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20 hours ago, PaoloT said:

I'm recurrently tempted by LaTeX. But then, every book I see made with it smells of school textbook. So, I end up declining.

Paolo

 

I've started learning LaTex as an interim step while waiting (years!) for Serif to provide footnotes, endnotes and proper cross-referencing (if they ever do).

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On 12/16/2020 at 6:14 PM, Patrick Connor said:

This is is simply an incorrect understanding. The same team who wrote PagePlus are writing Affinity Publisher. These programmers can access the legacy code (if desired), but there is no need, they wrote it and know how they wrote it. Legacy code and the Affinity code is not shared as the implementation and architecture are not similar. This feature needs writing using the current language spec and using the current OS independent architecture and algorithms. Code like this is not simply plug and play

True. Algorithms my travel and improve between architectures, but code will not. At least not easily.

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On 5/26/2022 at 1:25 PM, pfbt said:

I started to learn while waiting for Serif to provide appropriate […] cross-reference notes.

Hello, @pfbt ,

What do cross-reference notes need to be truly appropriate?

(For those wondering what it is, here is what is currently being done, see this video:)

https://affinity.serif.com/tutorials/publisher/desktop/video/337458844/

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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1 hour ago, Igor23 said:

This would be an amazing feature ) Hopefully they add it in 2.0! AfPub would really become quite powerful

😊Uh! About the cross-reference notes ? This video shows what has been going on for quite some time.

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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+1

Yes, please! Without this functionality, it's infeasible for me to use Affinity Publisher. 

As well as supporting natively-created endnotes, if you could also include functionality to import from Word, this would be wonderful. But even just a basic endnote construct in Affinity would be sufficient. I'd be willing to do the work to manually add them in Affinity, as long as each entry remained linked with its back matter content for easy navigation.

I love your software, and was so sad to realize that it's infeasible to use it because of this gap in functionality.

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  • 3 weeks later...

As with the majority of writers, I prepare my manuscript in MS Word, using both Mac and Windows versions. My current book requires a great deal of research, thus many hundreds of footnotes. We've chosen to record the notes as footnotes to keep them with the relevant text while writing, but will convert to endnotes when the manuscript is complete. Like most, I'm anxiously awaiting native support for foot/endnotes in AfPub, but have found what looks to be a nice workaround in NoteStripper by editorium.com.

NoteStripper is a Word macro that allows me to strip the notes (footnotes and/or endnotes) and place them at the end of the Word document. The main text retains the (unlinked) superscripts that relate to the numbered notes. I can then have two documents: one with the main text and the superscripted references to the endnotes; the other the list of numbered notes. Both documents retain their original formatting, and can be placed in AfPub separately (unlinked).

I did a search in this forum for NoteStripper and for emporium.com, but found only one reference to the latter, seemingly not related to the footnotes issue. Hopefully, this adds a bit of value to the discussion. If not, then just "Hi! I'm Len. Happy to make my first post!"

Edited by LenKagelmacher
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On 5/25/2022 at 10:29 AM, PaoloT said:

I'm recurrently tempted by LaTeX. But then, every book I see made with it smells of school textbook. So, I end up declining.

Paolo

 

I just published a 480 page technical book using LaTeX, and the kaobook template. It was not without challenges, but once I learned the way to handle things, I was able to obtain a very nice result. And it does not look like a textbook. Early on, that was a common complaint, as the handling of styles is intended to make spontaneous alterations difficult, in the interest of a coherent design. You need to visit ctan.org, and also search for templates. There is also abundant peer support available.

I would really like to use Affinity Publisher, but I need footnotes, and in this book I also used marginnotes.

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8 hours ago, PaoloT said:

the website itself seems to come out of the Nineties!

Most people access web sites using the TCP/IP protocols, which were developed in the 70's, so a web site from the 90's is actually quite recent considering what you are going through in order to access it.

 

9 hours ago, meyer.wil said:

I just published a 480 page technical book using LaTeX

Good choice.

 

On 6/20/2022 at 12:40 PM, Trevor A said:

Once Affinity Publisher offers support for footnotes and endnotes, it will be a great program

It is already a great program, just one which is not currently well-suited to your particular use case.

 

On 6/20/2022 at 12:40 PM, Trevor A said:

as in all other respects it is excellent and powerful

Not in *all* other respects - no support for RTL or vertical languages, no global layers, questionable practices regarding the handling of global and spot colors, inadequate cross-reference support, virtually no interactive features (other than hyperlinks), no support for spreads of more than two pages, no support for custom slug areas (just a few pre-defined things that can be turned on or off), no support for variable or color fonts, ... ... ...

