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46 minutes ago, MJWHM said:

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.

You do understand that a marketing team are going to concentrate on what the software we sell is already good at right? Why would you write about academic publications with a product that cannot do them well ?

You are doing exactly what I said, assuming something you believe is true because it was not mentioned in that article.

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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5 hours ago, Patrick Connor said:

You do understand that a marketing team are going to concentrate on what the software we sell is already good at right? Why would you write about academic publications with a product that cannot do them well ?

I seem to have lit a fire here. I presume that there are a large number of people (like me) who refuse to bend to Adobe's subscription scam where they can collect money endlessly at inflated rates and not improve their product; and who are on aging 32-bit versions that will soon not be able to run on the Mac (and cannot run on the latest version); who are looking to migrate.

How big is that market?

I've dumped Photoshop in favor of Photo. So there is an instinctive drive to move to you folks for the other pieces.

But it is increasingly looking like the only alternative is Quark (which there are other objections to). The lack of footnotes was an issue in the first version of InDesign. It was implemented in the second.

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10 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?

Agreed. How is it relevant?  I suppose we can give it some in this sense: it highlights what we already know – that what Publisher does well it does spectacularly well. And, it highlights the point I made earlier about the concentration on magazine-type production.

However, the number of people calling for footnotes/endnotes (and better cross referencing, in my case) ... and the number of years they've been doing so ... should be sending a clear message to Affinity. People are desperate to dump InDesign and QuarkXpress, but the lag with introducing basic, essential DTP features is a major issue.

Further down this topic's timeline there is mention that Publisher is maybe not the best for academic publishing. Agreed. If I were to do an academic article/book, I would use Mellel as it's ideally suited to that purpose and integrates wonderfully with Bookends for reference management. However, one could do academic publishing in InDesign or QuarkXpress. Now, Affinity came on the scene with a clear indication – albeit implicitly to a large extent – of taking on Adobe. So many of us are sick of Adobe's price gouging and ridiculous subscription system that gives you "value" by forcing you to pay for a pile of stuff you don't need (in many cases).  I only use Illustrator (and will dump that when Affinity provides calligraphic pens) and InDesign; but to subscribe to both those would be as expensive (nearly) as getting the whole thing. Given the gauntlet that Affinity has thrown down, you might expect that Publisher would provide the essential, basic tools that InDesign has, for example.

Moreover, if people were able to effectively use Publisher for academic writing, there is a HUGE market out there, especially given the very sensible pricing.

There is also the potential for disaffection of existing customers having to wait too long for what, in my opinion, they consider to be fundamental tools in the app. Recently, I found myself doing training documents in Publisher because it's so much nicer to use, generally, than Quark or InDesign. BUT, I need footnotes, so I've been wondering whether to just give up on Publisher and use Mellel (more laborious and much fiddlier with placing images, but it has all the essential tools).

Affinity, take note: I'd quite happily pay twice the price to have footnotes/endnotes, and fully-functional cross referencing. (And calligraphic pens in Designer.). 

Just don't EVER go to subscription model though.

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Hopefully, this is not getting off topic but another critical need is a decent word processor.

"What do you mean by decent?"

Glad you asked. Some of the features of a decent word processors would include:

  • decent text justification that operates by paragraph, rather than by line and does not leave gaping spaces.
  • hyphenation that follows the rules of hyphenation (and maybe even was configurable) and does not automatically break a hyphens. (e.g., "4-F" should not not break even with a hyphen and "A–Z" should not break with an en dash).
  • Be able to define ranges of characters with no break (character style setting)
  • Be style based and have styles easy to use. Not having 57.358 million pre-defined system styles that cannot be deleted so that you have to sort through a monster list to find the 10 styles you need for your template; be able to define style hierarchies in session and not have to go through the total BS of formatting text you want then define styles from already formatted text.
  • Have character and paragraph styles independent. No BS hybrid styles that are a mixtures of the two. Have the both the paragraph and character style displayed when you select text.
  • Have an easy method of removing character styles.
  • Allow rounded corners on text frames.
  • Be able to easily identify text that has been manually formatted by the idiot coworker who refuses to learn how to use styles.
  • Full font feature support
  • Be able to format all the elements of a numbered or bulleted list.

In other words, a full featured work processor without the bloatware.

Now that the "leading" Word processor (the one that has seen virtually no functional improvements in 25 years and where each "upgrade" is little more than a change in user interface) is pushing the subscription scam, the market there should be opening up.

Monopoly and subscription models are two biggest poxes on software progress.

The "leading" Word processor has had for decades a Table of Authorities feature that has never been usable. It was probably added as a check the box feature for a government contract. The vendor has never made any effort to make that feature work.

