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Will Affinity Publisher load PagePlus files?


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I had an ad book that became corrupted in PPP. I was hoping to convert a previous version in Affinity Publisher but since there is no way of doing that and the fact that I can't even copy paste the pages between the 2 programs I feel unless there is a converter or import feature then Affinity Publisher will be useless to me.

I had been doing these ad books for a very long time and regrettably turned the job down because I do not have a reliable program to work with. I AM NOT GETTING INDESIGN that is not an option for me. I despise Adobe, had to fight spammers for over 2 years, had to change my bank debit card because of their data breach. 

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PagePlus was and still is my favorite application for publishing and text-picture prototyping. Many thanks for it!
Unfortunately if you won't provide at least some kind of conversion for .ppp files there will be lots of suspicious about your current project management quality.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

If Affinity is not going to be able to open PPP files, I will surely not invest one single cent in any Serif/Affinity products anymore. Out of Principle. They woke up one day and let all their years long clients now we will not support you anymore because we set ourselves some new horizons. Bye! And that was it. Support for all their software just stopped. Then they start with Affinity and all my years-long files cannot be opened by their new software. WHAT IS THIS? MUST I REDESIGN ALL MY WORK? WHO IS GOING TO PAY FOR THAT???
I bought Affiniy Designer. Cannot open my Serif DrawPlus files. Come-On!!!!!! And the learning curve to steep for me. I do not have time for this.
Come on Serif/Affinity - you got to where you are because of people like me who bought my first Serif software when Pageplus 3 came out. I still use the last version of MoviePlus everyday. I upgraded every time on Movieplus, PhotoPlus and own PagePlus 9 today.  AND NOW THIS. No more support and no cross-over option. COME ON!!!
FIX THIS OR I'M OUT FOREVER (Out of Principle) - DO NOT KID YOURSELF: YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY GOOD SOFTWARE SUPPLIER. 

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Jaco said: "If Affinity is not going to be able to open PPP files, I will surely not invest one single cent in any Serif/Affinity products anymore. Out of Principle. They woke up one day and let all their years long clients now we will not support you anymore because we set ourselves some new horizons. Bye! And that was it."

I totally agree.

I have bought many times over the years all the Serif products and use DesignPlus and PagePus on a weekly basis and MoviePlus probably once a month... In both my main business (Publishing) and my work/hobby (Teaching martial arts).

Without an import from PagePlus to the new program, I will not be a customer - There are other alternatives and if I have to go through a new learning curve anyway, I will go elsewheres.

It seems a real shame that Serif have stopped supporting loyal customers.

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As what seems like a life long use of PagePlus I cannot believe that you are trashing your previous user base in this way. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

While I appreciate Affinity is 'new' it is lets face remarkably similar to how PPX10 would have appeared and all you have done outwardly is make it funky and black. Out of interest, that makes it look messy and it lacks the clean sensation of PP X9.  Which makes me wonder if what you are hiding is that apart from a database change not a lot else has happened.

I for one will not be moving over because of maybe thousands of PP documents used in all aspects of my business

Is it me of have you been taking lessons from Micro$oft?

It cannot be beyond the wit of man / woman/ no gender decision yet to put a cut down version of X9 in the back with a simple one way, one off conversion program. Such a process has value that you could even sell.

its not even worth beta testing affinity on this basis. "You're fired" and I am out of here.

Sad and unnecessary

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  • 6 months later...

I downloaded Affinity and opened it up to work on some of my many, many Page Plus files. After not being able to up load them I went on line to see what I was missing. Evidently Serif seems to have decided that those of us who have been using generations of Page Plus upgrades over the years are not important enough to include us in their newest publishing creation.

So with that said I will be sticking with Page Plus 9 and converting all my books, ads, note cards, and other Page Plus files into PDF's just in case the program fails so I am not left with years of unacceptable work. I went through that with Quark and do not look forward to living through that nightmare again. And for all of you out there who have .ppp files I would suggest that you do the same.

