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EPUB export


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5 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I am saying that as Affinity has no support for exporting HTML/CSS today, it is not as simple a matter as you suggest to provide the epub support. If they already had HTML/CSS support it would be less work (though still significant), but as they don't, providing HTML/CSS is a pre-requisite.

And yes, it is something that all the applications will need, as they have a common core set of functions and can operate on each others' files. The good part of that is that only a single implementation of the function will be needed and it will cover all 3 applications.

Perhaps when they start their WebPlus remake (i.e. their DreamWeaver competition), we'll see the ePub export show up in the Publisher app. I think it really makes more sense to have an ePub persona within Publisher since a novel style book and an eBook are much closer in concept than a website and a novel style book. Trying to display a 500 page novel on a website with the table of contents or an index is not a very common crossover.

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On 1/8/2021 at 4:05 PM, walt.farrell said:

I am saying that as Affinity has no support for exporting HTML/CSS today, it is not as simple a matter as you suggest to provide the epub support. If they already had HTML/CSS support it would be less work (though still significant), but as they don't, providing HTML/CSS is a pre-requisite.

And yes, it is something that all the applications will need, as they have a common core set of functions and can operate on each others' files. The good part of that is that only a single implementation of the function will be needed and it will cover all 3 applications.

Shouldn't the CSS part be relatively easy? I mean, LO extensions like Writer2html from the Latex2html do it by adding the applied text styles to the css. The output problem of that css would be exactly the same as with anyother epub, limited support of certain css specs on many readers. Having a clean html would be much more difficult.

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2 hours ago, lmarcos said:

Shouldn't the CSS part be relatively easy? I mean, LO extensions like Writer2html from the Latex2html do it by adding the applied text styles to the css. The output problem of that css would be exactly the same as with anyother epub, limited support of certain css specs on many readers. Having a clean html would be much more difficult.

I think the problem here would be if they want to implement it as a "best in class" feature (which they have talked about with other feature suggestions). If so, it would need to provide a preview of the eBook and tools to fine tune the output. An export plugin would mostly sidestep the need for major changes to their unified code base and could have it's own standalone rendering engine, but it wouldn't be "best in class" compared to adding a Persona into Publisher that seamlessly switched back and forth between the ePub and Paper views of the document.

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That sounds like a reasonable explanation. , many thanks.

Using Indesign regularly to make epubs, I find that even after mapping Indesign Style to css classes, I still need to examine the html code in Dreamweaver and tweak the results.

So if "best in class" has the aim of eliminating that "tweaking" step it's going to be a more challenging project than perhaps we had been considering in these discussions. 

An then, on top of that, "best in class" would almost certainly need to include all the requirements of Acessibility and when you look at lengths that Ken Jones had to go to in Developing Circularflo  the effort required rises significantly. 

So a more realistic route would be for Serif to work very closely with Ken Jones and let Circulaflo take care of creating the epub directly from Affinity Publisher.
See this video to see what a great job Circularflo does to create great epubs and kindle files.

 

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  • 5 weeks later...

Best-of-breed would be nice, of course, but I'd settle for anything that doesn't force me to re-do all the work from scratch.

I see two simple solutions (but maybe I'm missing something):

- IDML files are essentially XML, which can be converted to HTML + CSS.

- Since Publisher already understands RTF, maybe it wouldn't be too difficult to have it export it too. It's a good format to convert to ePub (or even just to HTML + CSS).

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Just thinking about how things might work behind the interface, an ebook is essentially like an ideal parent to a paper book. The ebook has variable formatting, and a paper book is just solidifying a few variables by choosing a fixed paper size, margins, fonts, and page numbers, but there are still a lot of overlap with things like the table of contents, chapter breaks, pull-quotes, images, bold, italics, bullet points, indents, etc.

I could almost imagine an eBook interface being the first step in Affinity Publisher, to get the content organized, then switching to a "paper" persona to do a fixed page layout.

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7 hours ago, pixelstuff said:

I could almost imagine an eBook interface being the first step in Affinity Publisher, to get the content organized, then switching to a "paper" persona to do a fixed page layout.

That is an interesting analysis. Thanks.

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  • 3 weeks later...

FEATURE REQUEST:  Export to EPUB!

The first request for this feature were made in 2018, now 3 years later there this feature is not realized. So one cannot use Affinity Publisher to

create an EPUB.

MacUsers would be glad if Affinity Publisher could export to MacOS Pages. From Pages it is very convenient to export to EPUB.

