Text Auto Flow -- great feature Affinity!

[appaulmac]

I just found out the super-fast way of creating multiple pages automatically with just a couple of clicks. This information might be written somewhere but in case anyone doesn't find it there, here's what I did.

I'm working on a book (70+ pages) so I created a facing-pages document and set spread margins. I then added two pages. After this I went to the first page and placed a text frame to fit the page margin guides. I then pasted in my 70-pages of text, which obviously overflowed the single text frame on the single page.

The next step is to click on the overflow arrow on the right, you can then draw out a new text frame on the next page to have the text flow into it. We hopefully all know this.

BUT, if you hold down Alt (on the Mac), a new text frame that fits the page guides will automatically be added to the second page without it having to be drawn out.

BUT, if you hold down Alt and Shift (again I'm using the Mac), Publisher will create as many pages as needed with text frames to fit all of the text that's still overflowing.

What a fantastic feature! Great job guys.

[fde101]

Macs don't have Alt keys - I think you meant Option?

But yes, this has been brought up a few times.

[Alfred]

12 minutes ago, fde101 said:

Macs don't have Alt keys - I think you meant Option?

I think that depends on your keyboard! I don’t have a Mac, but I’ve seen plenty of pictures of Mac keyboards where the Option key is labelled ‘Alt’, or both ‘Option’ and ‘Alt’ (sometimes accompanied by the ‘⌥’ symbol).

[mac_heibu]

You are not up to date @fde101! αℓƒяє∂   is right: Of course Macs have an ALT-key!

[fde101]

Yes, I've seen that - the extra "alt" label is there because of people running virtualized or dual-boot (bootcamp) Windoze environments as that usually maps to "alt" in those cases.  I believe it will also function as an "alt" key if the keyboard is connected to a non-mac system.  Native mac software should always refer to that key as "option".

[Dave Harris]

17 hours ago, appaulmac said:

I just found out the super-fast way of creating multiple pages automatically with just a couple of clicks. This information might be written somewhere but in case anyone doesn't find it there, here's what I did.

I'm working on a book (70+ pages) so I created a facing-pages document and set spread margins. I then added two pages. After this I went to the first page and placed a text frame to fit the page margin guides. I then pasted in my 70-pages of text, which obviously overflowed the single text frame on the single page.

The next step is to click on the overflow arrow on the right, you can then draw out a new text frame on the next page to have the text flow into it. We hopefully all know this.

BUT, if you hold down Alt (on the Mac), a new text frame that fits the page guides will automatically be added to the second page without it having to be drawn out.

BUT, if you hold down Alt and Shift (again I'm using the Mac), Publisher will create as many pages as needed with text frames to fit all of the text that's still overflowing.

What a fantastic feature! Great job guys.

Shift is enough; you don't need Alt and Shift. These options are described in the status bar at the bottom of the window when the mouse is over the text flow handle. I know nobody ever looks at the status bar, but during this beta when there isn't much proper documentation it can give useful hints.

[Old Bruce]

7 hours ago, Dave Harris said:

I know nobody ever looks at the status bar,

Thanks for something I have not noticed before.

[Alfred]

7 hours ago, Dave Harris said:

I know nobody ever looks at the status bar

Make that ‘almost nobody’, Dave! I’ve always paid attention to the hints lurking there in Serif’s desktop apps, and I would be happy to make use of status bars in the iPad apps if they had them.

[Joansz]

I want it to work like it does in Page Plus. There, all I have to do is set up my publication and ONE page. I don't even need to create a text box. I then insert text from file and it automagically creates as many pages as it needs and flows the text. Easy peasy. I just did that for a 330 page book.

[walt.farrell]

7 hours ago, Joansz said:

I want it to work like it does in Page Plus. There, all I have to do is set up my publication and ONE page. I don't even need to create a text box. I then insert text from file and it automagically creates as many pages as it needs and flows the text. Easy peasy. I just did that for a 330 page book.

With the exception of needing to create 1 text frame on the page, and shift-click 1 icon after you insert the text, Publisher does work that way. Still easy peasy, just two operations more that take almost no time at all.

[Joansz]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

With the exception of needing to create 1 text frame on the page, and shift-click 1 icon after you insert the text, Publisher does work that way. Still easy peasy, just two operations more that take almost no time at all.

I do not find that acceptable. This is time consuming, especially if you have multiple articles that are more than one text frame long. Additionally, if this product can't be as easy to use and robust as PagePlus, then why bother "down grading?"

[Mithferion]

On 10/18/2018 at 3:10 AM, Dave Harris said:

Shift is enough; you don't need Alt and Shift. These options are described in the status bar at the bottom of the window when the mouse is over the text flow handle. I know nobody ever looks at the status bar, but during this beta when there isn't much proper documentation it can give useful hints.

I can tell you that I do... sometimes... when I remember it's there...

Best regards!

[fde101]

On 10/20/2018 at 2:04 AM, Joansz said:

I want it to work like it does in Page Plus. There, all I have to do is set up my publication and ONE page. I don't even need to create a text box. I then insert text from file and it automagically creates as many pages as it needs and flows the text. Easy peasy. I just did that for a 330 page book.