I read that at least one of you is totally against Apple and does not want to use In-Design but you may want to reconsider that or find another product. For simple things I still use an old version of Microsoft's Publisher.

It is too bad that Serif has taken this route as I own 5 of their programs and now will be looking for other options.

 

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7 hours ago, Terry Wolff said:

It is too bad that Serif has taken this route as I own 5 of their programs and now will be looking for other options.

Affinity Publisher is a completely new program, totally different from PagePlus. It has no code in common, and PagePlus has many features that don't (yet?) exist in Affinity Publisher. Someday, when they are closer to having the same feature set, it might make sense for Affinity to provide a PagePlus importer, but it really wouldn't make sense right now.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
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    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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3 hours ago, Arun Sarkar said:

I think same theory should apply on Indesign or Freehand, but I know Serif will talk in a different tune for ID or FH.

 It may be hard for us who used Plus for a long time, but I believe that they will never come with a PP importer.

I don’t know about FreeHand, but Serif have made it quite clear that they will only add IDML import, not INDD import, to the Affinity range. I don’t think that’s so very different from only offering PDF import, not PPP import, for PagePlus files.

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Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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  • 4 months later...

I’ve used PagePlus X a little over the years and just started writing a cookbook. I couldn’t find any PP9 templates so used a purchased PDF layout. It took some effort to create the master pages. The PDF import to PagePlus only created pages. So if I now move to Publisher and it doesn’t import .ppp files, I will have to import the PDF version and go through the effort again to create master pages. If I am correct, it seems that some help from Serif to convert .ppp files would be helpful. I realize a full conversion is maybe not possible but some help would be appreciated if I am to move to Publisher from PP9.

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6 hours ago, fahza said:

So if I now move to Publisher and it doesn’t import .ppp files, I will have to import the PDF version and go through the effort again to create master pages.

I would continue using PP for all the projects started with PP, if I were you.

I would employ Publisher for all new jobs, though.

This is how I would go about it.

2017 27” iMac 4.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 • Radeon Pr 580 8GB • 64GB • Ventura 13.6.4.

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1 hour ago, fahza said:

Thanks for the reply. That’s the same conclusion I came to. Too bad Serif didn’t offer some better options. So much for being a loyal user.

It's not really about abandoning loyal users but  the PagePlus code base is hopelessly outdated and it made no sense to continue trying to flog what had become a dead horse. The alternative path for Serif was to produce an engine that could be ported across two incompatible platforms (Windows and MAC OSX) and use the same code base for 3 different applications making their files cross compatible - something quite ground breaking. That meant it wouldn't be reasonable to spend time and resource to create a reasonable conversion from the PagePlus file code system to the new .afxxx format.

If it is possible and financially viable then my guess is that a 3rd party coder will reverse engineer the pp9 file format and produce a converter.

Of course you don't need to use templates to create a document. You could also build it from scratch - it's by far the best way to learn Graphic Design and you can just as easily copy what others have already done to create your design.

 

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6 hours ago, CarlM said:

If it is possible and financially viable then my guess is that a 3rd party coder will reverse engineer the pp9 file format and produce a converter.

One can easily get to the text of a PagePlus file. 

.ppp files are a zip container that has .xml files in several folders. The folder named 'stories' has one or more .xml files that contain to text. In an hour I wrote a javascript to parse them.

I still need to build an array to load the paragraph style names and match them to the story XML tags as in the story, the paragraphs are by number. Dunno if I'll ever take it that far.

But the end goal, for myself, is to create tagged text for taking them into QXP. I can do that now, or take the plain text into APub. 

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  • 6 months later...

I have lost my Serif PagePlus due to a computer crash so I decided to download the trial for the Affinity Publisher thinking it would pick up my old files and I could carry on.  No. it doesn't convert the files so they are permanently lost and I won't be buying the new software.  What a way to treat loyal customers who have been loyal to Serif for years and years.

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  • Staff

@Mrs Doc

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums :)

Can I suggest you reinstall PagePlus which you can download here and you can recover your product key to install it from here

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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