 

 

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  • 4 months later...

Time for a repeat of the regular request. for epub support in Affinity Publisher. 
PLEASE implement epub export in Affinity Publisher soon. 

As I said in a previous post. I have had Affinity Publisher since the very beginning, but have never used it because I am not able to export .indd files to epub in Affinity Publisher. 

But I am now coming to the conclusion that this will never be implemented. If this is the plan, then please let us know so that we can finally uninstall Affinity publisher and move on. 

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As a Mac user, I think I would be happy to see a good export to DOCX. This file format would be useful for several uses. Including export to Apple Pages, that can read the DOCX format very well, and can export a very good ePub (thanks to it incorporating parts of iBooks Author).

EDIT: It has sometimes been considered copy&paste as a workaround for export. As for me, I find that this wouldn't copy text styles, making editing of the target text too complicate.

Paolo

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

One more vote for the absolute NECESSITY of having the capability of exporting to EPUB. Get with the program, Affinity. EPUB is not a "nice to have" feature, it's an essential function. E-books are exploding, and authors need a way to reliably generate quality EPUB files. The free and affordable converters do NOT do the job -- I know, I've tested so many of them my head spins. They all generate EPUB files that are riddled with formatting errors. One can't recognize center justification. Another doesn't recognize italic type. Most of them can't recognize a section break and start the next chapter on a fresh page/screen.

It's a jungle out there. I bought Affinity specifically for self publishing books. Without the ability to generate EPUBs, I've got less than half a loaf, because e-books are outselling paper books by a huge margin.

When I see that this has been on the waiting list for more than three YEARS I'm just amazed that any company can be so tone deaf. It reminds me of many years ago when users of a certain desktop publishing program requested a much-needed feature. The company said it couldn't be done. Well, it wasn't more than a couple of months before a start-up competitor came out with a program that did what "couldn't be done," and the company that couldn't do it went out of business.

Just saying ...

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Affinity Publisher's predecessor, PagePlus, was already capable of producing EPUB and MOBI formats, and at near-perfect quality from a single text feed. I understand that the engine has been rewritten and that the Data Merge option was needed, but PagePlus is no longer available and I cannot recommend it to my fellow writers and publication editors. I too am in dire need of an ebook generator, and I was looking forward to this feature along with the endnotes and footnotes functions. So, for the time being, Publisher is good for breaking a printed book at best.
Ok, an ebook is a web page at its core, so I understand that Publisher would then be able to export to the web, but could ebook export be lifted from PagePlus?

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I had PagePlus X9, but it stopped working after a recent Windows 10 update. I finally uninstalled it, then reinstalled it. Last night I brought part of a current book project into PagePlus just to test the EPUB export. Yes, it is there, and it works better than Microsoft's stand-alone converter, better than LibreOffice's export to EPUB, and better than SoftMaker Office's export to EPUB.

Affinity Publisher is being marketed as an alternate to Adobe InDesign. InDesign has long included support for EPUB export, both reflowable and fixed layout. It is unconscionable and incomprehensible that we've been asking for this in Affinity Publisher for literally YEARS, and the company hasn't implemented it. It's like they want to send customers to Adobe.

 

Edited by Will Wallace
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If there were interoperability between PagePlus and Publisher, I would complete the missing functionality in PagePlus. But neither the PagePlus project can be opened in Publisher, nor does it work backwards because of the different programming engines. So I am left waiting. I know it's a big job, but we've really been waiting at least 3 years.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Add my voice to the value of having an EPub export feature. Producing accessible digital material is important to me, and at the moment I export my work to Pages on a Mac and then do the EPub export from there - but it’s a hacky workaround. I’d love to be able to do the EPub export from Affinity Publisher. 

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On 2/25/2021 at 1:08 AM, arielf said:

- IDML files are essentially XML, which can be converted to HTML + CSS.

- Since Publisher already understands RTF, maybe it wouldn't be too difficult to have it export it too. It's a good format to convert to ePub (or even just to HTML + CSS).

I would be very happy to have some export file formats to do the conversion in specialized tools. I doubt Publisher will reach excellence in all things very soon.

I would however prefer either DOCX or ODT instead of RTF, because they are more modern and well documented. RTF has served us very well for decades, but XML-based file formats have their advantages.

Paolo

 

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10 minutes ago, Vasilij said:

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Thank you for your valuable and very inspiring contribution.

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