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@Joerg Thoeming

Thanks for posting this into it's own thread (It should be investigated by QA staff and that's unlikely if the post left here in this suggestion thread)

 

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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21 hours ago, Jozef said:

The facts are:

  1. Publisher is much too good to be used only for stunning commercial /artistic flyers or brochures.
  2. Any book or publication, just above the aforementioned type, must have a functionality of internal referencing to the text ( footnotes or endnotes are examples of).
  3. Those users, who seem to be surprised by the lack of this functionality are, in my opinion, the within the core of the Affinity applications. People of science, applied art etc.

This raises the questions: 1.) How much does Serif want to restrict its market? and  2.) What products does Serif want to compete against? These two questions also underlie the ongoing disagreement about templates in other threads in these forums.

Word for Windows had powerful footnote and endnote functions from its inception in the early 1990's. Yet to this day MS Publisher lacks footnotes and endnotes features. People have been fussing about this lack for decades. As far as I can tell, Scribus does not do footnotes and endnotes. 

Is it true that only very expensive, high-end DTP applications have automated footnotes and endnotes?. If so, what an opportunity for Serif to add this to AFPub and grab the market for technical, academic. and scholarly publishing on the desktop.  AFPub could sweep through the world's academic institutions and become the standard, just as MS Office became the standard for its functionalities.

In the late 1980's, I attended a demonstration of the NeXT computer at our university. I remember only one thing about that presentation: the sales rep was adamant that NeXT was NOT going to market to business and industry. He explained that NeXT was limiting its market to academia. Within a few years, NeXT workstations vanished into history, though the NeXTSTEP operating system was reborn in Mac OS X. There is a certain comfort in niche marketing, but niche marketing easily succumbs to ecological changes as niches evolve and transform.

Affinity Photo 2.4.0 (MSI) and 1.10.6; Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 (MSI) and 1.10.6. Windows 10 Home x64 version 22H2.
Dell XPS 8940, 16 GB Ram, Intel Core i7-11700K @ 3.60 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

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On 6/21/2019 at 4:51 PM, Granddaddy said:

Is it true that only very expensive, high-end DTP applications have automated footnotes and endnotes?

No, that would be a wrong assessment, I think. I would dare to say that a host of academic publications, at least in mathematics and, to a certain extent, also in the natural sciences, are currently prepared for print using the (free and open-source) LaTeX typesetting system. You will find LaTeX-based publications even in the humanities. As far as I remember, the recent volumes of the Academy Edition of Leibniz’ Complete Works were also typeset using TeX, and I have seen LaTeX at work in recent commentaries on Aristotle. And footnotes, margin notes, endnotes, etc. – all that is of course available in LaTeX.

(Whether LaTeX systems allow the creation of high-end typography, is a matter for another discussion though.)

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Just re=emphasising the desire to see APublisher have a footnotes/end notes facility introduced.

The lack of that feature means that I will continue using Serif's PagePlus for the majority of my projects use footnotes.

It's appreciated that the management of footnotes is a complex matter (insert foot note at point A, but subsequently add text and.or images befgre point A and that means the footnote has to be re-positioned and all that that entails...), but it is a very valuable tool.

p/s/ Congrats on Affinity Live 2019 - very impressed by the integration of Designer, Photo and Publisher.

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desktop publishing software without the management of footnotes, end-of-chapter notes, end-of-section notes, or end-of-book notes is virtually useless. This forces us to stay under Indesign or QuarkXPress. This feature is one of the core functions of the profession.

6 cœurs, 12 processus - Windows 11 pro - 4K - DirectX 12 - Suite universelle Affinity (Affinity  Publisher, Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo).

Mais je vous le demande, peut-on imaginer une police sans sérifs ?

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5 hours ago, Pyanepsion said:

desktop publishing software without the management of footnotes, end-of-chapter notes, end-of-section notes, or end-of-book notes is virtually useless.

Not really. It might be useless if you are into book production, etc. For magazines, the likes shown by the Affinity Team at launch of Publisher this is not important.

All these features will come but at a later date.

I feel your pain because I too am involved in book production and would welcome these features ASAP but I am also a realist and know that Rome wasn't built in one day.

Publisher is a very capable application but it lacks tools for long documents production.

Horses for courses.

