Tables inside text frames - mandatory

[Jowday]

Major disappointment to see that tables cannot be placed inside text frames and float with the content of these.

[Rylek]

agree, especialy for academic, economics books

[Michael117]

That would be a major showstopper for any technical documentation project.  Especially in an Information Mapped document. you need the tables to be inline in the text frame and anchored to the text above and below the table. 

[MichaelG]

I agree with everyone on this one. I have just tried creating a table in a text frame with Publisher and assumed that when I couldn't make it work, I must be doing something wrong. But no, when I get rid of the text frame, then I can create my table.

Just look at any corporate document, such as an annual report. You will always see lots of text, with tables scattered throughout with the numbers, and also few pie charts and/or graphs. And as another post has identified, theses object must move with the text, and therefore be anchored.

For the record, with InDesign a table behaves like any other character in a text flow. Therefore a table is anchored by default. With PagePlus. a table is first created within a text frame and then it is anchored to the text as a separate step is required. The table therefore becomes an anchored object like a graphic.

Thanks,
Mike.

 

[Ca5pian]

+1 here. Anchoring a table (or any element inside a text frame) is a must. 

In addition being able to specify table head rows (and columns) is important not only for long tables that flow over multiple pages/columns but also with respects for exposing an accessible PDF. Without specifying them any A11y checker will fail the PDF.

[Wilx]

I'm really enjoying Publisher Beta so far.  I was very pleased to see detailed table layout tools.

I would really like tables inside text frames also.  I observe also that it currently seems graphics cannot be placed in text frames either.

I suspect that the ability to put tables and graphics into text frames as in-line with text will be a forthcoming feature.

Serif ... would appreciate you commenting on this.

Thanks,

Mark

[walt.farrell]

45 minutes ago, Wilx said:

I would really like tables inside text frames also.  I observe also that it currently seems graphics cannot be placed in text frames either. 

I suspect that the ability to put tables and graphics into text frames as in-line with text will be a forthcoming feature.

They can be placed into text frames already. But they cannot be anchored to a specific point in the text.

To put a table into a text frame:

1. Create the text frame. Fill with text.
2. Create a table somewhere outside the text frame. Use the Move tool to put it over the text frame where you want it.
3. Adjust Text Wrap settings as appropriate.

A similar approach can be used for images, shapes, etc. Create them, move them on  top of a text frame at an appropriate position, adjust Text Wrap settings.

However, for all of these, if you add more text it will continue to flow around the placed object, and you cannot (at this time) keep the object positioned with any specific piece of text.

[Ca5pian]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

They can be placed into text frames already. But they cannot be anchored to a specific point in the text.

To put a table into a text frame:

1. Create the text frame. Fill with text.
2. Create a table somewhere outside the text frame. Use the Move tool to put it over the text frame where you want it.
3. Adjust Text Wrap settings as appropriate.

A similar approach can be used for images, shapes, etc. Create them, move them on  top of a text frame at an appropriate position, adjust Text Wrap settings.

However, for all of these, if you add more text it will continue to flow around the placed object, and you cannot (at this time) keep the object positioned with any specific piece of text.

While text wrapping is useful, it's not a substitute for anchoring. I'm sure they have a plan for it, I just hope it's sooner rather than later. I'm dreaming for a pro-level tool that is better/more intuitive than InDesign particularly for modern output. Without anchoring ePub isn't possible, and accessible PDFs become harder to achieve.

[JGD]

It seems this has been discussed at least in a different post already. Is it just me, or these requests should be compiled into a wishlist and voted on by the forum goers in order of importance/priority?

By the way, I second the motion. I used this way too much in the past to be able to forego it (can you believe that for a while I didn't know it was possible and I moved objects in InDesign by hand? Aha, fun times… but no, I'm not going back to that  ).

[walt.farrell]

10 hours ago, JGD said:

Is it just me, or these requests should be compiled into a wishlist and voted on by the forum goers in order of importance/priority?

In my experience, voting by forum users doesn't really work well, although it certainly may make the forum users feel good about being heard.

First, a technical issue: Some features must be implemented in a certain order, because they depend on each other (even if the users may not know that) or they impace (or are impacted by) other things being developed.

Next, a practical one: Some forum users are very vocal, but others are very quiet. Some would vote, and some wouldn't. Some probably don't even visit the forums at all. And you might have 10 very vocal users with a particular workflow who desperately want function A, but 100 quiet ones who have a greater need for B.

