Footnotes/Endnotes

[cyberlizard]

I tend to produce academic religious materials.  I have been using InDesign for around ten years but have more recently been trying out Scribus.  Unfortunately, Scribus is let down by an extremely poor UI, however if it were to update its interface then, at the price point it comes in at it would be a most excellent application.

I suspect that once we are closer for certain to knowing the likely time-frame for the inclusion of referential/citation marks and their associated footnotes and/or endnotes, I may be much happier in giving the software my full backing.  As it is for now, I sadly cannot commit to a purchase, which is a great shame as the general progress so far has been amazing.  So it remains at least for now InDesign or Scribus depending on the materials I am producing.

[Distill7]

18 hours ago, cyberlizard said:

I tend to produce academic religious materials.  I have been using InDesign for around ten years but have more recently been trying out Scribus.  Unfortunately, Scribus is let down by an extremely poor UI, however if it were to update its interface then, at the price point it comes in at it would be a most excellent application.

I suspect that once we are closer for certain to knowing the likely time-frame for the inclusion of referential/citation marks and their associated footnotes and/or endnotes, I may be much happier in giving the software my full backing.  As it is for now, I sadly cannot commit to a purchase, which is a great shame as the general progress so far has been amazing.  So it remains at least for now InDesign or Scribus depending on the materials I am producing.

I tried scribus because it supports RTL text now, unfortunately as you said its UI is so poorly designed.

[pointery]

2 hours ago, toutou123 said:

I tried scribus because it supports RTL text now,

In Design also supports RTL.

Indd is my publishing tool right now, till Affinity will add RTL support.

[Loader]

I received an email offering me the new full (non-beta) release of Affinity Publisher at a 30% discount for being a beta tester. Unfortunately I am letting it pass. That is because without footnote functionality, I can't use it.

As far as I can see there is no 'upgrade' pricing structure on Affinity products, so I might as well sit it out until the next version release, or whichever release in the future actually does have footnotes, and buy then. 

[fde101]

On 6/14/2019 at 8:07 PM, Loader said:

As far as I can see there is no 'upgrade' pricing structure on Affinity products

All version updates from 1.x to 1.y are free.

For 2.x it will be necessary to pay again.

Considering that the Affinity products have been in version 1.x for several years now at $50 each normally and QXP releases an upgrade which is now over $230 roughly once a year if paying for 3 years at a time (thanks to their disadvantage plan), I don't think it is unreasonable to not offer upgrade pricing on the Affinity products.  The fact that they often offer 20% off with new product releases is also kind of nice.  Note that many apps on the Mac App store follow this model of having free updates for a major release and pay in full for the next major version - the app store doesn't allow for paid upgrade pricing so they submit major version releases as entirely separate apps.

[erikmh]

I purchased Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer 1.6 this last winter — testing them out first, of course, and being really impressed with how full-featured, fast, and intuitive they both were.

It never occurred to me that Affinity Publisher 1.7 would debut without such basic and nearly universally-needed features as footnotes and endnotes, so I bought it sight unseen.

Caveat emptor, right? I get what I deserve. So Publisher will sit in my Applications folder unused, reminding me always always always to test software before buying it.

What were they thinking? It looks beautiful, of course. Too bad it’s useless....

[Petar Petrenko]

On 6/19/2019 at 8:53 PM, erikmh said:

What were they thinking? It looks beautiful, of course. Too bad it’s useless....

What are you expecting? In version 1.# to have all the features of InDesign? Just look behind and see what features InDesign had in v. 1.#. Did you start walking on 2 legs at the moment you were born?

[erikmh]

Umm, no, of course not. Just basic and nearly universally-needed features, as I said.

[Petar Petrenko]

2 minutes ago, erikmh said:

Umm, no, of course not. Just basic and nearly universally-needed features, as I said.

Why do you think footnotes are basic features? Do you know whey they where introduced in Quark?

[MikeW]

Just now, Petar Petrenko said:

Why do you think footnotes are basic features? Do you know whey they where introduced in Quark?

