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  • 3 weeks later...

I am responsible for the purchases of about 150 Affinity licenses. But here we are, almost three years on from the original post, and Publisher still doesn't have one of the most basic features I would hope for in a desktop layout application. Is there a roadmap for when to expect footnotes/endnotes? Is there some major architectural reason why they are difficult to implement? Can we have some information with which to make informed purchase decisions?

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Rparmar, your comment is extremely valid.

After printing a proof copy of my latest book, a decision was taken to increase the point size of the text in the introduction.  This was easily done, but the result was the need to check all footnotes, some of which now needed to be moved manually to the next page, which bumped other footnotes on down to subsequent pages.  I then had to reduce the size of the main text box individually on each page manually and to increase the text box for the footnotes manually on each page as required, as well as moving manually the line that separates the footnotes from the main text.

This resulted in hours of work and cannot be guaranteed to be 100% error-free, even though the text is the original point size was.

It really is a strong reason not to buy Affinity Publisher and if I had known of this problem before purchase, I would probably not have bought it.

uneMule, your suggestion on transparency is excellent.  I hope that Serif/Affinity will consider it.

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11 hours ago, rparmar said:

I am responsible for the purchases ........ Can we have some information with which to make informed purchase decisions?

Thank you for a simple, cogent and powerful post. I continue to avoid using AP because of this, especially since the ancient fore-runner was capable of doing it a decade ago. PagePlus still remains my go-to program for all sorts of functions, including PDF editing.

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1 hour ago, MJWHM said:

Thank you for a simple, cogent and powerful post. I continue to avoid using AP because of this, especially since the ancient fore-runner was capable of doing it a decade ago. PagePlus still remains my go-to program for all sorts of functions, including PDF editing.

" PagePlus still remains my go-to program for all sorts of functions..."

I couldn't agree more..

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/65541-footnotesendnotes/&do=findComment&comment=536959

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33 minutes ago, PatrickOfLondon said:

" PagePlus still remains my go-to program for all sorts of functions..."

I couldn't agree more..

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/65541-footnotesendnotes/&do=findComment&comment=536959

The truly astonishing thing here is that Serif has not monetized its excellent PagePlus product by continuing to provide it as a kegacy product since Affinity crept onto the scene. I cannot see what possible readon they have to lose that opportunity, expecially given the length of time it seems to be taking to achieve even some of the old program's functions. I don't like Affinity, I admit. It is not user-friendly; it is not intuitive, and it does not seem to understand how my mind works. I have bought all the programs and still do not enjoy using them, preferring others almost all the time. I am truly, truly, disappointed.

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Sadly, I can readily empathise with those sentiments, particularly about intuitiveness, and the subtle difference between (a) how a user might think of approaching something, and (b) how software might make it possible to achieve it, if indeed it does at all. Everyone has his or her own individual experience and expectations of using software. For some people, no doubt Affinity Publisher meets their needs excellently. My own experience echoes MJWHM’s.

In my case, wanting to produce relatively uncomplicated documents, I came to Serif PagePlus, around 10 years ago, from Microsoft Publisher. In making that transition, I found the learning curve very steep and arduous, but in the end, it was worth it, because I found PagePlus so much richer in features and fine control over layout; and once you got used to it, it did feel reasonably intuitive.

So it was that I came to Affinity Publisher from PagePlus. I wish I could say the same things about my experience of that transition, but regrettably, I can’t.

I had expected a gentler and more gradual learning curve because the products were from the same company. But it has been neither particularly gentle nor particularly gradual, and much of the time it doesn’t seem worth continuing down the path, because to me, it seems so much more difficult or time-consuming to achieve what I want to do than it is in PagePlus.

I bought all three Affinity products because I wanted – and still want – to support a small, ambitious, innovative, British company, and also (of course) because I like the price and the purchase model, rather than a subscription model.

Affinity Photo is something I use frequently: I find it good value and effective, even if sometimes lacking something in intuitiveness. But for publications, I always still turn to PagePlus, and leave Affinity Publisher alone, gathering electronic dust. I do appreciate that this is a case of sticking to what you know rather than moving to a new place; but change can be good, if it makes life better. However, attempting to make the move from the predecessor to the newcomer doesn’t feel worthwhile, to me, for my purposes; not yet, anyway, and surely not for as long as footnotes and endnotes are missing.