Finally, it's hard to be sure that the users participating in the beta are representative of all the users who might buy the product later.

[Michael117]

20 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

They can be placed into text frames already. But they cannot be anchored to a specific point in the text.

To put a table into a text frame:

1. Create the text frame. Fill with text.
2. Create a table somewhere outside the text frame. Use the Move tool to put it over the text frame where you want it.
3. Adjust Text Wrap settings as appropriate.

A similar approach can be used for images, shapes, etc. Create them, move them on  top of a text frame at an appropriate position, adjust Text Wrap settings.

However, for all of these, if you add more text it will continue to flow around the placed object, and you cannot (at this time) keep the object positioned with any specific piece of text.

@walt.farrell thanks for your patient explanations throughout the forum.  I think what frustrated me at first was that you had to start the table outside the text frame.  Until you said that it never occurred to me to do that.  I'm used to adding a table from inside the text frame, so I only considered that approach.

[JGD]

On 9/3/2018 at 3:43 PM, walt.farrell said:

In my experience, voting by forum users doesn't really work well, although it certainly may make the forum users feel good about being heard.

First, a technical issue: Some features must be implemented in a certain order, because they depend on each other (even if the users may not know that) or they impace (or are impacted by) other things being developed.

Next, a practical one: Some forum users are very vocal, but others are very quiet. Some would vote, and some wouldn't. Some probably don't even visit the forums at all. And you might have 10 very vocal users with a particular workflow who desperately want function A, but 100 quiet ones who have a greater need for B.

Finally, it's hard to be sure that the users participating in the beta are representative of all the users who might buy the product later.

Yes, those are all valid questions. And then there are users like me, who would be [more] actively participating in the Beta if they only had the time. It's extremely frustrating, as an old-timer beta tester, to not even be able to really put the apps through their paces, but such is life (and I am certainly representative of the people who will buy this thing – and I will, anyway, regardless of how incomplete it is; I am treating Affinity a bit like if it was a Kickstarter project – because a) I already bought the other two, b) I've been using ID professionally for almost 10 years now and c) I don't intend on leaving the DTP market any time soon).

As for feature dependencies… Sure, we don't know exactly which are dependent on which, but we can take some informed guesses. Seeing how Affinity Publisher is based on the same codebase as Affinity Designer, the internal support for variable page sizes (which should be just a different, more specialized implementation of artboards, after all) must be there already in some form, as should be the option of having more than two pages per spread.

It should be just a matter of exposing it via the UI, adding a spine indicator and getting the pages to snap nicely to one another (and that's yet another area in which Serif could one-up Adobe; I've always hated how when you change some page's size, the adjacent ones don't snap neatly to it automatically, forcing you to break your spreads apart and rejoin them…), and while I can appreciate that it might take a while to implement, it should be an absolute priority for a self-proclaimed “professional” DTP app. Otherwise, when it comes specifically to page management, it behaves just like a glorified text editor, am I right?

And the same goes for in-line, anchored objects… No self-respecting designer would start more complex projects in Publisher if that meant they would take even more work to do than even editing a Word document. That would defeat the whole purpose of using a dedicated DTP app, and would make the amateurs/prosumers default to Word/Pages and the professionals default to InDesign/Quark. That's why this thread is so important, and why I'm guessing at least this feature in particular will arrive in time of the 1.7.0 GM release.

[walt.farrell]

2 minutes ago, JGD said:

Seeing how Affinity Publisher is based on the same codebase as Affinity Designer, the internal support for variable page sizes (which should be just a different, more specialized implementation of artboards, after all) must be there already in some form. It should be just a matter of exposing it via the UI and getting the pages to snap nicely to one another

And that (different page sizes within the document) is already possible in the Publisher beta. What is not possible at this time is having a spread which contains more than 2 pages or pages with different sizes. Standalone pages can have different sizes. I'm not sure if a spread can have a size different from other sites.

Maybe you're right, but I have no idea what's involved with the snapping that makes spreads

[JGD]

29 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

And that (different page sizes within the document) is already possible in the Publisher beta. What is not possible at this time is having a spread which contains more than 2 pages or pages with different sizes. Standalone pages can have different sizes. I'm not sure if a spread can have a size different from other sites.