2017 27” iMac 4.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 • Radeon Pr 580 8GB • 64GB • Ventura 13.6.4.

iPad Pro (10.5-inch) • 256GB • Version 16.4

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Sorry for my English ....
I think Serif needs to implement the insertion of footnotes, otherwise the software is useless.
I use very long files with lots of notes because I create books ....
I bought it believing it was possible, when I saw that it was impossible to import the notes I was very disappointed ...
I work almost always with files of about 300 pages, a file of 50 pages is not long, but even that cannot be done
I will be forced to stay with Adobe

Edited by user60
writing mistake
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7 hours ago, Seneca said:

For magazines,  this is not important. 

Hello Moon! You must return to Earth! :)

Footnotes are not important only for short graphical documents, such as a cover, or flyer (a very small part of the job in desktop publishing). I do not know a book, a magazine, a student report, a company presentation, or a university thesis that does not require footnotes. It is even the essence of the service.

I did a test with a novel of 50 pages. This contains 20 footnotes. The text is just sticking in the right place. QuarkXpress 37 min. Affinity Publisher 5 hrs 12 min. What can I say about a famous actor’s bio whose author was on TV? It contained 480 footnotes…

This is a serious failure to correct as soon as possible, not a favour to please some eccentrics.

6 cœurs, 12 processus - Windows 11 pro - 4K - DirectX 12 - Suite universelle Affinity (Affinity  Publisher, Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo).

Mais je vous le demande, peut-on imaginer une police sans sérifs ?

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Hi community,

 

after buying this gorgeous software I started immediately to have a look to all features which I need. I found all of them (I thought) and started to build a template from my old Indesign documents. Middle of building a new document I copied old stuff into my huberduper template and I looked to my lovely and very often using tool, to the footnotes/endnootes. After searching for a while I couldn't believe that they are not available.... So I need to stop my work to bury Indesign in the ground.

Dear dev team, please implement this feature very soon in the next update. I love to work with the publisher, but this missing feature is stopping me really hard. I bought the whole suite to move away from Adobe...

Please but this feature in the next update...I am praying... :-)

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I know that LaTeX was used by mathematicians and computer science students because that's the market the markup language was developed for. I did not run into people using it in other disciplines. But I've been out of academe for more than 10 years so my information is way out of date.

So I asked an active chemistry professor with 50 years experience at major state universities whether he uses LaTeX for his publications. He said he does not use LaTeX and neither do most of his colleagues. It is an option for American Chemical Society journals. As a reviewer he sees manuscripts in Word or PDF files. Of course he doesn't know what software was used to prepare the PDF files.

My only point here is that Serif ought to look deeper into the academic market. Whatever software might be used for preparing documents for journal publication, it remains the case that there are myriad other publication outlets used by students and faculty for a variety of purposes. Several of my own publications went into the ERIC database of education related research documents. I prepared them with Word, but I could have done a better job with DTP software. Most universities now require theses and dissertations to be in electronic format, usually meaning PDF. This is a large market that should not be written off by marketing staff. 

Affinity Photo 2.4.0 (MSI) and 1.10.6; Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 (MSI) and 1.10.6. Windows 10 Home x64 version 22H2.
Dell XPS 8940, 16 GB Ram, Intel Core i7-11700K @ 3.60 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

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1 hour ago, Granddaddy said:

My only point here is that Serif ought to look deeper into the academic market. […] This is a large market that should not be written off by marketing staff.

Absolutely. :)

Please don’t get me wrong. I didn’t want to dispute the point you have, quite the contrary! I just meant to answer your comment I quoted by saying that there are even free solutions that cover advanced typographic needs. (At least on a technical level.)

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On 6/23/2019 at 1:11 PM, Pyanepsion said:

I do not know a book, a magazine, a student report, a company presentation, or a university thesis that does not require footnotes. It is even the essence of the service.

Well I do. :)

2017 27” iMac 4.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 • Radeon Pr 580 8GB • 64GB • Ventura 13.6.4.

iPad Pro (10.5-inch) • 256GB • Version 16.4

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Yes, I agree with all those who are requesting implementation of footnotes/endnotes. I'm sure it will require some programming effort to do it right, but it is an absolutely essential feature for serious desktop publishing, which includes books, magazine articles, and academic publications. 

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13 hours ago, alienfruit said:

I would love if we could have great plugin support instead so in theory you could implement footnotes yourself. 