How one fixes “intuitiveness” is an elusive concept, especially at this stage of the product’s development. But one continues to hope that fixing footnotes and endnotes, by making them available, might not be too far down the road, now.

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I bought Affinity Photo and Publisher, although I do own the last non-subscription version of Photoshop to be sold by Adobe (CS6, bought in 2013).  Over the preceding years I had been purchasing previous versions of Photoshop and soon learnt to do the things that I want to do, which mostly centres on adjusting brightness and contrast on files that either come from digital cameras or have been scanned in from negatives or slides, plus straightening, cropping, etc.

I occasionally try to do these simple adjustments in Affinity Photo, but for the experienced user of Photoshop, Affinity Photo is not at all intuitive and as I am not tied to the Adobe monthly subscription model, the need to use Affinity Photo is not there, and it is far quicker for me to do needed adjustments in Photoshop than to spend the time learning how to do the equivalent things in Affinity Photo.  Perhaps one day I will set myself the task of learning it (as I have done with Affinity Publisher), but until then, in my case it won't get used.

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  • 1 month later...

I started with PagePlus some 10 years ago, then moved to Affinity Publisher becuase my books ended up collapsing PagePlus, which crashed all too often or took a horrible time to respond, even though splitting the different chapters into separate files.

One of the things that I missed was having a workbook, to join all the different chaopters into one single file, like PagePlus had. It seems that Serif is working on it, which is good news. Though I do not have a clue when that feature will be available, for the moment I can work with the whole book in Affinity, as it reacts much more efficiently than PagePlus, which was so slow that it was unworkable. Unfortunately, there is zero compatibility and no way to migrate (and please don't talk about using PDFs for that purpose, because I feel that is a joke).

As repeated highlighted in this thread, the big NO-NO is the lack of footnotes and endnotes. Serif said that it was working on those more than one year ago, and we have still no clue about when this feature will be available (If ever, because it bcomes increasingly difficult to believe such promises). I write both fiction and academic books, and even some of my FICTION books have footnotes! This is not a luxury, this is an essential feaure! Even M$ Word has it!

I am starting a new book, and I expect hundreds of footnotes. Do I need to abandon Affinity Publisher altogether for a more complete package or can we expect this feature in a relatively short period of time? I am talking a few months at the most, not years!

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I hesitate to say this, lest things go wrong for me, but I have published two large books, filled with images and notes, using PagePlus X9. I used Book Plus, and it seems to work well for me.
But youa re right about importing PDFs, and also the need that has not changed in two years.

Edited by MJWHM
Simplification.
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Footnotes? What are Footnotes for?

In Germany most books have footnotes. For education, for the former texter, for the…

I had wish footnotes from the begining of AP. Until now: NO FOOTNOTES!

O.K. on the other hand I do now a 344 site architecture magazine there is no need to do footnotes. I do this in the newest Beta, becaues the 1.9 is so sluggish and buggy. Until now went all good. I do tests with print PDF and there are o.k. too.

I think when we get the V2 of Publisher we have a great and strong DTP-Tool. And then I hope we see the first Beta with Footnotes in a way that will blowing us away.

Stay tuned and positiv.

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Ramon

Affinity Publisher struggles with my current book, which has 272 full colour images, each larger than A4 size and on a page of its own, most of them with a small amount of text also on each page, plus a small number of pages that only contain text (and footnotes!).  Whenever I edit an image (at this final checking stage, generally just adjusting colour and contrast), Affinity Publisher freezes for about a minute and this afternoon after a session lasting a few hours, with occasional saves, it crashed completely.  The total file size for the saved pdf to send to the printing company is about 2.4 GB.  The Affinity file is smaller, as it links to the images instead of including them.

I am using Windows 10 on a 64-bit machine with 8GB of RAM, and seem to be working at the outer limits of what Affinity Publisher can handle.

Various bugs lead me to hope that version 2.0 will be forthcoming soon.

Trevor

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12 minutes ago, Trevor A said:

I am using Windows 10 on a 64-bit machine with 8GB of RAM, and seem to be working at the outer limits of what Affinity Publisher can handle.