Maybe you're right, but I have no idea what's involved with the snapping that makes spreads

Interesting… Pardon my ignorance, but… How exactly does one go about changing an individual page's size? I looked for it and I couldn't find it anywhere. :\

[Edit] Nevermind, I found it. You just have to edit the spread properties…

In any case, those two features make much more sense in conjunction, as I just explained. Besides that use case I've mentioned, when doing two fold, three-flap flyers that have one of the flaps folded under the cover flap (as opposed to being folded in a Z shape) you have to subtract 1-2 mm off of that inner flap so that it fits.

Just having the option to change spread sizes may allow you to do a book cover, in the same document as the rest of the book, which includes the spine, back cover and inner flaps as a single page, but it's still a PITA because it forces you to make a specific layout all by hand, and fine tune it according to the print shop specifications (just like I had to do waaaaaaaay back in 2010, in InDesign CS4, with the only added – but negligible – advantage of being able to keep it in the same document… I mean, you wouldn't expect Publisher to be four or five versions behind CC 2018 in basic stuff like that, let alone eight full years, now, would you?).

Also, I just found that the weirdest thing happens when customising a spread to have a different page size: I had a portrait A4 document, with a cover page and two full spreads; I customized the first full spread to be landscape A3 sized; then I proceeded to delete one of the A3 pages to see what happened and, guess what, I still had a landscape A3 spread and the last A4 page was gone. I am very curious to see how Publisher would behave if those pages had a Master applied to it and had content in them. This may make sense in some use cases and makes print documents more foolproof (in general, you shouldn't be able to have differently sized facing pages), but it feels woefully unintuitive.

Oh, by the way, now that I think about it, it would be awesome if Publisher actually had a “print project” persona/tool of sorts (maybe a grouping tool in the pages panel?) for books, that let you define how many sheets/booklets you had (perhaps even with a paper colour/texture preview), how they were folded, and in which order they were stitched/bound. That way, you could “freeze” a physical layout, so that it was physically possible to produce and that your content would fit it and not the other way around. That would be great both for newbies and professionals alike, especially in the DIY camp, and would ensure that every project would always be made up of multiples of 4, 6 or 8 pages. That would definitely not be a priority, but it would be a “nice-to-have”, which would give them a leg up over Adobe. I am a pro and, while I don't exactly need such a feature, I would love it.

[walt.farrell]

48 minutes ago, JGD said:

Also, I just found that the weirdest thing happens when customising a spread to have a different page size: I had a portrait A4 document, with a cover page and two full spreads; I customized the first full spread to be landscape A3 sized; then I proceeded to delete one of the A3 pages to see what happened and, guess what, I still had a landscape A3 spread and the last A4 page was gone. I am very curious to see how Publisher would behave if those pages had a Master applied to it and had content in them. This may make sense in some use cases and makes print documents more foolproof (in general, you shouldn't be able to have differently sized facing pages), but it feels woefully unintuitive.

And that sort of complication (assuming it's even intended to work) will have to factor into development plans for new features.

(In a discussion a day or two ago where I mentioned different size pages in the same Publisher document, and one of the requests was for 3 pages in a spread, 2 outer book covers and a spine, one  of the Serif staff wondered what the test scripts would have to be like for that situation. I can only guess that I wouldn't want to be the one testing it   But it brings back memories of one project I was designing at my former employer, where I had a nice design for a new function that the users of our product would like, and our testers vetoed the development of the item because they had no way to test it adequately.)

[MickRose]

Sorry to ask such a basic question but how do I add a page with a different size?

[MickRose]

Different page sizes - just found out how.

[JGD]

On 9/4/2018 at 1:41 AM, walt.farrell said:

And that sort of complication (assuming it's even intended to work) will have to factor into development plans for new features.

(In a discussion a day or two ago where I mentioned different size pages in the same Publisher document, and one of the requests was for 3 pages in a spread, 2 outer book covers and a spine, one  of the Serif staff wondered what the test scripts would have to be like for that situation. I can only guess that I wouldn't want to be the one testing it   But it brings back memories of one project I was designing at my former employer, where I had a nice design for a new function that the users of our product would like, and our testers vetoed the development of the item because they had no way to test it adequately.)

Well, just because something is hard to do, doesn't mean you shouldn't do it… Especially if it's something you must do in order to be able to be taken seriously by your target audience. AFAIK, Affinity is supposed to be geared to the professional print market, and though we do not expect all the same bells and whistles from CC (many of which are, let's face it, bloatware at best), basic features pertaining to the actual physical layout of our print jobs should be a given (hence the insistence by the tester community on the need for bleed previews; however, in the grand scheme of things, these features are actually way more important for more complex projects).

