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On 1/23/2021 at 1:56 PM, walt.farrell said:

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

Sounds like you need Designer, not Publisher. The applications are suited for different purposes, and for your purpose you need Designer's Export Persona.

I want to use Publisher for everything, I don't need a designer, I like Publisher better, everything is much more organized.

80% of my time I work for printing. For my Publisher it is better: master pages, page display, frames, tables, pagination, ... it's the closest thing to Quark xpress.

To do branding with the forms, Boolean tools and the typography that Publisher offers I have plenty.

For web design it also seems perfect, it makes it easy and agile. The only thing I am missing is some way to export. Ideally, so as not to intoxicate the interface, it would be to name the layer as: logo.jpg70 (jpg and 70% quality).

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11 minutes ago, oscarlosan said:

For web design it also seems perfect, it makes it easy and agile. The only thing I am missing is some way to export. Ideally, so as not to intoxicate the interface, it would be to name the layer as: logo.jpg70 (jpg and 70% quality).

That's a function you can easily do in the Designer application, using the Export Persona, which does not exist in Publisher.

If you don't own it already, this would be an ideal time to try Designer as you can get a 90-day free trial, and if you want to buy it there's a 50% sale going on right now.

-- 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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1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

That's a function you can easily do in the Designer application, using the Export Persona, which does not exist in Publisher.

If you don't own it already, this would be an ideal time to try Designer as you can get a 90-day free trial, and if you want to buy it there's a 50% sale going on right now.

purchase another tool just to export. Designer had already tried it but for logos, posters, cards, books and the web I really like Publisher. I will export the web page and define assets from Quark Xpress or Photoshop. Hopefully they will implement it in the future, I like all-in-one tools and Publisher is at 98%. Good for this great tool.

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On 1/24/2021 at 2:03 AM, PaulEC said:

I don't know much about web design / html myself, but going on what I see (and on the websites that my wife designs), don't you really need specialist software (or to write code yourself), rather than just some sort of export function from an app that isn't really designed for it?

You are absolutely correct. I do both web programming and layout for print as part of my work. I am a true expert in neither since my time is divided, but I do these things "professionally" (in the literal definition of the word), so with one foot in each discipline, it is my firm conviction that web design and fixed-document layout are so vastly different that they are entirely separate disciplines. I don't believe Publisher could ever reach the phase where it could be truly useful for web "layout." In fact, web layout via a WYSIWYG app really just doesn't work very well.

That said, I would be very interested if Publisher could export a story as a limitted HTML tagged text to reuse in web. This would not be whole page layout, but it would be great if we could set up text styles to have HTML export attributes, where you could set which style equals which element, and whether or not to add classes to it. I think the easiest solution would just be to select text in a story (often Select All) and "copy as HTML," which would then be raw text and only such HTML as was defined in the text styles without attempting to be rich text. Generally the formatting would be defined in the site CSS, so including full formatting would be more harm than help. InDesign has HTML export, but I almost never use it because it attempts to do full-page layout, and that seems to be fairly worthless. I would have to spend so much time stripping out all the things that it adds that it is almost always easier to just copy raw text and reapply formatting for web. 

 

Edited by garrettm30
Fixed a couple typos
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5 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

I don't believe Publisher could every reach the phase where it could be truly useful for web "layout." In fact, web layout via a WYIWYG app really just doesn't work very well.

^ This.

I started with web design back in 2000 using Adobe PageMill (yuk! anybody old enough to remember?) that came bundled with something that I bought (the iMac G3?), after having been working in DTP for 10 years with Aldus PageMaker and QuarkXPress 3.x.
It was a p.i.t.a.

So I tried a plethora of affordable WYSIWYG webdesign apps, like Flux, iWeb, Forgot-its-name, Forgot-its-name-as-well, you name it.
It was a p.i.t.a.

Eventually there was the Espresso.app v1.x on sale within an attractive MacUpdate 10-apps bundle.
So I've learned how to code clean HTML and CSS myself.
I've never looked back.
I haven't bought any upgrade for Espresso though, and since the old version crashes on Catalina, meanwhile I've switched to BBEdit instead.

Nowadays I'm mostly doing webdesign via WordPress, mostly applying the free version of the Customify theme which is – as the name says – highly customizable. By injecting hundreds of lines of custom CSS I can make it look almost whatever I want. (Shameless plug: loukash.com)

5 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

I think the easiest solution would just be to select text in a story (often Select All) and "copy as HTML," which would then be raw text and only such HTML as was defined in the text styles without attempting to be rich text.