Sounds like you want a word processor rather than a layout program.

[Joansz]

7 hours ago, fde101 said:

Sounds like you want a word processor rather than a layout program.

PagePlus is Serif's legacy Desktop Publishing software. It certainly can do great layouts such as the attached jpg (of the pdf file with bleeds that I submitted for print). Affinity Publisher is supposed to replace page plus. Currently, it can't do half of what PP can do.

[Alfred]

19 minutes ago, Joansz said:

Affinity Publisher is supposed to replace page plus.

PagePlus was in development for three decades. There’s no way that the first version of Affinity Publisher, developed from the ground up, was ever going to replace PP in the sense of being able to do everything that PPX9 (i.e. version 19) can do.

[Joansz]

58 minutes ago, αℓƒяє∂ said:

PagePlus was in development for three decades. There’s no way that the first version of Affinity Publisher, developed from the ground up, was ever going to replace PP in the sense of being able to do everything that PPX9 (i.e. version 19) can do.

That's what Serif is going to have to do in order to produce a product that I would want to buy.

[jmwellborn]

Not me!   I use Apple products only, and am already a huge fan of Affinity Photo.    Affinity Publisher is going to be equally wonderful.   I am willing to bet that in a few years it will be another Apple product of the year.  Meanwhile, it still has a few growing pains, but a wonderful group at Serif who are ironing them out at the rate of knots.   I cannot wait to buy the very first commercial version and will be very happy to see it grow.

1 hour ago, Joansz said:

That's what Serif is going to have to do in order to produce a product that I would want to buy.

Meanwhile, I am delighted to have an already very workmanlike replacement for InDesign and their extortionate price gouging.   Hooray Beta!

[Joansz]

Right now the basic show stoppers for me are that I can't insert doc, docx, and odt files and they don't automagically flow and create new pages based on the starting master page. Also, from what I can see, footnotes are not handled at all.

[fde101]

1 hour ago, Joansz said:

I can't insert doc, docx, and odt files

For now, either copy/paste, or use another program to export them as RTF first.

 

Also:

 

 

1 hour ago, Joansz said:

they don't automagically flow and create new pages

This takes one extra shift+click after getting them into a text frame on the first page.

 

1 hour ago, Joansz said:

from what I can see, footnotes are not handled at all

Not expected to be in 1.7:

 

[Joansz]

2 minutes ago, fde101 said:

For now, either copy/paste, or use another program to export them as RTF first.

 

Also:

 

 

This takes one extra shift+click after getting them into a text frame on the first page.

 

Not expected to be in 1.7:

 

Doc, docx, footnotes, and endnotes are absolute show stoppers for me. I'll definitely stay with PagePlus until that is fixed, and then I'll see if it meets my other requirements. What about Open Office odt? That was my backup for Page Plus when Word went wonky.

[fde101]

2 minutes ago, Joansz said:

What about Open Office odt?

I haven't seen any official response concerning odt support one way or the other.  It is an open format so I don't think they would rule it out completely but I'm sure it has a lower priority than .docx if they are considering it at all.  I would imagine it is more likely than .doc though as the .doc format is not quite as open.

[Joansz]

I do think the Affinity Publisher developers should bear in mind that any process that requires a "work-around" or extra steps that another product doesn't will probably not switch for productivity considerations. In addition, anything that requires extra work is more prone to error and can be very painful if one is working against deadlines.

[drmajorbob]

My 445 pages is made up of chapters, each with a title and header image. Does AutoFlow do anything for that? Will I have to repeat the process for each chapter?

Edited October 22, 2018 by drmajorbob
correction

[fde101]

9 hours ago, Joansz said:

any process that requires a "work-around" or extra steps that another product doesn't

No two applications are going to be identical - otherwise they would be the same application.  This is in the early stages right now, they won't be able to do it all at once.  Version 1.7 will only be version 1.0 for some people - it might be 0.7 for others.

 

9 hours ago, Joansz said:

anything that requires extra work is more prone to error

This is true; however...

 

11 hours ago, Joansz said:

don't automagically flow and create new pages

If this is what is being referenced, consider that there may be times when someone wants a document to flow in a different manner after the first page.  In this case, having the flow take place automatically upon adding to the first page might create a bunch of pages they don't want - it could just make a mess sometimes.  I think in many situations it makes sense to defer this until getting confirmation that the "automatic" behavior is actually what is wanted - consider magazines where an article might be threaded across pages that are not consecutive and may even be interspersed with other articles.  I would hope that if they do have the software create the extra pages automatically that they would at least offer a preference somewhere to turn that on and off.  I think I prefer being able to confirm it is actually what I want.

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, fde101 said:

Version 1.7 will only be version 1.0 for some people - it might be 0.7 for others.

The version number is clearly nothing more than a compatibility indicator, telling us that the features will be fully understood by version 1.7 (or later) of any Affinity app.