First impressions

[music2bmade]

I did my normal method for walking through software:
Opened a doc from scratch and worked to create a finished document without looking at a manual. Disclaimer: I have worked a lot in Designer and Photo so I am familiar with the programs.

Here are my two cents:
1. Creating a new doc, margins, master pages: All very easy and intuitive except Page numbers. While I was able to get page numbers to appear in the master pages, to get the numbering to offset by a particular number of pages was daunting.  

2. Performance: Not a single task slowed and every movement such as dragging around objects and text blocks was VERY smooth. Nice!

3. Did quite a few text blocks before I realized I was using the wrong text tool. I like the artistic text tool but it is WAY too similar in look on the toolbar. 

4. Tabs (once I used the correct text tool) were very easy and intuitive and I love the text ruler. Could it be the default to have the ruler showing? I had to choose it in the view menu to see it.

 5. Center objects tool: Extremely helpful but if you are in facing pages it puts the object in the center of two pages joined, not in the middle of the page you are working on. The ruler also displays the entire two facing pages instead of starting from zero for the next page. I had to get rid of facing pages to get the ruler and center tool to behave as I wished.

5. Layers that are not document wide but change from page to page: Brilliant! This is a huge time saver. Each page felt like its own separate designer file. Love it!

6. Printing: The scale pull down menu is strange. Why would you not want print to fit as the default? Also colors printed poorly compared to printing the same file in Swift Publisher. My designer created tiff files looked gorgeous on the screen, even close up, but printed in low resolution. This problem would be a deal killer for me. Hope it is just a Beta glitch.

7. Love how text is handled, especially the typography window, and styles seem intuitive. Never found the "create style from selection" part of the program.

Great job! Looking forward to seeing the final product. 

 

Edited September 21, 2018 by music2bmade
Type-o

[Wim Daniels]

About number 5, center objects tool: when centering an object you can specify the alignment mode, just pick page. Publisher seems to keep that setting until you change it again. Even when you quit publisher, it keeps the setting.

Really nice about 5 bis: layers per spread!

[music2bmade]

Great! The alignment options you suggest are quite cool. Not seen this feature in other programs. I am more impressed by the center object tool now. 

My goal was to see how intuitive the interface was. I am sure the under the hood settings will be as fun to discover as Designer was . 

Ran into another time saver by accident: With the main selection tool selected, double click on a text box . The boundaries  of the text box shrink to the text entered.

 

[Peg11]

Quote

 5. Center objects tool: Extremely helpful but if you are in facing pages it puts the object in the center of two pages joined, not in the middle of the page you are working on. The ruler also displays the entire two facing pages instead of starting from zero for the next page. I had to get rid of facing pages to get the ruler and center tool to behave as I wished.

If you click on the Alignment button on the toolbar you will have several choices of how you want to align an object if you click on the "align to" arrow on the right. Two of them are to page and align to page margin.

[Fixx]

10 hours ago, music2bmade said:

I love the text ruler. Could it be the default to have the ruler showing?

It is sticky – once you set it on it will be displayed in all new text frames.

[music2bmade]

I am suggesting to the designers that they start with it on. Most text programs have some sort of easy access to a ruler with tabs. I found it eventually and like how it works.

[music2bmade]

14 hours ago, Peg11 said:

If you click on the Alignment button on the toolbar you will have several choices of how you want to align an object if you click on the "align to" arrow on the right. Two of them are to page and align to page margin.

It took me awhile to find this window as well, because it wasn't activated in the button I put on the toolbar. I had chosen the customize toolbar and added the the center button to the toolbar.  

Again, my concern to the developers is that the default setting, or at least I think so, should be be set to "page".  

[atombowl]

First impressions very favourable. It look beautiful, very clean and sensibly organised. Opening pdfs is remarkably glitch-free, the only thing lacking is guides but given that they wouldn't have been exported to the pdf in the first place that seems entirely reasonable. Not sure whether there's any possibility of a smart-gridding feature that throws guides in based on content and once Indesign import comes online it would be largely unnecessary. If I were to make any suggestions it would be merely that the text flow handle was a bit hard to spot at first and possibly a little higher up the text frame than I was expecting. Love the auto pop-up tab bar, but found the manual tab markers a little hard to see on some screens.