On Mac:

  1. Copy the formated text
  2. Paste it into a rich text TextEdit document
  3. Save as HTML

Can be partially automated via Automator, AppleScript, Folder Actions, Keyboard Maestro macros, etc.

~~~

Or use one of those:
duckduckgo.com/?q=convert+pdf+to+html

MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2

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17 minutes ago, loukash said:

^ This.

I started with web design back in 2000 using Adobe PageMill (yuk! anybody old enough to remember?) that came bundled with something that I bought (the iMac G3?), after having been working in DTP for 10 years with Aldus PageMaker and QuarkXPress 3.x.
It was a p.i.t.a.

So I tried a plethora of affordable WYSIWYG webdesign apps, like Flux, iWeb, Forgot-its-name, Forgot-its-name-as-well, you name it.
It was a p.i.t.a.

Eventually there was the Espresso.app v1.x on sale within an attractive MacUpdate 10-apps bundle.
So I've learned how to code clean HTML and CSS myself.
I've never looked back.
I haven't bought any upgrade for Espresso though, and since the old version crashes on Catalina, meanwhile I've switched to BBEdit instead.

Nowadays I'm mostly doing webdesign via WordPress, mostly applying the free version of the Customify theme which is – as the name says – highly customizable. By injecting hundreds of lines of custom CSS I can make it look almost whatever I want. (Shameless plug: loukash.com)

On Mac:

  1. Copy the formated text
  2. Paste it into a rich text TextEdit document
  3. Save as HTML

Can be partially automated via Automator, AppleScript, Folder Actions, Keyboard Maestro macros, etc.

~~~

Or use one of those:
duckduckgo.com/?q=convert+pdf+to+html

Web designs are made in design programs (illustrator, designer, publisher, photoshop, ...). After that design, that design is passed with html and css (with responsive frameworks such as bootstrap) in a code editor. Finally, if you want to manage the content with a CMS like Drupal, Wordprees or any other, you go to a compatible template. The beginning is always in a design program and in this phase we need to pass the logo and other images (slider, product images, author's photo, ...) in various resolutions to place them according to the mobile-first methodology.

For example, when you buy a web template for wordpress, 80% include a psd or ai file. With this design you can replace the example images with images of your company or product. It also has the slices or export by layers configured. The same goes for prestashop or woocomerce templates.

Edited by oscarlosan
amplie
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2 minutes ago, oscarlosan said:

Web designs are made in design programs

Sure. you can do mockups. Been there done that with Illustrator or InDesign, too. Then I sent my mockups to the web developer who would then write the corresponding code to make it look the way I designed it.

5 minutes ago, oscarlosan said:

The beginning is always in a design program and in this phase we need to pass the logo and other images (slider, product images, author's photo, ...) in various resolutions to place them according to the mobile-first methodology.

That's what you can already do with Designer, can't you? (I haven't explored these Designer options in detail myself yet, so I sincerely don't now all the quirks, caveats, etc.)

MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2

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39 minutes ago, loukash said:

Sure. you can do mockups. Been there done that with Illustrator or InDesign, too. Then I sent my mockups to the web developer who would then write the corresponding code to make it look the way I designed it.

That's what you can already do with Designer, can't you? (I haven't explored these Designer options in detail myself yet, so I sincerely don't now all the quirks, caveats, etc.)

Yes, correct, but also: affinity photo, illustrator, photoshop, Quark xpress, indesign (html), ... they all have some export method for the web.

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1 minute ago, oscarlosan said:

they all have some export method for the web.

Publisher is a page layout tool.
That means its primary goal is either to print to paper or to print to PDF.
Those pages will always have an absolute dimension.

Wheras web design is a completely different medium. A web page doesn't have an absolute size whatsoever. Everything is relative to the viewport.

Vive la différence.

As I have noted above, there are several easy ways to get your content out of Publisher as HTML using only a few interim steps.
I, for one, seriously don't see any need to bloat Publisher any further with a half-baked "HTML Export" that would suck anyway.

And to create mockups, Affinity Designer is the tool.

MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2

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28 minutes ago, loukash said:

As I have noted above, there are several easy ways to get your content out of Publisher as HTML using only a few interim steps.
I, for one, seriously don't see any need to bloat Publisher any further with a half-baked "HTML Export" that would suck anyway.

I am in total agreement with you that any kind of HTML export for layout or formatting would be of limited value. Certainly it would not be any good for a person who does not know HTML to simply save as HTML and have a web-ready file. I also don't see how HTML export would be of any help in web mockups.

