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What is the target market for Affinity Publisher? Is it intended for professional typesetters or only enthusiastic hobbyists? If the former at what stage do you intend to offer multiline composition? This was the key feature that won me over from QuarkXPress 4.1 to InDesign from the day version 1.0 was released in the UK. And I suspect its continuing omission from XPress is central to Quark's failure to win back disgruntled users of InDesign, despite the current upgrade offer (upgrade to XPress 2015 via Xpress 10 for £299 from XPress 3 or later).

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We wil not have multiline composition for 1.0. It will be aimed at companies like ourselves that produce a lot of marketing material, retail box design, electronic publications etc. We don't produce very long documents that are predominantly text but we do need to produce high quality press ready output.

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I was really hoping that Affinity would hire James Felici to guide them on the typesetting aspects of Publisher. Or at least include most everything he suggests in his book The Complete Manual of Typography. If Affinity would do something like this, I think they would do to Adobe in two or three years what Adobe did to Quark when they got to CS3. We can only hope.

 

Keep up your GREAT work, Affinity.

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Another MUST read for typography is The Elements of Typographic Style... I actually think that this is a coveted Killer Feature Affinity can deliver to the design community. Let me explain:

 

Delivering an intelligent software and UI model to apply what are the timeless principles of proper/classic typography seamlessly to users — not the typographic compromises imposed by obsolete technologies like typewriters, word processors, and others— will essentially leapfrog Adobe in this area of functionality. I think the granularity offered by Adobe is great, but 80% of the time, 90% of users want to simply lay out great looking type. In order to do this, there are some inter-relationships which must be honored and dynamically adjusted by the user and/or the software's logic for intelligently typesetting copy. This AI typesetting engine can offer an order of magnitude better functionality, and really is not that hard to set up. The principles are open source, it's just a matter of applying a set of rules and links between font, character and paragraph attributes.

 

I would be more than happy to help the Affinity team develop this if they wanted any ideas...

2021 16” Macbook Pro w/ M1 Max 10c cpu /24c gpu, 32 GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Ventura 13.6

2018 11" iPad Pro w/ A12X cpu/gpu, 256 GB, iPadOS 17

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Exactly Dale... AI = artificial intelligence, or in Affinity parlance, the Typesetting Assistant?

 

Am presuming Artificial Intelligence here rather than Adobe Illustrator :)

2021 16” Macbook Pro w/ M1 Max 10c cpu /24c gpu, 32 GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Ventura 13.6

2018 11" iPad Pro w/ A12X cpu/gpu, 256 GB, iPadOS 17

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Hi everybody,

interesting thread ... personally I *hope* that Affinity Publisher will develop into a full-fledged desktop publishing application providing not only smart typographic options, but giving us the means to produce long structured documents as well ... and I am talking about multiline composition, footnotes, endnotes, a *fast* cross-references system, smart options for structured indices, intelligent pagination features and so on ... I am well aware that Indesign has added cross-reference support only in version 4 or so (and everyone who has ever had the pleasure of preparing scientific texts for print will know what missing this feature means for a typographer), but I hope we won’t have to wait this long in the development of Publisher, before we get the options I mentioned ... I hope these are planned at all ...  :huh:

Before considering features like the ones Ronny was talking about (no offense, Ronny: I would *love* to see them in Publisher as well), I would rather suggest thinking about those *bread and butter* features needed for serious book typography ... 

Best, Alex  :)

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Well yeah Alex, of course Affinity has to address the basics of publishing too, but IMHO, there needs to be some genuinely new features or ways of doing things in order to grab people's attention. Just making a clone for cheaper is ok, its what built modern China, but it's not very innovative... I think the right balance of feature party + innovation is what will pique designer's interest, and of the two, feature parity is not really a benefit, more like it's expected, if you're going to call yourself "professional"...

 

So I agree, we need "bread and butter" but that's not gonna be enough to make Affinity successful... just my 2 cents...

