Essentials for the road map

[captain_slocum]

I've written about the following three requests individually but thought it would be useful to pull them together in one post. I have been using DTP professionally for many years and have recently spent quite a lot of time using this beta in a "real world" situation - ie trying to reproduce one of the magazines I currently produce in InDesign. As others have noted, the depth and amount of features in this beta is impressive. However, I feel APublisher needs to be clear about what it is. As it stands, it is a competent and well featured poster or 2 or 3 page newsletter app. It could be an InDesign beater, but to do that, Affinity need to listen to seasoned designers and publishers who know what they are talking about, and then publish a road map for the near future. Here are three things I have identified so far that APublisher does not have,  but that in my opinion no serious publisher of printed material could live without:

• Inline graphics and tables. (A curious and fatal omission this - what were they thinking of?)
• GREP customisable presets. (An enormous time saver.)
• Spanning paragraphs across multiple columns. (Multi-column text becomes unwieldy if spanning headlines have to be in separate, unlinked, text boxes.)

These were the first three problems I came across and they became apparent very early on in my testing. I am prepared to continue to evaluate APublisher if Affinity will publish a road map with these items on it. Otherwise there is little point, as I, and anyone who earns their living through DTP, will not be using it. 

[Tom Schülke]

Sounds logical

[Seneca]

On 9/10/2018 at 11:07 AM, captain_slocum said:

• Inline graphics and tables. (A curious and fatal omission this - what were they thinking of?)
• GREP customisable presets. (An enormous time saver.)
• Spanning paragraphs across multiple columns. (Multi-column text becomes unwieldy if spanning headlines have to be in separate, unlinked, text boxes.)

And someone else will have 3 other features without which there will be little point considering Publisher, and someone else will have yet 3 other points, etc.

I know what you are saying but be realistic. All come in due course.

What so nice to see, though, is that people really want Publisher to succeed and this is great to see.

And succeed it will.  

[fde101]

They have already said that inline graphics and anchored objects are on the roadmap.  Others are asking for grep searching, not sure about paragraphs that span columns (that is actually a thing?  I find that curious as it sounds like it is basically a temporary change in the column structure that merges two or more of the columns back into a single column?)

[GDPR-365024]

5 hours ago, fde101 said:

not sure about paragraphs that span columns (that is actually a thing?  I find that curious as it sounds like it is basically a temporary change in the column structure that merges two or more of the columns back into a single column?)

Here

[Johann Seidel]

Features requests:

• Text frame panel available from the context (right-click) menu.
• Right-indent tab.
• Ability to define tab stops in a table cell.
• Hyphenation options: Hyphenate capitalized words; hyphenate across column; hyphenate last word.
• Ability to base a master page on a master page.
• Ability to only apply either the left-hand or right-hand page of a spread (thus different master pages on same spread)
• More than 2 pages on a spread. (I currently use this feature in Indesign to ad a spine to a book cover.)
• Bleed options when you create a new document.
• The ability to select and change position of guides in the "Transform" panel.
• Possibility to give preferred size of percentage of cell width or height and let APub scale table. Or alternatively more control of sizing of table cells. (It seems APub tries to auto-calculate the sizes,but I never really get the correct values I am looking for ...)
• When I copy a group of objects from InDesign and paste it in APub, it places it very small. Would be helpful if it places it at the same size
• Nested styles.
   

[fde101]

19 hours ago, PedroOfOz said:

Here

nice... and essentially the equivalent of inserting a temporary change back to a single column, then a change back to two, about what I thought I was reading.  Some word processors have the ability to insert a column break / change in the column count part way down a page, which could achieve a similar effect to this, though I haven't checked yet to see if Affinity Publisher has that option.