However, I do think there is some really great potential for exporting text with markup to be incorporated into various projects such as the web. Let me see if I can illustrate, because I believe this could be a real power feature by someone who would know how to use it. To start my example, consider a scenario that I think is rather common: taking a printed publication and making an online version on a WordPress install. (In any case, this is something I do a lot: once our printed publication is done, I then have to move it over to an online version.)

So here is my sample dummy article in its Publisher document that I want to move over to my hypothetical WordPress install.

2085447896_ScreenShot2021-01-25at5_08_07PM.png.eecf061e877a81a13d7ae12dafd6c224.png

I set up that article using text styles. In this simple example, I have two paragraph styles, heading and body, and one character style, italic. Using text styles effectively means I have already tagged the different elements of the text for the sake of the printed publication. Since that work is already done, it would be great if those semantic elements could be exported in a way that they could be used for a different medium. The formatting and layout could be—and usually is—completely different on the web, but there would still be the equivalent to a heading, body, etc.

So imagine now that if each text style had new attributes in the Text Style editor for HTML Export (as InDesign does have something similar). In that segment, you could define what each piece of text gets exported as. No need for Serif to worry about translating the format to HTML. Just let us define the element and the class. In our example above, I would set up my heading style as <h1>, my body style as <p> and my character style as <span class='italic'> (just to illustrate exporting classes to match whatever the existing stylesheets might use in the website; obviously here I could have just used <em> of course).

Now, I would select-all on the story in Publisher, then use my hypothetical "Copy as HTML," which would copy the raw text only with whatever markup I defined in the text styles, with no extra formatting. It would result in this:

<h1>Heading</h1>
<p>Paragraph text, including <span class='italic'>a segment of italics.</span></p>

Nice and clean. So clean, in fact, that I could drop that directly into the raw text editor in WordPress and it would work as is, following the website stylesheets exactly. With such a feature, I would spend some careful time setting up all my Publisher templates where my text styles are prepared for export in a way that corresponds to the needs of our sites.

Your idea of copying rich text, pasting into TextEdit, and exporting as HTML is an interesting idea, but it unfortunately is not much help, as it exports worse than InDesign. Here are the results for my same sample article:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css">
  <title></title>
  <meta name="Generator" content="Cocoa HTML Writer">
  <meta name="CocoaVersion" content="1671.6">
  <style type="text/css">
    p.p1 {margin: 7.1px 0.0px 0.0px 11.3px; text-align: center; font: 11.0px Georgia}
    p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 11.3px; font: 11.0px Georgia}
  </style>
</head>
<body>
<p class="p1"><b>Heading</b></p>
<p class="p2">Paragraph text, including <i>a segment of italics</i>.</p>
</body>
</html>

It is not nearly so clean. Of course, I could strip all out but the only part I would need:

<p class="p1"><b>Heading</b></p>
<p class="p2">Paragraph text, including <i>a segment of italics</i>.</p>

But here, I have effectively lost the benefit of all of my tagging. TextEdit simply assigned sequential classes of like formatting as p1p2, etc. I would have to write a script to translate, for example <p class="p1"><b> to <h1>, but each article would have different formatting, and the order of the different kinds of elements would be different from one article to the next, so there is no way I could guarantee that .p2 is always body text. In one article, it could be a subheading. Writing a script to take care of all the cases would not really be practical unless I were working on a really long text where coding time would be less than time to do it manually.

So in this case, working with the export would take me more time to work with than simply copying the text as rich text, pasting into the WordPress visual text editor, and then manually reformatting the article bit by bit using the TinyMCE interface in the cases where the formatting did not transfer as needed. In fact, this is what I do presently. It might be just twenty minutes of work per article, but in the scenario I am suggesting, once I have my text styles appropriately defined in my templates, it would be as simple as a copy and paste and no more.

I hope that makes the case that some kind of HTML or XML markup for export could be of value. However, I am not suggesting that this would have any kind of near-term priority. This would surely be the kind of thing to be added in a later paid update, certainly as we still have a lot of layout features that most people would want to see first.

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26 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

XML markup for export

And import!
I'm in fact eagerly waiting for this, for sure!

MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2

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9 hours ago, loukash said:

Publisher is a page layout tool.
That means its primary goal is either to print to paper or to print to PDF.
Those pages will always have an absolute dimension.

Wheras web design is a completely different medium. A web page doesn't have an absolute size whatsoever. Everything is relative to the viewport.

Vive la différence.

As I have noted above, there are several easy ways to get your content out of Publisher as HTML using only a few interim steps.
I, for one, seriously don't see any need to bloat Publisher any further with a half-baked "HTML Export" that would suck anyway.

