the printing press

 

[NeedInDesign 1]

If it does import INDD files accurately, I'll be very impressed.

 

[Patrick Connor 3,590]

The head of development has made a statement on this subject here

On 9/6/2018 at 3:47 PM, TonyB said:

We will be able to import InDesign IDML files but not .indd files. The feature is being written but we don't have a timescale yet.

 

[despin 2]

+1 for idml import!

Otherwise some people might be reluctant to change to AP because of the extra work.

[Antony parks 6]

Hi everyone,

I'm very new around this software.

I'm an orphan from Abode who just declared my bundle of CS6 illegal and switched it off!

Really enjoying Publisher and as most of my (limited ) output from In-Design went out in PDF I am very pleased to find that I can edit and update these files perfectly in Publisher.

Thank you and carry on the good work.

Antony

[dannyg9 23]

I've been running CS5 on MacBook Pro Yosemite for some time.  I've also got a late 2017 iMac which is Adobe-free. No subscribing, thank you very much. Been waiting for the Publisher Beta patiently. Has some quirks on Yosemite (expected, it is a Beta). No real problems on the iMac running High Sierra. Read through the whole thread here, and happy to say that selecting all and copying from an ID CS5 file and pasting into new Publisher file works quite well. All formatting intact, including the feathering of the background image. Importing a PDF works about the same. So far just experimenting with single pages. As some others have stated here, Publisher is LIGHT YEARS ahead of where InDesign was when it was released (I was an early convert from Quark to InDesign). And this is a Beta (did I mention that?). Can only imagine when 1.0 is released and it integrates with the rest of the Affinity line with a click of an icon. 

Let the naysayers call Affinity products "toys for hobbyists." I've been designing since T-Squares, Triangles, REAL paste-up, etc. and they're anything but "lite" applications. I've been producing with Photo and Designer for 2 years and they make Photoshop and Illustrator look and feel almost as antiquated as the T-Square. 

As for transitioning, just do it. In the Beta there's ways and means to pull in InDesign files via Copy and Paste or placing a PDF of said InDesign file. Of course larger documents will take a bit of effort and cleanup. Move forward. Don't stay stuck in the Adobe rut. They don't care about you and if you think they do, have I got a bridge for you.

[jnoyce 2]

Love publisher so far. Love that there is an alternative. Looking forward to being able to open InDesign files.

[kurtedward 0]

On 8/31/2018 at 4:07 PM, ToOldForThis said:

I'm a bit disappointed that the Affinity team is creating an InDesign import, but has effectively left the PagePlus population out in the cold.

I wholeheartedly agree. I have been a Serif patron for years and own every one of their products including all but the first two Page Plus versions. And was told that there is not a import facility for Page Plus documents. So with hundreds of document that I created over the years are only usable in their unsupported legacy program now. Very sad, support your existing customers first please!

[3Dshark 22]

+1 for importing INX / INDD files

The ability to import Quark files is one of the reasons many of us made the jump to InDesign. I really don't fancy having to recreate all of my old documents if I'm going to be switching.

Looking forward to making a bit more time seeing what AP can do

[Franky Drappier 10]

Maybe this has been mentioned before so excuse me if i repeat someone else's suggestion. this workaround kind of works for me: I export my indesign file ans a high quality print pdf and open the pdf in Publisher. I'm amazed by how editable it is. So far I've used this method on ads (used it also with Designer before Publisher came out), but now I'm actually doing it for an entire magazine layout. Sure, I have to redo quite a bit, therefore i call it a "workaround". I can however quite easily save my paragraph styles and such so it does save a lot of time as opposed to having to start all over again. I'm in the middle of a double switch: Adobe to Affinity and Mac to PC.... pff.

[woefi 56]

2 hours ago, Franky Drappier said:

I export my indesign file ans a high quality print pdf and open the pdf in Publisher. I'm amazed by how editable it is.

Although it is a workaround, I am also amazed, how well PDF-import works!

For one-page-documents, like ads or business cards it's quite useful – of course for multipage-documents with textstyles and so, we will have to wait and see how well the real import will work out!

[Petar Petrenko 437]

12 minutes ago, woefi said:

Although it is a workaround, I am also amazed, how well PDF-import works!

For one-page-documents, like ads or business cards it's quite useful – of course for multipage-documents with textstyles and so, we will have to wait and see how well the real import will work out!

It is amazing for multi page documents, too. But you can't expect text styles to be preserved, because Adobe doesn't allow that. Or, better said, they are not preserved during the conversion.

[woefi 56]

Well, It's not like Adobe forbids it - It's because when I export the PDF, I (or better Indesign) already leave this information out.

So no blame on Affinity - when the textstyle is not anymore there in the PDF, they can't guess, which elements have the same style!

ProTip: When exporting, you usually give the printshop what they need and nothing else, so their export-presets are very limited. But when exporting with the Idea of later importing into Affinity, I would try some higher-level PDFs, as they include more stuff! (Haven't tested yet it Afffinity can make use of it, but assume) For example: "Keep Layers"

[Marco Taietta 0]

For me it's impossible to try the new Affinity Publisher software because I've been using Indesign for years and would like to be able to edit old files with this program and use them as a starting point. Please enter the possibility to open Indesign files. Let me know...