I mean, page and spread management in ID is sometimes unintuitive (especially that stupid habit it has of automatically adding more and more pages – until that magical… what's it, 10-page limit? is reached, and that's something that would also be cool to see being addressed in Publisher, too – whenever the content overflows; maybe there's a way around that, but if there is I still haven't found it), but it gets the job done. It's actually not the most unintuitive of Adobe's apps when it comes to page/artboard management, unlike Ai (oh, how I loathe that stupid Artboard panel and miss FreeHand's page navigator/editor… Artboard management in AD is a bit better than in Ai, but still not as intuitive as in FH, and it has quite a few issues of its own – namely object ownership and out-of-bounds visibility –, as I pointed out in the Designer forum some time ago), and it doesn't look that hard to replicate, either.

The whole “can you give as an ETA” thing is not meant a diss on the Serif devs or anything. I am, of course, fully expecting them to add that functionally eventually (even if it has to be postponed to an also paid 2.0 version), but having an ETA, especially on a feature which is not exactly novel (and, hence, won't really tip off Adobe's or Quark's devs in any meaningful way) but is, at the same time, essential, is of material significance for their customers, as it may affect their future buying decisions. If I were using InDesign CC and intending on switching to Publisher, and realised this or that feature would be completely missing for months, I would start looking for a CS6 copy+license on eBay ASAP so I could set up a dedicated virtual machine in the mean time (even considering the initial investment, it might be worth it in the long run, if anything to be able to convert old files into .PDF so as to import them into Publisher even well after the subscription expired).

[walt.farrell]

16 minutes ago, JGD said:

Well, just because something is hard to do, doesn't mean you shouldn't do it

I never said it shouldn't be done. I said (somewhere upstream) something like "letting the users vote on which things should be done first generally can't work, as there are complications the users don't know about."

18 minutes ago, JGD said:

and that's something that would also be cool to see being addressed in Publisher, too – whenever the content overflows; maybe there's a way around that, but if there is I still haven't found it)

Are you asking for a way to have overflow text automatically flow into additional text frames? If so, try shift-clicking on the "link" triangle on the lower-right edge of the text frame, near the eye icon.

[JGD]

16 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I never said it shouldn't be done. I said (somewhere upstream) something like "letting the users vote on which things should be done first generally can't work, as there are complications the users don't know about."

Oh, sure, I can appreciate how that could become very chaotic and misguided, and quite fast. But perhaps allowing them to rank a pre-compiled list of features and suggest others in the forum like we already do (and the Serif devs would ultimately be the arbiters of which made the cut)  in order of importance would give the devs a bit of insight on at least which would make the app more competitive, ASAP.

Of course, dependencies would have to be taken into account and would always dictate the order by which they were tackled in the end, but that doesn't change the fact that, all things being equal, tool A, being more popular than tool B, could also get priority treatment.

 

16 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Are you asking for a way to have overflow text automatically flow into additional text frames? If so, try shift-clicking on the "link" triangle on the lower-right edge of the text frame, near the eye icon.

Quite the contrary! I wanted to prevent InDesign from doing that and adding page after page near the end of the document (until said limit is reached and I keep getting those stupid pop-up messages warning me of just that).

IIRC, I believe I once came up with an ersatz solution; I broke the link on the last page of the main section of my document, and linked it instead to a dummy text box outside of the master (which would just show the overflow [+] sign, instead of, you know, actually flowing to a new page). There's probably a proper, more elegant way to turn that off, but my jury rig achieved the desired result anyway.

In any case, don't worry too much about that. This is a Serif forum, after all, and we're all itching to ditch InDesign rather than keep dealing with its quirks.  

[Old Bruce]

On 8/31/2018 at 4:04 PM, Wafer said:

Major disappointment to see that tables cannot be placed inside text frames and float with the content of these.

This seems to have wandered off into the tall grass, I just want to say that I would want this (tables) and the ability to anchor other elements to specific places in the text. Not worth buying without it.

I will also say I am so far impressed with the beta's limited set of tools.

[Jowday]

8 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

This seems to have wandered off into the tall grass, I just want to say that I would want this (tables) and the ability to anchor other elements to specific places in the text. Not worth buying without it.

Exactly. TOC possible but not this?

[Foomandoonian]

Latecomer to this thread and just wanted to give my +1 for this necessary feature.