 

Some users are much more heavily impacted by one or more of those things than by the lack of footnotes and endnotes.

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14 hours ago, fde101 said:

Most people access web sites using the TCP/IP protocols, which were developed in the 70's, so a web site from the 90's is actually quite recent considering what you are going through in order to access it.

During the Nineties there were people vigorously defending that real men didn't need icons. I feel like that web site may have been developed by someone who was convinced of it. I would hesitate to consider that as part of the same modern communication world that came after PageMaker.

Paolo

 

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14 hours ago, PaoloT said:

real men didn't need icons.

Wait, you mean... they do?!?!?!?

😇

 

I just pulled up the CTAN site and believe it or not they seem to be using a lot more icons than I remember them using last time I visited it.  Given the nature of the site (and of TeX itself) the site seems reasonably appropriate to me.

The TeX system can still be used quite effectively on a lot of older computer platforms which might not handle "modern" web browser standards particularly well, so keeping the site reasonably simple for such systems to parse may very well factor into the design...

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On 8/31/2018 at 2:38 PM, garrettm30 said:

Are footnotes and endnotes currently possible (besides manually creating them, of course)? I haven't found them so far.

If not, this is a feature that I think would be widely used. I suspect it may take some time to get right if it is not yet under development, so I would understand if it is not a day-1 feature.

Woaaa!!

Soon four years and counting!

I remember the early days of UK home computers and PC clones. The UK was leading for a few years, then… suddenly… fell off a cliff due to lack of innovations and customer support. They insisted on being the best; even while the world decided otherwise.

Now, is Affinity aiming at repeating this old sad state of affairs?

Regards

P.S. I have practically stopped using designer (nice app, but integrates rather badly with other software). Photo is relegated to handling old material. I’ve returned to using Lightroom Classic and Photoshop again. And as far as Publisher goes, the still lacking support for docx material import (including styles), lack of foot/endnotes support and especially no real export to ePub usage (especially galling, now that Amazon/Kindle seems to be about to make peace with the format). I’ve even used Word as a Publisher replacement in one recent case, since Publisher seems to have become a dead end, and word at least is supported by most serious environments - still!

It’s not a case of pricing. It’s a simple case of lack of even the most basic features, supported in most serious environments. Nearing four years of non-solution of significant omissions to the product feature list is rather telling in my view.

Your mileage may vary, but all my licenses for iPad, Windows and Mac has fallen out of use the last 12-18 months. Maybe a secondary machine will be relegated to supporting legacy solutions, like Affinity Designer, Photo and especially Publisher.

It all looked so enticing many years ago, and look now on all the good will squandered by inaction or persisting non-solutions to relatively basic needs.

 

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Hello, @kfriis,

The first version was released on 19 June 2019. It was already quite exciting despite some shortcomings, and it won an award. Since then, every few weeks, a new update brings its share of improvements on the existing features and from time to time we even find new functions.

Except for the long-awaited footnotes, which are the subject of this discussion, you just need to open the Word text to import it. Some defects in the Word file are even corrected. That said, whether it’s QuarkXPress or Indesign, good DTP is about taking all the raw text from Words and then rebuilding the styles if you want to get a professional job.

The EPUB format has nothing to do with the format of a printed book. The structure of the files has nothing to do with it, hence the disasters of the extensions of some DTP software that have tried it. This format can only be obtained with really specific software. Just select all the text from Publisher and paste it into one of these specialized programs.

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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We really need a Whining section in the forum. So, I'll have a place where to write myself things like "WHY THE FEATURE I ASKED YEARS AGO IS NOT YET THERE?????? WE NEED A ROADMAP!!!!!! OTHERWISE SERIF IS DOOMED!!!!!!!"

:)

Paolo

 

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22 hours ago, Pyanepsion said:

[cut...]The EPUB format has nothing to do with the format of a printed book. The structure of the files has nothing to do with it, hence the disasters of the extensions of some DTP software that have tried it. This format can only be obtained with really specific software. Just select all the text from Publisher and paste it into one of these specialized programs.[...cut]

Pure balloney! Utterly, decidedly uninformed opinion (which you are entitled to have, but that does not make it right per se ;-).

Even the very much simpler standard Apple Pages program allows producing fixed format, intricately designed ePub books/documents. Including multimedia content, like audio , video etc. I guess, this several years old extension to the ordinarily office solution, did not turn up on your radar on "what the world uses or can use" to produce more or less standard output for general use world wide.