 

 

 

Hi everybody,

 

interesting thread ... personally I *hope* that Affinity Publisher will develop into a full-fledged desktop publishing application providing not only smart typographic options, but giving us the means to produce long structured documents as well ... and I am talking about multiline composition, footnotes, endnotes, a *fast* cross-references system, smart options for structured indices, intelligent pagination features and so on ... I am well aware that Indesign has added cross-reference support only in version 4 or so (and everyone who has ever had the pleasure of preparing scientific texts for print will know what missing this feature means for a typographer), but I hope we won’t have to wait this long in the development of Publisher, before we get the options I mentioned ... I hope these are planned at all ...  :huh:

 

Before considering features like the ones Ronny was talking about (no offense, Ronny: I would *love* to see them in Publisher as well), I would rather suggest thinking about those *bread and butter* features needed for serious book typography ... 

 

Best, Alex  :)

2021 16” Macbook Pro w/ M1 Max 10c cpu /24c gpu, 32 GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Ventura 13.6

2018 11" iPad Pro w/ A12X cpu/gpu, 256 GB, iPadOS 17

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Of course, Ronny, you are right ...  :)

But as you will know, even in the area of so-called ‘bread and butter’ features there’s ample room for improvement. Just to provide a single example: When you use the cross-references system of the ‘industry standard’ publishing app and create x-refs that span from one document to another, the editing process becomes inbearably slow, as long as you decide not to open all of the documents implied in the referencing process ... Of course, I don’t know if that has become better in recent versions of the app ... I am still stuck with the ‘prepaid’ one ...  ;)

But nevertheless, in my opinion a smart and fast cross references engine would be a huge selling point for Affinity Publisher, even if this is a feature that falls into the ‘bread and butter’ category ...

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  • 4 months later...

We wil not have multiline composition for 1.0. It will be aimed at companies like ourselves that produce a lot of marketing material, retail box design, electronic publications etc. We don't produce very long documents that are predominantly text but we do need to produce high quality press ready output.

 

Ah.

 

Does that mean Publisher won't be a good fit for laying out longer documents? 

 

I'm thinking novels mainly (around 700 pages!).

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What do you currently use to produce your novels and what is it you don't like about it?

 

I use Pages at the moment, and it's great for the stuff I do with it. The only real problem is that it can't do facing pages – which is a real pain.

 

I tried Word, and I found it quite slow and hard to navigate, especially when the books get really long. I also find that I can change a few words here and there, and the whole layout can get thrown off kilter.

 

. . . and answering posts on a Saturday. Very impressive!

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I use Pages at the moment, and it's great for the stuff I do with it. The only real problem is that it can't do facing pages – which is a real pain.

 

I tried Word, and I found it quite slow and hard to navigate, especially when the books get really long. I also find that I can change a few words here and there, and the whole layout can get thrown off kilter.

 

. . . and answering posts on a Saturday. Very impressive!

 

If you haven't yet, I would check out Scrivener or Ulysses. Scrivener has more features, but Ulysses is nicer to use.

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Question: as you state that Publisher will not be capable of doing long documents (at least, not in the first iteration), will there then be an option to compile a series of smaller documents into a collection (a la InDesign book function)?

 

ThIs might be an option to allow for longer documents while not going for an Adobe Filemaker type of long document.

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I doubt there will be any limit to the number of pages; it's just unlikely to have features targeted at long documents. Compiling several small documents into a book is something we did with BookPlus, and I doubt we'd want to do it again. It's a bit clunky and doesn't really gain much.

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If you haven't yet, I would check out Scrivener or Ulysses. Scrivener has more features, but Ulysses is nicer to use.

 

Yes, I use them both (Scrivener for novels, Ulysses for short stories). Both are great, but layout isn't really their strong suit. They do a very good job, but sometimes you need a little more precision.

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Hi All,

 

I'm still using Adobe FrameMaker on a PC which, incidentally, is the one application preventing me switching to Mac completely.

 

So far I have found nothing else quite hits the spot for producing reasonably long technical documents which have lists, tables and illustrations or photos.

 

The auto numbering is a bit tricky to learn but once you understand it, it is so versatile. Tables of Contents are a cinch as are cross-references and external links. Building multi chapter documents is easy and features like conditional text are a real show stealer when producing documents for different products which share a similar "parent".

 

I've tried Quark, InDesign, Scribus, LibreOffice, even Word (!) and quite a few more but I always come back to FrameMaker. 

 

Here's hoping Affinity Publisher can provide the 3rd "must have" application to complete the trio!

 

Cheers

Brian

 

 

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  • 3 years later...

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