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First impression, bugs and suggestions


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Congratulations to the Affinity team on the release of Affinity Publisher. The Beta is looking really good. Having already tested quite a number of DTP Apps so far, I think the UI is very intuitive and you immediately feel „at home“. It sure has a lot of features I’m going to like. So thanks for sharing this with us, although there are obviously some bugs.

So, besides the bugs others have already reported (e.g. sliders staying on screen) here are my findings so far in no particular order …

Auto-Correct Preferences won’t save
No matter what I do, after restarting Publisher all boxes in Auto-Correct Preferences are ticked on again.

Menu structure changes to Affinity Photo
This happened twice, but I can’t reproduce. So still investigating here.

Zooming out on multi-page documents
Using Cmd+Space+Mouseclick to zoom in works as expected, but zooming out by using Alt+Space+Mouseclick sometimes scrolls the page randomly on multi-page documents. After clicking the Zoom Tool and then the Move Tool again, this weird behaviour seems gone.

No text indent next to text wraps
Text flow along the right side of a text wrapping object does not honour paragraph indent settings (neither first line indent nor left indent).

Stock panel and picture frames
A picture dragged from the stock panel onto a picture frame does not show up. Expanding the picture frame layer then crashes Publisher.

Color picker „boxes“
Even for objects/text that have a defined colour from the swatches panel, clicking any color picker box opens the colour chooser with the „colour“ tab enabled. Making it seem a non-global colour was used for this text/object. I would expect the colour chooser to show either „swatches“ or „colour“ depending on the „type“ of colour used.

Text Context Toolbar - Vertical Alignment Option/Icon
On selecting or creating a text frame the icon always shows the text as being centred vertically. No matter what the vertical alignment really is. Selecting the option „Top Align“ then switches the text to „Centre Vertically“.

Text Styles
Using „Apply … Then Next Styles“ formats selected text only visually as expected, but does not really apply those next styles.

Live-update of master page items
Changing e.g. the paragraph style of a master page item while being on any other page does not live-update the master page item. Only after clicking OK the changes get applied. Well, not really a bug, but it seems inconsistent as everything else seems to live-update when changing parameters.

ICC-Profiles on PDF/X export
ICC-Profiles on exported PDF/X documents seem to get somehow altered or renamed causing Acrobat to complain about non-recommended profiles in preflight. E.g. the output intent „ISO Coated v2 (ECI)“ ends up as „ISO Coated v2 (ECI) (Custom)“ in PDF/X. Affinity Designer has the same behaviour.

PDF/X export fails with some PS-Type 1 fonts
Trying to export a PDF/X with certain PS-Type 1 fonts fails either silently or with some generic error message. Affinity Designer does export those fonts as curves. Which is better than nothing, but not desired.

 

Suggestions

Page columns
Or at least some kind of column creator tool which creates the necessary guides.

Page Origin
I know you can edit the page origin in Publisher, but I would like to have every page (not spread) start at 0/0

Text context menu
This could also contain the „Insert > Page Number etc.“ menu items

Global layers, kind of
In InDesign layers are global across all pages and master pages which is a big help in structuring documents. I, for one, use to keep text, images and basic layout elements on separate layers. Or use layers for multiple language versions of the same document.
Publisher’s concept of layers seems different here. Although I can see the possibilities of this layer concept, it doesn’t fit aforementioned use case.
So it would be nice if you could consider some global, layer-like structuring kind of thing :)

 

I also vote for
- some kind of bleed view/guides
- GREP-Styles … maybe instead of „Initial Words“
- paragraphs spanning columns
- Scripting .. any „language“ is good

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  • Staff

@maxgraphics, 

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums and... Wow, what a great first post! :):)

I will leave your bugs to the QA team who should be in on Monday. Please do look out for a recipe for the illusive Photo menu on mac bug, it's intriguing. 

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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