If you assume only "novel type books", you are (mostly) right, but when we're talking instruction material, manuals, safety manuals and vital check lists, embedded video into fixed formatted manuals, can - and will sometimes - do wonders. Pages is not ideal for that, but it can be done, both simply and to a large degree reliably. When lives may be involved, Pages is not the most obvious solution, alas, there are lots of cases, where the fixed format ePub may be the most obvious solution (iPad's are standard reader devices for a lot of professional use cases - including piloting, engineering, electronic or mechanical repairs etc.)

Try animate anything in a 200 page PDF manual or in in a 25 page safety check list (exploding into hundfreds of illustrations required to produce a less clear instruction in PDF only, if even an inkling of freely oriented 3D is involved).

It doesn't hurt, that you can design for fixed format ePub (which is displayed without any problems on iOS, iPadOS and macOS, as well as the usual contenders for hi-quality Android machinery) and export to PDF, if animations/videos can be linked to multi gigabyte files online, but that's of no use, when e.g. in doubt on how to mount a special gasket on a bespoke emergency solution natural gas switch in a secure, non-lethal way in 50C in the desert somewhere in the Arabian peninsula. A a similar intricate task on the Altiplano between Arequipa and Puno, in large regions above 4km up, topping out at 4.910 meters, with Wonderfull views of the "Vulcan alley" hundreds of kilometers from nearest mobile connection of even the most inferior or unreliable type.

You can of course elect to design tools restricted to produce only material targeted for use cases within the confines of the City of London, but the world is far larger, than that ;-)

If you have no knowledge, it is OK to say so, but just rejecting usability - even critical usability in some cases - due to lack of insight and vision, is really no way forward.

Do you speak for Affinity in any official capacity?

 

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The EPUB extensions provided so far with DTP software (such as Indesign and QuarkXpress) produce files that are as far from the EPUB format as the print files produced by Word or worse Write or Page. Very bad. When you know that a very good EPUB software costs only around 100 €, why deprive yourself of it?

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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1 hour ago, kfriis said:

Even the very much simpler standard Apple Pages program allows producing fixed format,

If we restrict the topic of Epub to "fixed format", why do we need Epub at all. Why not just use PDF?

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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40 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

If we restrict the topic of Epub to "fixed format", why do we need Epub at all. Why not just use PDF?

Because - for instance - instruction manuals often has to include animations or videos showing approach, placement and tools in a repair/mounting process. In other cases, it’s a html based “widget” controlled by the user, enabling the user to control views on an detail or construct in ways meaningfull to the user in the moment in the actual environment and space available in restricted spaces locally.

Paper manuals are still produced today. Seldom used for anything but emergency backups. PDF format manuals or instructions, check lists etc. are widely used, but not always sufficient.

If internet can be guaranteed to be available in a sufficiently high speed (!), a link within a PDF document will often do, but try using that from an iPad with mobile connectibility, in central, old parts of Rome (where even less than megabit speeds are often the only thing available, unless you carry a few hundred meters of Ethernet cable to a reliable Cabled connection - parts of that vanishing, before ends are connected, if you do not use “security heavies” to guard the cable run).

Large parts of the world - even large parts of Europe - allow only periodical and “symbolic” mobile phone internet connection speeds.

In many situations, you actually need to carry “the internet parts” on you (video, audio elements - e.g. playing the sound of to low or too high tension to aid a technician - or “operator controlled explanatory elements” - typically a html based widget).

You can of course use “external files”, but now you run into a versioning problem, that worst case can cause loss of life, if files end up in “unintended mixes” or even files not present on a current device recently gone into use.

One ePub3 file has the same benefits as one PDF file.

The PDF file is one document, with a collection of elements within. Easily version controlled as a whole (no risk, that one image is showing a year old version by end user accident).

The same is the case of an ePub file (whether fixed format or not). All elements are “packed” into one, single file, easily allowing reliable versioning, including fonts and whatnot.

If you have an unencrypted/protected ePub3 file called “x.epub” and rename it to “x.zip”, you can unpack the content (as you have probably done a few times, if you work with epubs), and apart from a few, central definition and control files, you’re looking at mostly near standard html content, that could be used as an ordinary “website”  element (and often is, during widget development).