 

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13 hours ago, Jim Slade said:

Glad you asked. Some of the features of a decent word processors would include:

  • decent text justification that operates by paragraph, rather than by line and does not leave gaping spaces.

@Jim Slade Most of those features are things I normally would not expect to find in a typical word processor but rather in a quality layout app, which is of course what Publisher is aiming to be. Especially your very first item in your list is something I have been hankering for in Publisher for some time. But compared to word processors, such as the “king” MS Word, Publisher already does better work at justification, even though it is still on a line-by-line basis. Justification in word processors such as Word and Apple Pages is usually very simple: they also are line-by-line, but handle justification by inter-word spacing alone. Publisher has them beat by also allowing adjustments by letter spacing, not to mention the ability to tweak the values for both kinds of spacing. I have not really used any of the other word processors, but I never expect quality layout from them in the first place.

But as you suspected, this is getting quite off topic. But on the other hand, what more can we really say about footnotes than has already been said?

And on that note, to the newcomers to this thread, you may not be aware that we have already been told by Serif that footnotes are in development. Some of the recent discussion about how important footnotes are suggests to me that some of the participants in this thread were not yet aware of that fact. We do not need to convince Serif how important footnotes are, because they recognize it already, and are doing something about it.

Here are a couple of the relevant posts from earlier pages (and there are yet others besides):

 

On 5/30/2020 at 1:17 PM, Patrick Connor said:

@garrettm30 is correct. This is pinned to make it easier to find as we know it is important and really do not want 100 independent threads all asking for the same feature.

Serif are currently in the process of implementing this. It needs to be done carefully, not just thrown in, and we do always have the issue of programming resources. Thank you all for your patience, it will be rewarded.

[The underline in the above quote was added by me, not by Patrick, to draw attention to the most pertinent point.]

On 12/3/2020 at 7:26 AM, Patrick Connor said:

The Footnotes/Endnotes feature is not currently ready and so we cannot be fairly accused holding it back on purpose. I see why it may appear that way, but I try to be as honest as possible in all my dealings here on these forums, but without breaking company confidences, and I can honestly say this feature is not being held back, it is simply not ready yet.

 

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garrettm30, thank you for this, reminding everyone that Serif / Affinity are already very well aware of the need for these features, and are going to introduce them, when they are confident that they are ready.


I had wanted to post the same point here yesterday, but couldn't find it — after having searched in vain for the phrase, as I mistakenly recalled it, "it will be worth the wait".

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Thank you very much indeed, garrettm30, for finding and displaying those quotes, for those are very important quotes. They are the quotes I live by at the moment. They are reassuring: something is really being done. They constitute, at least in my mind, a clear and precise promise. I do hope, from the bottom of my heart, that Serif can and will live up to this promise.

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2 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

@Jim Slade Most of those features are things I normally would not expect to find in a typical word processor but rather in a quality layout app, which is of course what Publisher is aiming to be.

 

The reason I made this what-might-be-considered-off-topic-list is to illustrate that something a step up from a word processor would meet the publishing needs of 99%. All of the features that I listed (except for paragraph composition) have appeared in various word processors. In ye olde days we had Samna Pro that was in every way superior to Word. I had a usable style system (and frames with rounded corners). Unfortunately, M$ was able to use its market power to drive them out (with their 2nd rate product). When it got bought out, it was over 

For a quick survey, we have the text in a text box word processors that do little formatting above what the text box does. This includes various RTF editors and Open Office and Libre Office.

It appears to me that Apple deliberately hamstrings Pages so Word will stay on Mac. You cannot even format all the elements of a list. Like a number of other text programs, Pages uses the ridiculous system of of styles where you have to format the text then use existing text to create a style.

There appears to be market need to drive the word processor up as there is a big gap in appear between what you get in Word and InDesign for plain text.

I note that in just searching for a references to do this post I ran into a quite a number of posts from people in the same boat as I that want to put an end to the Adobe scam, are sick of the lack of improvement in Adobe (and Word), noting the poor performance on the Mac, looking at Quark and Affinity, yet cannot find product to do professional plain text.

A technical note from 14 years ago:

https://creativepro.com/the-importance-of-paragraph-composition/

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1 hour ago, Jim Slade said:

I note that in just searching for a references to do this post I ran into a quite a number of posts from people in the same boat as I that want to put an end to the Adobe scam, are sick of the lack of improvement in Adobe (and Word), noting the poor performance on the Mac, looking at Quark and Affinity, yet cannot find product to do professional plain text.