And to create mockups, Affinity Designer is the tool.

for that I already have adobe xd which is much better than Designer. The only thing I need from Publisher is that it can export the images to the size that I define in the frames and also other graphics. Some kind of automation that puts them in a folder. The html I would not use. If you say that it does not work for web because there is File / new / web (that they eliminate it), in fact I bought Publisher when I saw that menu and also because of the boolean operations (which is the only thing I used in Designer).

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4 hours ago, oscarlosan said:

The only thing I need from Publisher is that it can export the images to the size that I define in the frames and also other graphics.

  1. Create custom page(s) of the size of each image
  2. File > Export… > [format] > Pages: [page number(s)]

If all images are the same size, stack them all on one page and simply disable the top image one by one to export the next in the stack.

4 hours ago, oscarlosan said:

Some kind of automation that puts them in a folder.

On Mac: keyboardmaestro.com and in the macros use AppleScript's System Events to talk to Publisher since it doesn't speak AppleScript. Which is, frankly, a bummer!

Yes, a "workaround".
Better get used to this basic concept if you want to get actual work done now.
The whole life ain't nuthin' but a "workaround" because my Utopia just doesn't wanna materialize. Sigh… :(

5 hours ago, oscarlosan said:

there is File / new / web

That's the same module for the whole suite, so it's likely they have just kinda "recycled" it for Publisher. :)
That said, of course you can lay out pages and brochures sized for "web" and export them in one of the available formats. No contradiction in there.

5 hours ago, oscarlosan said:

in fact I bought Publisher when I saw that menu and also because of the boolean operations (which is the only thing I used in Designer).

Fair enough.

Now if only boolean operations would actually work. Sigh… :(

MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2

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  • 5 weeks later...

Export html as table tag with slice images may be ok to just display in browsers...
But it's not usable for real websites at all since modern web needs complex html5+css codes for responsive layout.
So should not expect it to be useful for websites.

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2 minutes ago, ashf said:

Exportar html como etiqueta de tabla con imágenes de sector puede estar bien para simplemente mostrar en los navegadores...
Pero no es utilizable para sitios web reales en absoluto, ya que la web moderna necesita códigos html5 + css complejos para el diseño responsivo.
Por lo tanto, no debe esperar que sea útil para los sitios web.

Export images from frames. Also in shapes export as svg.
All super useful. We already know how to build a website, technically I have been doing it for 20 years.
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El 3/28/2020 a la 1:56 PM, walt.farrell dijo:

Por lo general, Serif no responde a las solicitudes de características; sólo los leen y los tienen en cuenta en su planificación.

Sin embargo, hasta ahora han dicho que Publisher es para libros, y no han mostrado ninguna inclinación a implementar la exportación HTML u otras funciones de diseño web en el conjunto affinity de productos. Así que aunque puede llegar algún día, dudo que sea en los próximos años.

image.thumb.png.4818e4ac412934c152fc62c6e8930b55.png

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10 hours ago, ashf said:

Exportar html como etiqueta de tabla con imágenes de sector puede estar bien para simplemente mostrar en los navegadores...
Pero no es utilizable para sitios web reales en absoluto, ya que la web moderna necesita códigos html5 + css complejos para el diseño responsivo.
Por lo tanto, no debe esperar que sea útil para los sitios web.


I just want the exported jpg, png, svg files in one folder. Optimized for each different screens @ 2, .... No html. Only assets.

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4 hours ago, oscarlosan said:


I just want the exported jpg, png, svg files in one folder. Optimized for each different screens @ 2, .... No html. Only assets.

For that function it would be more appropriate to use the Affinity Designer application, not Publisher.

-- 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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19 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

For that function it would be more appropriate to use the Affinity Designer application, not Publisher.

But designer does not have master pages or photo frames. Publisher is more productive. "design a web" Who is going to want to design a web in plublisher? If we don't have these options, we can't send the assets to the developer. If it's just for books remove that text, it's confusing.

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35 minutes ago, oscarlosan said:

But designer does not have master pages or photo frames. Publisher is more productive. "design a web" Who is going to want to design a web in plublisher? If we don't have these options, we can't send the assets to the developer. If it's just for books remove that text, it's confusing.

The Affinity Store page did not say that Publisher could design a web page. It said you could design a mockup of a web page. That would be a visual display that looks like a web page, but does not actually operate.

For what you described, wanting to export JPG and PNG and SVG files, for different screen sizes, you want Designer and perhaps more importantly its Export Persona, which Publisher does not have.

Publisher is best for books, or for designs that require only the main Personas (Designer Persona, Photo Persona) from the other two applications when you own them.

-- 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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