I do. But they had long been available via an XTension.

[Petar Petrenko]

We are talking about native features here. I don't think there will be a footnote extension/plug-in, or what else, for Publisher.

[BillF]

Surely the issue here is that while the guys at Affinity have done a wonderful piece of work, in today's world footnotes are an essential and basic feature in the DTP environment, especially for anyone producing academic publications. It is therefore no good looking back and saying how long it took Adobe or Quark to implement such features. The benefit of hindsight might have been better used by the Affinity team to have included this feature from the outset.

[Petar Petrenko]

There is another situation, too. Nowadays, people expect from newborn to act as an 30-40 years old man. If you expectt that, then Affinity should not come out in next 15-20 years maybe.

[erikmh]

Surely the issue here is that while the guys at Affinity have done a wonderful piece of work, in today's world footnotes are an essential and basic feature in the DTP environment, especially for anyone producing academic publications. It is therefore no good looking back and saying how long it took Adobe or Quark to implement such features. The benefit of hindsight might have been better used by the Affinity team to have included this feature from the outset.

Indeed. They’re not trying to pattern themselves after Adobe or Quark (or Aldus or Frame or Corel), and that’s why they’re creating such good products.

[MikeW]

1 hour ago, Petar Petrenko said:

We are talking about native features here. I don't think there will be a footnote extension/plug-in, or what else, for Publisher.

At least like ID, Q was built from the beginning with extensibility from the beginning, which lessens the demand upon developers to provide everything. 

[Petar Petrenko]

11 hours ago, MikeW said:

At least like ID, Q was built from the beginning with extensibility from the beginning, which lessens the demand upon developers to provide everything. 

I think they took something from PageMaker, not everything from the beginning, because they did it very fast.

[Dave Harris]

12 hours ago, BillF said:

Surely the issue here is that while the guys at Affinity have done a wonderful piece of work, in today's world footnotes are an essential and basic feature in the DTP environment, especially for anyone producing academic publications. It is therefore no good looking back and saying how long it took Adobe or Quark to implement such features. The benefit of hindsight might have been better used by the Affinity team to have included this feature from the outset.

As ever, it was a choice between releasing the product without that feature, or delaying for however long it took to add it. If we waited until footnotes, database merge and IDML import were done, that could easily be another six months. It turns out that a lot of customers can be productive without those features, so we chose to release now. If you aren't one of those customers, that's unfortunate, but you aren't actually worse off today because it was never feasible to have the features ready for today.

[Peter Kahrel]

That's why a road map of planned features would be useful.

P.

[A_B_C]

Pretty sure, a roadmap will show up very soon here … 

[PatrickOfLondon]

I can certainly appreciate the frustration, from people who need footnotes and endnotes, about their non-availability in Affinity Publisher at present.

I'd really like to see these features too.

However, I feel confident that they will appear, in the not-too-distant future, in an incremental version along the way. And there are alternative products I can use, if I absolutely must have endnotes and footnotes right now.

I'd like to add my thanks to all at Affinity / Serif for offering the marketplace this choice of products, at their price-point, alongside currently perhaps more feature-rich, but certainly much more expensive products from other companies.  Given that AfPub is currently on sale for a one-off price of 3.9 months' worth of a single-app Adobe subscription, I'm personally very happy with the value I'm getting at present, and hope to see enhancements in the future of the kind we've seen in the other Affinity products' evolution since launch.

[Joerg Thoeming]

6 hours ago, Peter Kahrel said:

That's why a road map of planned features would be useful.

P.

I am with Peter in that case.

First and foremost, I'd really like to compliment the Affinity team - "story link" alone without leaving the layout ... wow. The many really great things that are relatively easy and intuitive to use, I need not enumerate (even usable with iPad...).

Nevertheless - especially the publisher really has to catch up with some important features of InDesign, because without these functions a (complete) move will not take place ...