Although 8GB of RAM should be adequate for general use, for an image-heavy publication with upwards of 272 pages you would probably find operations much smoother with at least double that amount.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.5.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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Its RAM consumptiom is known. I have 64 GB RAM and a one year old AMD 8GB graphiccard and Publisher will more. I work aunder Windows 10 too. When I open Publisher wit my 344 site file, all images linked, the file is at 750 MB, publisher take all of my 64 GB. So ther is 99% RAM Publischer.

The same file in ID needs only 6 GB. I think Serif has a massiv RAM-Managemet-Problem.

When nothing is embeded why there don't use a smaler preview like Adobe?

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3 hours ago, Trevor A said:

Ramon

Affinity Publisher struggles with my current book, which has 272 full colour images, each larger than A4 size and on a page of its own, most of them with a small amount of text also on each page, plus a small number of pages that only contain text (and footnotes!).  Whenever I edit an image (at this final checking stage, generally just adjusting colour and contrast), Affinity Publisher freezes for about a minute and this afternoon after a session lasting a few hours, with occasional saves, it crashed completely.  The total file size for the saved pdf to send to the printing company is about 2.4 GB.  The Affinity file is smaller, as it links to the images instead of including them.

I am using Windows 10 on a 64-bit machine with 8GB of RAM, and seem to be working at the outer limits of what Affinity Publisher can handle.

Various bugs lead me to hope that version 2.0 will be forthcoming soon.

Trevor

I also use Windows 10 on a 64-bit machine with 32 GB of RAM.

I am right now editing a 450-page book (text only). I checked, and it occupies 11043 Mbytes of RAM and approx 2 Mbytes of disk (Word takes 38 Mbytes of RAM and 600 kBytes of disk for the same text). PDF is 7 MBytes. However, PagePlus choked on this same book (I am reformatting it, it is an oldie), taking typically 2-3 minutes to update even after a minor change such as changing a word. Yes, it's very memory-hungry but it's a big improvement over PagePlus.

I have not tried graphics-intensive books yet, for the one that has those I need first the footnotes, or it is unfeasible to edit it (Too complex to do it by hand).

Edited by Ramon56
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Ramon

When considering editing the text of this book, I now first check if I can make changes without pushing footnotes onto a different page!  Editing out a long sentence that was no longer needed, it was necessary to create another, unnecessary, sentence of equal length, in order to avoid bringing footnotes forward to an earlier page!!  Doing this, the quality of the writing suffers!!

Trevor

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2 hours ago, Trevor A said:

Ramon

When considering editing the text of this book, I now first check if I can make changes without pushing footnotes onto a different page!  Editing out a long sentence that was no longer needed, it was necessary to create another, unnecessary, sentence of equal length, in order to avoid bringing footnotes forward to an earlier page!!  Doing this, the quality of the writing suffers!!

Trevor

Trevor,

I have exactly the same issue, that is why I do all the quality checks & editing in Word - it becomes a mess to do it Publisher.

However, when I print the proof, sometimes there is something that pops up that needs correcting, and it makes no sense to reformat the whole book again. Unfortunately, even adding or removing an extra word can cause trouble with footnotes.

And mind you, I am not just talking about scientific books (which I also publish), it applies also to something as simple as a SciFi book, which might have a few footnotes to explain some obscure scientific terms... or an adventure book, where you need to provide from time to time some historical background to improve the reader's experience. Could you include it in the text instead of a footnote? Probably, but it would disrupt the storyline. In fiction books it's workable to do it by hand, but quite messy. In scientific books, it's a disaster.

Edited by Ramon56
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I too have already manually set footnotes out of desperation.  You can do that in a 54-page booklet.  But as I posted in a previous post in this thread, extensive books, history books and reference works cannot be realized without footnote function.

pub-screen-2.jpg


And here is a screenshot of the magazine and memory consumption.

pub-screen-1.jpg

pub-screen-3.jpg

As it looks, Affinity has already changed memory management in the new beta.

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Your text layout and footnotes look like mine.  The magazine looks very impressive.  Glad to see "sehr niedrig"  for Stromverbrauch  and very low figures or zero for most other requirements.  As I still consider myself an inexperienced user of Affinity Publisher, I prefer to avoid beta versions.  I hope that a new upgrade will be launched soon.

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