Jim, your post was a magnificent piece and an excellent eye-opener: it seems to me that the overall competitive gear has been towards the management of visuals and the management of text has been the quiet child in the corner: easily ignored because unlikely to ever bring any food to the table. I don't get this: since Serif has already showed them to be more than capable of coming up with great visual management with Aphoto and Adesigner, why does Apub has to be an overkill in visual area at the expense of text management. By honoring text the ultimate marketing niche is at their feet and yet they seem to be reluctant to take it. Why?

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18 hours ago, Jim Slade said:

... Some of the features of a decent word processors would include:

  • decent text justification that operates by paragraph, rather than by line and does not leave gaping spaces. ...
4 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

... Especially your very first item in your list is something I have been hankering for in Publisher for some time. ...

 

Do you use in-line graphics in ID? InDesign secretly turns of paragraph composer for paragraphs containing in-line graphics and doesn't make this known in the UI.

Do you use contextual features in ID? Which would include most non-Latin languages. ID mostly needs single-line composer to handle those OT features properly (mainly for letter spacing issues).

Do you use rag-right? Paragraph composer is seldom handling line breaks properly.

My only point is that a single (ID has at least 2 types) multi-line paragraph composer isn't a panacea.

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2 minutes ago, MikeW said:

Do you use in-line graphics in ID?

Rarely, and so on…

2 minutes ago, MikeW said:

My only point is that a single (ID has at least 2 types) multi-line paragraph composer isn't a panacea.

Perhaps so, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be nice to have, at least to some of us.

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56 minutes ago, MikeW said:

"Do you use in-line graphics in ID? "

Rarely

56 minutes ago, MikeW said:

"Do you use contextual features in ID?"

Never

56 minutes ago, MikeW said:

"Do you use rag-right?"

Never in InDesign. Frequently with Word

 

I should have mentioned that there is an option in M$ Word to do justification like WordPerfect. That option causes Word to shrink spaces and bring text up from the next line. That is a multi-line composer. Justification in Word always looks terrible. I have not used WP in a long time as they did not support Mac.

Sadly, bad formatting is now becoming increasingly common in printed books as well. People get used to the #$@$ the see in Word and think it's OK in a book as well.

 

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just rubbed my hands together thinking I had found some wonderful publishing software and downloaded the free trial.

It took 3 minutes to discover there was a black hole where footnotes should have been.  Pity.  I'm out.

Let me know when you get this fixed.

 

John Elliott.

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As a techie copywriter of some 24-years (and a Microsoft Office Specialist Word Expert with 27-years' exp.) I don't see how this can't be a must have.

I use Word, I use Scrivener, and I want to use Publisher (this one, not the MS version), but the whole point is you make your users' lives easier. I get that I'm likely not going to use Publisher for academic work, but I guess there's an almost expectation that if you claim to be fit for purpose for books, etc.--and also as a serious challenger for another piece of software that does encompass this--then that type of functionality should be a given.

+1 for the roadmap, wherever that may be.

Edited: I saw a previous post where this is being addressed by Serif, so that's good news.

Edited by RussC
Added edit line based on an earlier post previously missed.
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On 3/23/2021 at 7:15 AM, Jim Slade said:

"Now that the "leading" Word processor (the one that has seen virtually no functional improvements in 25 years and where each "upgrade" is little more than a change in user interface) is pushing the subscription scam, the market there should be opening up."

 

Ha, ha, yep, that's exactly it, @Jim Slade. I've been using Word since 1997, helping organizations with it since 1999, and I'm using the very same core today that I was 22-years ago. Sadly, I'm still fixing the very same problems and issues today that I was back then, too. Moreover, I've actually been hired by to improve their Word templates, yet when I <ahem> politely advised where they're going wrong and what they really should be doing about it (because, after all, it's their software and they should be the leading light) was less-than-politely-100%-ignored. Ah well, we live and we learn.

 

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On 3/23/2021 at 1:15 AM, Jim Slade said:
  1. decent text justification that operates by paragraph, rather than by line and does not leave gaping spaces.
  2. hyphenation that follows the rules of hyphenation (and maybe even was configurable) and does not automatically break a hyphens. (e.g., "4-F" should not not break even with a hyphen and "A–Z" should not break with an en dash).
  3. Be able to define ranges of characters with no break (character style setting)
  4. Be style based and have styles easy to use. Not having 57.358 million pre-defined system styles that cannot be deleted so that you have to sort through a monster list to find the 10 styles you need for your template; be able to define style hierarchies in session and not have to go through the total BS of formatting text you want then define styles from already formatted text.
  5. Have character and paragraph styles independent. No BS hybrid styles that are a mixtures of the two. Have the both the paragraph and character style displayed when you select text.
  6. Have an easy method of removing character styles.
  7. Allow rounded corners on text frames.
  8. Be able to easily identify text that has been manually formatted by the idiot coworker who refuses to learn how to use styles.
  9. Full font feature support
  10. Be able to format all the elements of a numbered or bulleted list.

