Adobe FrameMaker / Corel Ventura Publisher

[Wtin]

I use Corel Ventura Publisher 10 daily, and from time to time, I also use Adobe FrameMaker 2019.  Most of my documents are short, but some are long. I like these programs because I am able to import the style sheet (for Ventura) and format (for FrameMaker). 

I bought this program (before the company became Affinity), and found it unusable because it won't import any text and convert open quotes and close quotes properly. They stayed as straight quotes. Can it do that now?  There were extra steps that had to be done. I think someone suggested importing it to Open Office, and exporting it. But why call itself a DTP when it can't do something like that? 

One thing about Ventura that FrameMaker can't do is hanging punctuation. (I realize that Adobe InDesign can do that.) 

My question is when a new document is started, both Ventura and FrameMaker gives me a blank page and I can start composing my document (by typing, or importing) right away. I tried Adobe InDesign and could not handle having the draw the frame (for the text to go in), and it just irked me that when the text spills to the second page, I have to add more frame - or as I remember, create a master page (I think that was it was called.) 

This was why I could not learn to use Scribus either. 

So is there a default setting with AP that starts a blank page with the master page already ready-to-go? 

Thanks! 

 

[Seneca]

The short answer is no.
The slightly longer answer is that this may change in the future.

Affinity Publisher is still in early Beta program.

[Wtin]

No automatic open and close quotes conversion makes it unusable. Even lowly Word (which I don't use) can do that. 

I can live with no master page (and I will learn to create one) and even no hanging punctuation, but not being able to turn a straight quote (or apostrophe) into a curly one, let me put it this way, makes no sense for a program that claims to be a DTP. 

[MikeW]

If quote marks are not in the auto correct, you can add them. As for importing text, if they are curly quotes, they come in.

It has hanging punctuation. Make sure your paragraph style is using it.

This is beta software that will have changes before and following its release. 

[Wtin]

MikeW: Thank you. I need to look into it. 

I hope I did not come down too hard - having been a Corel beta tester (for Corel Draw and Corel Ventura Publisher), it was good to see that suggestions get put into the actual final program. 

 

[MikeW]

No worries, Wtin.

I don't use CVP10 every day. Up until a half dozen years ago I did. Nowadays I use it mostly in conjunction with ID and QXP to move manuals and other work into them. 

I gave up long ago hoping someone would borrow it's best features like the base frame you mentioned, side by side paragraphs and linked text files like it did, etc.

Such is life.

[Wtin]

I run Ventura with (this desktop) Windows 10 64 bit with 32 G of RAM. One major thing it can't do is export to PDF-the Open Type and Postscript fonts won't export. Corel PDF Fusion used to do it, but according to Adobe, a bug in Windows 10 prevents that. So I downloaded a copy of Oracle Virtual Box, and dug up my old copy of Windows 2000, and install Ventura (and all the fonts I have) on it. Now I edit in Ventura Windows 10, and export to PDF with Ventura Windows 2000! 

I also found that when I was doing indexing, Ventura Windows 10 doesn't sort them correctly. I had to run it with Windows XP or Windows 2000.  Very weird Windows "bug". 

I wrote and begged Corel to continue to upgrade it. They put in so much energy into WordPerfect. Every freaking year it comes out with a new one, and I can't figure out what more it can do. (I used to do WP 5.1 for DOS but hated it. Preferred WordStar. 

I suggested that Corel Draw borrows Ventura's feature when it comes to something more than one freaking page long.. but it was ignored. 

I love it's style sheet. And paragraph tagging. So much easier to use than FrameMaker. 

[af-user]

On 9/3/2018 at 11:17 PM, Wtin said:

So is there a default setting with AP that starts a blank page with the master page already ready-to-go?

 

Just as a Workaround, what you can do is:

• Create a new Shortcut to publisher.exe (on your Desktop for example)
• append the path to the template document (wrapped in quotes if path contains spaces)

Example:

"C:\Program Files\Affinity\Publisher Public Beta\Publisher.exe" "D:\Affinity Documents\Template1_Simple.afpub"

(funny thing, this reproducibly instantly crashes my Virtual Maschine in VMware Workstation 12, some GPU SVGA crash, and yes I know, totally unsupported as VM)