Must-have-suggestions

[StevenSchindel]

Hello Affinity People,

good job so far. But there are some very essential things that designers need (in order to get them away from Indesign):

- There must be am option to put more than 2 pages together as facing pages. I often have brochures with a folded page at the end of the brochure. Yes I can do this with a workaround using spreadsizes but this is very uncomfortable when exporting single pages (I have to cut them by hand).

- It is essential to have inline graphics within a text. One example: I have a lot of logos to put in a very long dokument with company portaits. Then you have to insert another portrait at the beginning. Text will flow but te logos have to be placed by hand. This can drive you crazy without inline graphics.

- And of course: visible lines around the page and the bleed area an yes a quick preview where all lines and grids are invisible.

Go on. You're on the right way.

Regards, Steven

[Interior Book Design]

21 minutes ago, StevenSchindel said:

- And of course: visible lines around the page and the bleed area an yes a quick preview where all lines and grids are invisible.

I really like InDesign's preview, especially their full screen mode.This, I use all the time. QuarkXPress lacks such a feature.

However, Publisher is somewhat better than QuarkXPress, in the Windows version, just press Ctrl+Shift +W, than Ctrl+0 to zoom and center the spread.

[EddCh]

3 hours ago, StevenSchindel said:

- There must be am option to put more than 2 pages together as facing pages. I often have brochures with a folded page at the end of the brochure. Yes I can do this with a workaround using spreadsizes but this is very uncomfortable when exporting single pages (I have to cut them by hand).

YES!!! I love QuarkXpress' ability to have more than two pages together which is a feature I use all the time when designing documents with intermittent fold out pages or roll fold literature.

[edesigned]

I can agree with this. A three- or fourfold i make regulary.

[JGD]

Steven, you should change the thread name (if you still can) to include these two features in a more visible fashion, or at least add them as keywords; I was about to post something similar and I had to scour the forum and take a leap of faith just to find your thread.

To all the Serif devs out there in the forum, pay attention as they are absolutely essential.

I used both of them for the same client, every year. Without them I just couldn't use Publisher for those projects, I'm afraid. By the way, while you're at it, please come up with a better name than “Allow document pages to shuffle”; that has got to be the stupidest, most unintuitive name in the entire history of DTP software.  By the way, I must say I don't really like the default, continuous page view instead of the more sensible and intuitive spreads-aligned-along-the-spine view; the default should be the latter, and if you think about it, it's also the only view in which that option would be usable (otherwise, you would have to add centre/spine lines to each and every separate spread, don't you think? That would make it look a bit cluttered, if you ask me). In fact, if you got rid of the continuous option altogether, I don't think many people would shed a tear (it would probably be useful only for vertical spreads, I'm guessing, and perhaps you could even have a horizontal mode for the pages panel, or just allow it to stretch infinitely along the horizontal axis). While I'm at it, the maximum page thumbnail size is still a bit too small for my taste (I'm using a 27'' iMac, plus an external screen where I have all my panels, so space is definitely not an issue), and perhaps you could have a continuous size/zoom slider instead of discrete thumbnail sizes?

I will also add to them another big one, which is directly related to the first: variable page sizes. I used to use this one a lot for book covers, for a different client (and even once at the company I worked at, now that I think of it), as they allowed me not only to do the cover flaps as separate pages (which would also allow for, say, easily exporting just the book cover to send to the author, to upload it to a website or social media, or whatever), but also to customize the book spine width as per the specifications the print works sent me usually very late in the production cycle (I was working on a collection, and the spines would all look the same but their widths would obviously vary unpredictably from one volume to the next).

I will finish my post with the inevitable question, because these three features are really that important: do you guys have any ETA on them? Can we expect them by the 1.7.0 GM MAS/Serif Store release? Or will they come out further down the line? Because there's really no way around them (and no, using Designer for some of those projects instead is not an option, as it starts getting reaaaaally sloooooow when you get into ersatz DTP territory; also, forcing people who may want to do an entire, more complex book to buy Designer just to be able to do the cover – especially if the artwork is done by someone else – or to have to deal with separate files – a cumbersome workflow that used to be the norm until a few years ago, when Adobe fixed it by adding that feature to InDesign – isn't very nice, either).