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I was so hoping to create ebooks with AP. To discover that is not possible is a dive back to old publishing programs, of which there are many.

The popularity of ebooks is a huge and growing market for self publishers and commercial publishers. What were you thinking guys? 

The name Affinity Publisher held such promise. As you have guessed, this is one long time customer who is very disappointed.

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1 hour ago, Jeff282 said:

I was so hoping to create ebooks with AP. To discover that is not possible is a dive back to old publishing programs, of which there are many.

The popularity of ebooks is a huge and growing market for self publishers and commercial publishers. What were you thinking guys? 

The name Affinity Publisher held such promise. As you have guessed, this is one long time customer who is very disappointed.

Even on the amazon KDP site, they recommend importing epub via kindle create rather than PDF due to PDF issues.

ebook (epub) was the first thing i looked for when i opened it, and it's also missing a startup assistant like in pageplus.  The new file -> new is similar to designer, which is fine, the addition of a startup assistant / wizard would be ideal.

Looking at the export option, it looks identical to designer, focused on graphical publications, made they need two export menu options like in PagePlus, one for graphical/print exports one for ebook/html - (epub, PDF (optimised for ebook), apple and kindle (or via epub3) and HTML for sites.

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If you look at the competing mac products Affinity needs to step it up. iStudio Publisher exports to epub, even Apple Pages exports to epub3. Running a publishing company we take epub3 and the Daisy Consortium standards seriously, as we believe that everyone should have accessibility to books.

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I would like to add my voice to this!  it seems that not having the functionality to create e-books and e-publications of all kinds is missing out on a huge market.  I did a quick search of this forum for "epub" and got  7 pages of results.  

So to the folks at Serif:  Will it be added in the future?

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1 hour ago, Angelize said:

I would like to add my voice to this!  it seems that not having the functionality to create e-books and e-publications of all kinds is missing out on a huge market.  I did a quick search of this forum for "epub" and got  7 pages of results.  

So to the folks at Serif:  Will it be added in the future?

Yes, we'll add more export formats in future to support e-publications. (I'm not going to commit to exactly which ones.) For this initial 1.7 release we chose to coast with our existing PDF because we had so much else to do. We have left a lot of work to do over the coming years.

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7 minutes ago, stunev said:

I can’t believe that Affinity would release even a Beta version of Publisher without the ability to export to ePub. 

I can believe it fully. Epub is very minor market compared to printed matter industry AND needs also very different tools for creating quality output. Again, I would recommend specialized application for e-publishing.

That said, I believe Publisher content can be tweaked to e-publishing market if Serif coders are given enough time. Maybe version 1.8 would have robust e-publishing tools?

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Agreed ePub is not a minor market. If anything the printed matter industry is what is crashing compared to the enterprise video industry growth, especially in marketing. Video is expected to grow from a US$16B market to US$40B by 2022. Electronic publishing is taking over and that includes book publishing and without an ePub export option we can not see any reason to use  this product or recommend it to any of our clients.

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Ok guys, lets step down a bit here. As I wrote before, I am also looking for ebup export. However, I feel we are loosing it with complaints in this subforum. The beta is out for 2 days. Different people have totally different requests and feel that their favourite features are missing. Lets not forget that building indesign or any of the other tools out there also happened in a long process and not all features were there right from the start. In other words: if it was that easy to s?*t out a fully fledged InDesign competitor, we would have many of such tools already.

However, it would be great to get some kind of idea (roadmap or so) on what you Affinity guys are going to focus in the near future. Integration with the other 2 apps? Import/export of Adobe formats for compatibility? Export function such as html or epub? That could help users a lot to make an informed decision when switching to Publisher is a realistic option in their particular situation.

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On 8/31/2018 at 5:53 AM, Fixx said:

At this point seems that Publisher is not going to export any HTML-based formats. They are after all very different from traditional layout work.
I would use Jutoh for epub based publishing, simple and reliable tool which generates clean code too.

Jutoh doesn't support fixed epub and only a tiny subset of epub 3. Instead of Jutoh, Sigil is comparable and completely free for flowing epub ebooks.

https://sigil-ebook.com/

Although I understand the technical reasons why the Publisher developers decided to forego html and epub export, the fact remains that without this option Publisher will be unable to compete with the current crop of DTP layout software.

Which is why I hope scripting and a decent plugin API/GUI will be at the top of the list: this will empower users to build their own solutions. Because export to a fixed html page (which fixed epub 3 basically is) isn't that hard to develop, to be honest. Pretty much direct conversion from frame containers to absolutely positioned div elements, with content converted to bitmap and svg files.

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Your right, and I apologize for getting carried away a bit.  It's just that running a publishing company we need to keep our costs down to .07 to .10 cents per page to create an eBook to remain competitive. When looking at the quality of Design and Photo we were expecting a lot more than what we got. So now were back to using what passes for Desktop Publishing but quite frankly is antiquated technology, that requires us to do a lot of custom modifications to create quality output.

 

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9 hours ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

Jutoh doesn't support fixed epub and only a tiny subset of epub 3. Instead of Jutoh, Sigil is comparable and completely free for flowing epub ebooks.

It does support fixed layout (though it may be lacking some features). I though do only free flowing books where Jutoh is easy and adequate. Sigil is more complicated but also more complete. Price is 0 $ vs. 39 $...

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Quote

It does support fixed layout (though it may be lacking some features). I though do only free flowing books where Jutoh is easy and adequate. Sigil is more complicated but also more complete. Price is 0 $ vs. 39 $... 

What do you know? You are right, Jutoh does support fixed epubs nowadays. That's interesting. Apologies, I hadn't bothered to check, relying on outdated knowledge, and my assumption was wrong.

Seems it even supports CBZ comic book files: http://www.jutoh.com/bookv2/html/section-0022.html

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Talk of alternative ePub creation software like Jutoh and Sigil is missing the point, yes you can use other programs to create ebooks but why would you want to start from scratch with clunky software when, using InDesign you create one beautiful  layout and export for print or ePub. This is where Affinity are getting it wrong by not providing ePub export as a basic feature. I’ve said it before, this is a deal breaker.

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