... what I need here 90% daily - in order of priority:
1. Script support (Applescript or at least cross-platform Javascript – a lot of my work would not be efficient without scripts)
2. GREP in paragraph styles (essential for "automatic" micro and macro typography)
3. Override standard kerning with optional "Optical Kerning" (for example, for uniform spacing of numbers in the body text in conjunction with # 2, see above).
4. And yes: footnotes and endnotes AND own table footnotes (footnote text just below the table). Best implemented much better than Adobe has done so rudimentary. So freely definable footnotes with the possibility to determine how the footnote text appears (right column from bottom to top or left column from bottom to top or over all columns or only as many columns as one would like ...)

Edit: just forgot 5. Marginalia, which run automatically according to the rules (left column left, right column right - they do not fit below in the type area, then automatically in the next column, etc. pp). InDesign can not do that - and it would be extremely great if Publisher could do that

What I do not like at first:
The "Search / Replace Palette" ... at first glance, you can not see at all which search options are set without clicking on the menu item. Here you just have to look again how Adobe has solved this with icons that trigger by clicking corresponding functions and are recognizable at a glance including trash can to delete options.

For the first time today, I looked a little closer to the final version of the publisher - maybe I also overlooked something ... however, I noticed the above mentioned one at first or I really missed it.

If I am more in the topic, I will certainly create poster design, flyer, folder, etc. in the near future with Publisher in conjunction with the Designer and Photo - this one requires of course not above mentioned necessarily criticisms.

 

Cheers,

Joerg

Edited June 20, 2019 by Joerg Thoeming

[PaperQueen]

6 hours ago, Dave Harris said:

As ever, it was a choice between releasing the product without that feature, or delaying for however long it took to add it. If we waited until footnotes, database merge and IDML import were done, that could easily be another six months. It turns out that a lot of customers can be productive without those features, so we chose to release now. If you aren't one of those customers, that's unfortunate, but you aren't actually worse off today because it was never feasible to have the features ready for today.

Thanks for the insight, Dave. Like others here, my work is academic and research-based, thus the need for citation footnotes (and a corresponding mobile version of the app, since much of my research is done in repositories, but hey---one thing at a time, right?). 

When foot/end note capability is introduced, I hope they'll function inside table cells too. That critical element is sometimes overlooked by developers. 

Looking forward to future iterations of Publisher....

[Jozef]

This discussion went emotional and a liitle off the merit. 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.

So it is not a matter of "if" but of "when" or "how".  Maybe a temporary workaround using a "branch link" to a text frame located at the footer combined with index finction would be possible ?

[Patrick Connor]

@Joerg Thoeming & @Jozef

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums and for your input to this thread   As you can see Dave Harris, one of the developers most likely to work on these features is posting here directly so thanks for your patience while we implement any new features.

 

[Joerg Thoeming]

2 hours ago, Patrick Connor said:

@Joerg Thoeming & @Jozef

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums and for your input to this thread   As you can see Dave Harris, one of the developers most likely to work on these features is posting here directly so thanks for your patience while we implement any new features.

 

Hi, Patrick,

I just overlooked Daves post, sorry for that - nevertheless, without a roadmap its hardly to know what kind of rabbit is in the box ... but now I noticed something quite unpleasant in all 3 apps …

Color management does not seem to work properly:

While all Adobe apps display 100% cyan correctly on my hardware calibrated monitor (EIZO CG 277), this is clearly not the case with Affinity apps. Since we already have to pay attention to correct coloring in the layout phase, this would almost be a knock-out criterion for us if color (especially in the pre-press area of important boundary areas) could not be displayed correctly in the Affinity apps.

I have of course checked the color settings in the Affinity Apps - everything quite the same like the Adobe Apps with cmyk ISOcoated v2 ...

Please find attached a ZIP with a screenshot - InDesign and Publisher side by side (PNG incl. Monitor color profile - if the PNG is opened on a properly calibrated monitor, for example in Photoshop, the difference is clearly visible). Hopefully, I overlooked something ... 
... if not - should I also post this in the "bug area"? 

I gonna move it to the bugs area ... 

AffinityColorNotCorrect.zip

Edited June 20, 2019 by Joerg Thoeming
Moved to Bugreport