:D Myself too. I did not find the usefulness of incorporating a steering wheel on my car, because I'm driving only on straight lines, but I would love if we could have a plugin allowing eventualy it.

Be serious. Footnotes/endnotes/etcnotes  are not an option, but a necessity except in a very rare case!

6 cœurs, 12 processus - Windows 11 pro - 4K - DirectX 12 - Suite universelle Affinity (Affinity  Publisher, Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo).

Mais je vous le demande, peut-on imaginer une police sans sérifs ?

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Hi all,

I am new to this board but have been using Affinity Photo and Designer on both Mac and iPad from the day they were released ... and now Publisher. I looked into the beta a few times, although not in depth, and currently I try to find my way around in Publisher. I do like it, I (yet again) learn quite a few things and features, some of them just different from comparable features in Adobe- or Quark-Land, some are all new, fresh and exciting to explore.

I also stumble sometimes over features or functions I would expect to work differently and some others that are (so far) missing altogether, like footnotes.

That said, I need footnotes/sidenotes and advanced handling of those too! And, given the experience with Photo and Designer, I have no doubt that footnotes will come to Publisher as well as other already requested features. I believe that creating and handling footnotes in Publisher is not that hard to do for the developers since it is not fundamentally different from page numbers or chapters; the most work will be in handling the different source file formats as docx, TeX and whatever there will be.

So, I am looking forward to footnotes being added - patiently, if I must.

Designer, Photo & Publisher on macOS – Designer & Photo on an iPad pro with Pencil

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  • Staff

@Stephen B, @Circle B, @Brett H, @FrankClau, @RooW@user60, @cyberlizard

Welcome all of you to the Serif Affinity forums :) :) :) 

With so many people, like yourselves, enjoying Publisher but joining the forums to specifically request this feature and others like it, be aware that we very clearly aim to add this . Delaying launch of Affinity Publisher until it performs all the features of products that have been around in some cases for decades would have meant an unnecessary delay to those for whom the current feature set is sufficient for their jobs. Be reassured the developers understand what is required of this product. Thanks for your valuable input.

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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Thank you, Patrick!

I might add, that I found a way to manufacture sidenotes for less complex, non-scientific documents: As shown in the video about pinning, where an image container was placed and linked to a paragraph one can do the same thing with a text container, minus automated numbering and endnotes.

Beside that, I was an early adopter of InDesign and it was barely usable before v2 plus a number of bug fixing updates, so I am more than pleasantly surprised with the initial release of Publisher! I will continue rebuilding some older projects for comparison reasons and to find "my" setup and workflow. I have no doubt you will deliver the tools needed and wanted, as you have with Photo and Designer.

Edited by Stephen B
Speling =)

Designer, Photo & Publisher on macOS – Designer & Photo on an iPad pro with Pencil

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1 hour ago, Stephen B said:

I believe that creating and handling footnotes in Publisher is not that hard to do for the developers since it is not fundamentally different from page numbers or chapters;

Really? I would say that the handling of footnotes, especially ,is a complex task.  Each footnote can vary in length; if you edit the main body text of an article that may move the position of a footnote mark - perhaps moving it to the next page, or the next column... If you add a footnote into an article  that might impact the placement of any existing footnotes at the bottom of the page/column... If a footnote is lengthy, at what point should it automatically break/overflow to the next page/column?  There's a lot of interaction between footnotes and main body text. [I've seen the challenges that footnotes can create when using PagePlus]

I do really appreciate why footnotes/end notes didn't make it into the APublisher launch. I applaud Serif for delivering a working product as they have done. This dpesn't stop me from anticipating the inclusion of the footnotes/end notes feature in APub sooner than later, but. of course, all of us who are supporting the feature request will want Serif to deliver the feature in a solid working  state. So, looking forward to a future release.

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5 minutes ago, AllanP said:

Really? I would say that the handling of footnotes, especially ,is a complex task.  ...  There's a lot of interaction between footnotes and main body text. ...

You are of course right and I agree. My statement was more along the lines of "Footnotes will come to Publisher when they are done" rather than it's a trivial thing to do, and to do right. The basics needed are there, we have structure with page numbers and chapters, and we have pinnable containers that move with the paragraph they are pinned to. Building structured foot-/side-/endnotes from this is another thing altogether, I am sure.

Designer, Photo & Publisher on macOS – Designer & Photo on an iPad pro with Pencil

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