It is actually easy to add an “active element” to a fixed format ePub (in most cases, it looks decidedly similar to a html link in a PDF file ;-) 

A popular description is “to place the active element” within a given frame, similar to the “startup image size”. All the elements could be regarded as one, discrete package, with predefined options for display and control. In effect, it is a “local web presentation object” requiring no connection beyond the device, but as easily integrated into a specific, physically selected “displayframe” on a screen page.

The manual, instruction or check list approach is simplified enourmously by using fixed format ePub3 “Books” (using the term book, is like using the term pdf to describe the freedoms of the internet).

In most cases, the web widgets are actually constructed in tools, that may target output as a html-page for inclusion into a standard online webpage, a html-widget (with the interface required to be embedded as an ePub element) or simply to a video or audio rendering, if user interaction is not required.

In short - seen from the outside - you could view fixed format ePub3 documents as PDF documents with options for embedded sound, video, animation and optional user interaction, if required (“if required” being the operational phrase).

Initially Adobe had a simple, embedded flash swf script approach added to PDF’s in mind, but it never cought on (it was exciting news, when I was an Adobe Postscript device driver developer late in the last millennium). Maybe it is even possible to some extend today (haven’t checked within the last ten years), but you’d run into heavy play problems (our modern world use mostly anything but strictly Adobe endorsed tools for presentation ;-)

html - and the derivative ePub3 - have completely replaced that option in real life.

Regards

 

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@kfriis,

If you are producing ePub files that need video and/or audio embedded and these files are used to preserve someone's life then you must realize that a dedicated EPUB application would be the best way to go.

11 minutes ago, kfriis said:

... you run into a versioning problem, that worst case can cause loss of life ...

 

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.

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Just now, Old Bruce said:

@kfriis,

If you are producing ePub files that need video and/or audio embedded and these files are used to preserve someone's life then you must realize that a dedicated EPUB application would be the best way to go.

 

Ah, still looking panicked for any excuse to not…

Would you also prohibit the use of pdf file content, where life depends on the content, I.e. an embedded image (embeddable in ePub too), you’d have to ban pdf in all engineering, hospital, airline use.

EPub is a file format. Just as pdf. The value is in content reliability and usability.

If content has been reliably certified, it is usable. Otherwise even paper copies must be banned.

Try to look at things this way:

PDF is a special case of the very powerful postscript language packed into one file only.

Epub is a special case of the very powerful html language packed into one file only.

The latter is vastly more flexible and powerful, but both are logically similar in scope. They deliver a locally available media output packed in one, single and standardized content file.

It’s a case of making ALL pertinent and important material available in a reliable format inside a single file locally on the device available for the purpose. Often, nay, nearly always an iPad. Support material in likewise reliable formats.

It’s also a case of making additional, optional explanatory material available at the command of the user, if the user deems this important. Interactively, if required.

And it is a case of creating a verifiable, interactive checklist of tests performed in an authorized order, to ensure a job correctly done and reliably finished.

From “do this” over “how on earth is this connected” ending in “aha” and a final “test” followed by a series of “check”, “check”… followed by “finished”!

No need to connect to anything outside the device, you have at hand. A device, that easily holds a very well assorted technical library down to details seldom required, but when they are… pure blessing!

With or without media, animation or interactive content 🤪

Why’s that a problem for you?

You do not loose the option to restrict yourself to pdf-only, if that’s your wish, but more modern requirements may be served by ePub support too. In large parts, the program will be similar, some parts even identical.

Your personal needs may not be representative, and if Affinity plans on long term survival, planned, recent, current and coming requirements for users with widely varied use cases may be pertinent to plan for.

epub is “just” a far more flexible output format. Not at all excluding pdf (really only a small subset of ePub capabilities), if that’s the only level required. You could in theory limit all Internet presentations to pdf only, but that would be rather restrictive, so why do that?

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I realise that the  questions of the EPUB format are of valid interest to various people, but the discussion seems to have strayed away from its original topic - the availability of and Endnotes in Affinity Publisher.

Is it possible for the EPUB discussion to be split off elsewhere as a separate topic?  While this topic remains focussed on Footnotes/Endnotes.

No disrespect intended to anyone, just feel            things could be a little more specific.

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Publisher cannot edit or place audio or video files. So from the get go it is unsuited to the manufacture of your desired epub file.

 

And to get this back on track, how will the Footnotes be handled by the epub? Will they be inline or popups or moved to the end of the book?

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.

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1 hour ago, Old Bruce said:

And to get this back on track, how will the Footnotes be handled by the epub? Will they be inline or popups or moved to the end of the book?

When i use my Kindle, Footnotes are handled as a pop-up. End notes are at the end of teh ebook.

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