Jump to content
You must now use your email address to sign in [click for more info] ×

Recommended Posts

1 hour ago, IAmMatt said:

As one of the many people ......

.....

... I don't have a solution for this problem but I also don't want this thread to die because it is a useful reminder that this is still a pressing problem for many people.

"IAmMatt" you may be, but I am seriously impressed by this clear and well-expressed posting. Thanks.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It’s been two years since the launch of APub and we still live in total darkness with no end in sight. All we can do is watch update after update pass by. I feel like a guinea pig for some sort of ’wear them out’ strategy. It also becomes for me more and more depressing to open Aphoto and ADesigner - which I love and need - because of this seemingly everlasting limbo. I find this kind of marketing strategy contemptuous and degrading.

 

Therefore I thank you, IAmMatt, for your thorough and well laid-out analysis of the current standing. That was indeed fresh air for the sails of this thread.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 3/8/2021 at 11:01 AM, IAmMatt said:

I think a better analogy would be a car without headlights: perfectly functional for a lot of users, who won't even notice anything is missing, but utterly useless to many; and even those that bought the car to only drive during the day might find out sooner or later that they need it at night from time to time.

We keep seeing the car analogy, but I am glad to see your adaptation, as I think it is more fair than the steering wheel or similar. A steering mechanism is indisputably essential for the basic operation of a car—you cannot operate without it; headlights are so important they may be considered essential and are legally required (but then some race cars don't need them, if I am to believe Pixar's movie), but it must be admitted that a car can operate without them, and until recent years, we used to think it odd to see headlights turned on during the day.

I think your version of the analogy is closer to the idea with footnotes: some work you can do in Publisher completely without them, and their lack is not even felt (comparable to driving in the daytime without headlights). On the other hand, you could do footnotes manually (just as you could still in theory drive in the night without headlights), but who wants to do that?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks everyone for the kind words. I was reading a book yesterday and had to think of what I was saying about German (and other) publishing practices again. This is what it looked like. This isn't a page spread that was carefully chosen for its egregiousness, they literally all look like that in this c. 800 page book. You will see the spread begins with a footnote flowing over from the last page and it ends with the last footnote flowing into the next page. All in all the book has 2385 footnotes (if I counted correctly, since the numbering restarts with every chapter).

 

This is just to underscore what is the normal situation in many writing cultures around the world, something that those in the English-speaking world might not be as aware of, which might lead them to consider footnotes nonessential.

footnotes.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

There are different markets and segments. Footnotes are essential for academic publishing. A few academic publishing houses prefer endnotes—depending on the discipline—partly because editing a book with extensive footnotes is time consuming, particularly if there are a lot of subheadings which get shifted around. This is something a bit beyond the automatic capability of software, since it requires design and judgment, and often means cutting or adding in text (or cheating leading) to avoid having orphans and widows, or to get the layout looking just so. It's hardcore editing. 

Outside academia, the more popular non fiction publishing also has a requirement for footnotes or endnotes, though endnotes increasingly seem to be preferred as offering a smoother editing task. 

Fiction book publishers do not, as a rule, require footnotes; and those cases where one or two are deemed necessary can be dealt with manually. On the other hand, with such basic layout and typographic requirements, one has to wonder whether MS Word or Pages, or some open source software, would be adequate for the job.

Finally there is the market for general publishing, magazine work, brochures, or any graphic intensive layout. Here the full Affinity suite scores, since it integrates image editing and vector drawing.  The three packages hold up very well against Adobe's Creative Suite, and at a fraction of the cost.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Agreed that Affinity Suite is a great package with a lot of advantages for an unbeatable price.

However I try to use Publisher for editing a German Church Magazine. By and large Publisher does a great job and it's a joy to work with the program. However in some cases - i.e. footnotes, ragged lines ajustment etc. - I still prefer to use Indesign ...

An example from a Mag regarding footnotes demonstrating that footnotes in german publications are not limited to 800 pages scientific books 😉

 

Footnotes_Magazin.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The last several posts have pointed out a difference between English versus German, but I really don't think this is a language issue. As a native English speaker myself, it seems I have seen footnotes far more often than endnotes in English books. I suppose that depends on the type of reading one does. I have read plenty of English books in the domain of religion with examples of footnotes taking up a majority of the page just like the example posted above.

Whatever the language, English included, footnotes are a requirement for certain publications.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Looking through this topic, we can see that people have been begging for footnotes and endnotes for 3 years now. I absolutely love Publisher, but like many people cannot abandon InDesign or QuarkXpress until Serif provides really basic, essential features for desktop publishing. It seems there is a lot of concentration on magazine-y stuff with lots of clever Designer & Photo integration, BUT that's not nearly as important to many of us as essential DTP features like footnotes. 

