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How to kill InDesign


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I'm just starting this thread to see what truly wild and crazy GREAT ideas people have. 

Mine? 

1. A font menu like we had in 1990's. Yes, things do in fact get worse. Way worse.  Now Utilities had a custom font list better than any.  You could order your font list like you wanted. Colour code them in the menu list.  Apple changed what could be accessed a few years ago and perhaps made this very difficult. Which ticks me off. I used to be able to find my fonts very quickly right in the app. 

2. Warped text either in the app or another app you can place a link in and shortcut key within APublisher to open the warped text file and change it. Warped text app also has preset curves that are easy to go through, plus customizable. 

3. Tight buttons to save space, yet not too tight so you have to get that mouse into the exact spot while trying to work quickly.  InDesign is pretty tight on an iMac where the resolution is so small the buttons can be hard to hit if you're rushing or tired. Not sure they could easily make adjustable button sizes. Boy that's asking a lot.  ? 

Hoping that Publisher will have this shortcut feature like InDesign to open PS docs to adjust images and also open other AP docs to adjust and ad that is place inside a publication doc. I haven't looked at or tested this in AP yet and I'm sure it must be there already. 

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11 hours ago, BLKay said:

Colour code them in the menu list

That might not work too well with color fonts (SVG, etc.) if they do live previews of the fonts in the menu, and I would like to see both of those things supported (as they are in QuarkXPress 2018 for example).

The fonts should really be tied to the styles anyway so access to the list should be relatively infrequent once the paragraph and character styles are set up and in place.

 

11 hours ago, BLKay said:

Apple changed what could be accessed a few years ago

Probably because there is a tendency to have a lot more fonts now and as the number of fonts in the system increases the efficiency of a simple pop-up or pull-down menu for font selection begins to drop off.

On the other hand there is a wider range of text styles and attributes available in most cases which likely led to a rethinking of how the menus are organized.

The "old" way was great when there were a lot fewer options than there are now.

 

11 hours ago, BLKay said:

Warped text

Best guess is vector mesh distortion tools which are probably more suitable to Designer than to Publisher.  If/when they get that working in Designer you would have most of what you are asking for here, except maybe for the presets.

It may not have the integration you are asking for, but if you haven't already (I'm assuming you are on a Mac based on your other comments), check out Art Text - https://text.design/art-text/ - it can do much of what you are asking for on this one, but you would probably need to store the editable format outside of the Publisher document and bring in exported images of the results.

 

11 hours ago, BLKay said:

like InDesign to open PS docs

Once Photo and Designer are up to the same version I would expect to have even better integration with those two programs than what the Adobe apps currently offer with each other.  The existing integration between Photo and Designer is brilliant...

If you haven't tried those yet, Photo, Designer, and soon Publisher, at the same version level, use the same file format and can open each others' files.

If I am in Photo and want to use a tool from Designer, I can choose "Open in Designer" from the File menu and the document closes in Photo and opens in Designer, fully intact, ready for me to make full use of the tools in Designer to do whatever I want to the file (put text on a path perhaps).  I can then "Open in Photo" to get it back into Photo.  The same integration at least should be available from Publisher once they are all up to the same version and released... and based on the currently-disabled personas in the Publisher toolbar, there might be even tighter integration for some functionality...

Also, already within Publisher, if you have an embedded Affinity document, you can open the embedded document into a separate tab for editing, and it syncs back into the original document when you close it.  It opens as another tab in Publisher though, rather than in the other apps... and as the Publisher beta is a newer version than the available Photo and Designer builds, they may not transport back and forth as easily at this stage of the beta process, so you would be limited to the tools available in Publisher for now.

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