1. I don't know any word processor that has "paragraph composer" feature.
2. Hyphenation engine should auto detect the language of the word to be hyphenated so we don't need to select specific language for that.
3. There is already "no break" feature as character attribute.
4-5. Yes, I would love separate style panels because I use lots of paragraph and character styles. BTW, I deleted predefined Affinity styles and created mine not based on "group" style and without "No Change" anywhere in paragraph styles.
6. What is more easier than right click on any style and choose "delete"?
7. Yes, it would be nice.
8. Call the idiot and ask him what he has done or just use "Find/Replace" to change manual formating with character style formating. BTW it would be nice if applying paragraph local or style formating do not reset local character formatings.
9. Do you mean support for color fonts or something else?
10. You can already format bullets/numbers by assigning a character style in "bullets and numbers" in paragraph panel and you can format the text by using paragraph style.
 

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1 hour ago, RussC said:

Ha, ha, yep, that's exactly it, @Jim Slade. I've been using Word since 1997, helping organizations with it since 1999, and I'm using the very same core today that I was 22-years ago. Sadly, I'm still fixing the very same problems and issues today that I was back then, too. Moreover, I've actually been hired by to improve their Word templates, yet when I <ahem> politely advised where they're going wrong and what they really should be doing about it (because, after all, it's their software and they should be the leading light) was less-than-politely-100%-ignored. Ah well, we live and we learn.

 

 

The default Word Templates are a total joke. I get the impression the do things just because they can be done. Who uses superscript ordinals besides "for sale" signs in used car lots? Blue headings? 

I who was the idiot who came up with themes that are just half-assed template.

I switched to Word from what by then was Ami Pro and it was a major step downward (a book publisher demanded that). I had used Word for Windoze since WIndoze 3 in the early 1990's for work. There is been little improvement in Word since I first used it.

Word has needed for 30 years:

1. Templates with the 10 styles actually needed in to the document; not ever one of the 2.987 million default styles.

2. Reasonable justification.  You can tell if any justified document has come from Word because of the rivers.

3. Hyphenation that follow basic hyphenation rules.

4. Better support for alignment (vertical and horizontal) without having to mess with Word settings.

5. Distinction between character and paragraph styles. If you click on text you should be able to see both in use.

As the evil empire gets more people to subscribe word improvements are less likely. Just as improvements in Adobe products have come to an effective halt now that they use subscriptions. (And Quark has been totally FUed as a company.)

For my own copies, I don't upgrade word until it no longer functions on my OS. That is usually ten years. My last word upgrade (11 year ago) brought me open type features and nothing else. If I "upgrade" now I but I'd just get a change in UI.

 

 

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18 minutes ago, Petar Petrenko said:

1. I don't know any word processor that has "paragraph composer" feature.
2. Hyphenation engine should auto detect the language of the word to be hyphenated so we don't need to select specific language for that.
3. There is already "no break" feature as character attribute.
4-5. Yes, I would love separate style panels because I use lots of paragraph and character styles. BTW, I deleted predefined Affinity styles and created mine not based on "group" style and without "No Change" anywhere in paragraph styles.
6. What is more easier than right click on any style and choose "delete"?
7. Yes, it would be nice.
8. Call the idiot and ask him what he has done or just use "Find/Replace" to change manual formating with character style formating. BTW it would be nice if applying paragraph local or style formating do not reset local character formatings.
9. Do you mean support for color fonts or something else?
10. You can already format bullets/numbers by assigning a character style in "bullets and numbers" in paragraph panel and you can format the text by using paragraph style.
 

1) That's the point. After decades, of @$#@$# formatting, you'd think someone would have done it. On the other had, Quark still hasn't done it. On the other hand, Quark as a company is totally FUed.

2) Yes. In English, the basic rule is keep 2 and take no more than 3. Yet word will hyphenate ABCD as AB-CD. And Word will split already hyphenated word at hyphens. "F-4F" will be "F-" + "4F". Microsoft has probably gotten complaints about this ever  day for the last 25 years and not don'e a thing.

😎 Most people do not use styles because they are so difficult to work with in Word.

9) I am talking about open type and similar phone features. Lining vs. old style figures for example.

10). This was an attack on other word processors. Word does this. Pages, for example, does not allow full editing of a list.

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