Cross-referencing could use a serious boost too. I often want to refer to an example by number. Sometimes that number will change if I add in a new, preceding example. In Quark, I can update the cross-reference to that example. In Publisher I can't even (as far as I can see) cross-reference specific text – though I can link to an anchor, but that's not the same nor as useful for my purposes.

It's been a long, long, long time Serif. We love the program but you're making it too hard to complete the transition from InDesign/QuarkXpress.  You're at risk of losing your market edge with this really slow response to basic, essential DTP features. Even the $80 Mellel app that I wrote my PhD in has had such features as long as I've known it (going back to 2005). 

Drop the glitzy graphics stuff (which I bet of lot of us might not be using) for a while, and quickly catch up with the features your dedicated, but exasperated, customers are asking for.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

PFBT said "It seems there is a lot of concentration on magazine-y stuff with lots of clever Designer & Photo integration, BUT that's not nearly as important to many of us as essential DTP features like footnotes."

Readers may be enlightened by the interview with Emily Goater to which we were directed in the "Spotlight: 50% off True Grit content packs on the Affinity Store" which reached me on 19 March.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, MJWHM said:

Readers may be enlightened by the interview with Emily Goater to which we were directed in the "Spotlight: 50% off True Grit content packs on the Affinity Store" which reached me on 19 March.

First, a direct link to the actual article: https://affinityspotlight.com/article/interview-with-emily-goater-affinity-publisher-product-expert/

There is no mention of footnotes at all.

How is this relevant to this discussion?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, LibreTraining said:

First, a direct link to the actual article: https://affinityspotlight.com/article/interview-with-emily-goater-affinity-publisher-product-expert/

There is no mention of footnotes at all.

How is this relevant to this discussion?

May the absence of any mention at all not indicate the interest or else the lack of interest in this feature by Serif?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Staff
2 minutes ago, Moudy01 said:

May the absence of any mention at all not indicate the interest or else the lack of interest in this feature by Serif?

Nope, in the same way that my saying nothing about poodles does not indicate my interest or lack of interest in poodles. (oh no I've mentioned poodles now!)

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

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If we are in the process of doing kremlinology I am much more excited about this article, which suggests the team are working on book publishing features, something that might or might not involve footnotes but either way is more relevant to me than glossy magazines:

Quote

No sooner had we finished the Workbook than the Dev team had come up with a book management feature for Publisher—the fast pace of Affinity development in action! Here’s a sneak peek screenshot of the new Books Panel expected sometime after 1.9 release.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

23 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

Nope, in the same way that my saying nothing about poodles does not indicate my interest or lack of interest in poodles. (oh no I've mentioned poodles now!)

Dear Patrick.

Please tell me that I misunderstood your post: the sentence you put in the parentheses (oh no...) struck me as if you are ridiculing something. Because if you are, you are ridiculing the paying clients of Serif.

Yours

Jakke

Link to comment
Share on other sites

26 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

(oh no I've mentioned poodles now!)

<Metaphor on>

But I would think that you do have a dog in this fight.

<Metaphor off>

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Staff
6 minutes ago, NaulisJakke said:

Dear Patrick.

Please tell me that I misunderstood your post: the sentence you put in the parentheses (oh no...) struck me as if you are ridiculing something. Because if you are, you are ridiculing the paying clients of Serif.

 

You have misunderstood my post, I am not.

I am using an absurd example to say that one cannot say that because we have not mentioned it in an article Serif have a position on something (footnotes/endnotes) .

The part in parenthesis makes a joke at my expense about that fact I have now mentioned the thing I said you could not know my opinion on because I had not mentioned it.

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

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

The part in parenthesis makes a joke at my expense about that fact I have now mentioned the thing I said you could not know my opinion on because I had not mentioned it.

And now you have said the word that we cannot stand to hear. I am glad I haven't said it , oh no. I said it, I said it again......

Sorry.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, LibreTraining said:

First, a direct link to the actual article: https://affinityspotlight.com/article/interview-with-emily-goater-affinity-publisher-product-expert/

There is no mention of footnotes at all.

How is this relevant to this discussion?

People have wandered off into fantasy land following my comment above, but a reader of the article should see the sort of background that Emily Goater has and her interests, which on the face of it are design-led ('glitzy' as someone said) and focussed on magazines and web-pages. It may not reflect her true thoughts, but the article suggests that the sorts of publications which need footnotes and other features suited to academic publications are not a priority.
It is a pity that the conversation took a different direction.

As for the link to the workbook article (#IAm Matt, above), the one I mentioned was because we had been directed to it this week. When the workbook was being first advertized I asked about its value as a manual, and was told quite clearly that it is not such, but rather a publications showing how some features of AffPub have been used in realtime publications. It might work as a manual to a degree, but had not been created as such. The 'Books Panel' image is not clear enough for me to understand its purpose, so I cannot comment on it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Guidelines | We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.