Call me dumb, but....

[NauticalMile]

Been using PagePlus for almost 15 years, merging from PP9 to "Publisher". Have spent hours trying to figure out simple things. What made PP nice was its speed and simplicity, wiling to continue trying but afraid the new Publisher will just be "Another program" because it its complexity. No quick "lock objects" feature, can't right-click to highlight a text box, no "undo" button on the toolbar, no right click to "undo" or cut something.... stuff like that made PP fast to work with. Even the simple & quick zoom features have been removed.  In PP I could click outside of a page to return the cursor to an arrow, in Publisher you have to go to the toolbar and manually click back to an arrow. Little things like this add a lot of working time. A 2 hour project will now take 3. That's a big deal to publishers.

Been using desktop publishing daily for 15 years and I've spent over an hour in Affinity trying to create a text document, still can't get it right. Stuck on spacing. No matter where I look I can't find how to set or modify spacing. It's set to 1.5 line spacing. A publishing program shouldn't be this difficult to use or figure out.....  (Link below)

Moderators- please consider simplicity in a complex world. This is what built your company:)

 

Tried to upload image to explain, forum would no allow- look here: http://www.thegriffithsgroup.com/publisher

[Steps]

Yes, in it's current state it's quite cumbersome and not exactly ease to use in many aspects.

I hope they will use our feedback to make things easier.

[Move Along People]

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[Move Along People]

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[Fixx]

Publisher should have many things simpler and quicker to realize, but most things OP mentioned are not needed in professional publishing application. In word processor maybe.

[thomaso]

@NauticalMile, when reading your thoughts, I see a road map in front of my inner eyes and somebody new in town, who has just moved from a known location and is now looking for the basic infrastructure like post office, supermarket, doctor, highway and train station, and so on.

As in any city, it's usually all there. Take your time to discover. After a while it becomes more familiar, day by day a little more ...
For the time beeing this related topic might widen your view on the new surrounding:

 

 

[PMan]

5 hours ago, NauticalMile said:

Been using PagePlus for almost 15 years, merging from PP9 to "Publisher". Have spent hours trying to figure out simple things. What made PP nice was its speed and simplicity, wiling to continue trying but afraid the new Publisher will just be "Another program" because it its complexity. No quick "lock objects" feature, can't right-click to highlight a text box, no "undo" button on the toolbar, no right click to "undo" or cut something.... stuff like that made PP fast to work with. Even the simple & quick zoom features have been removed.  In PP I could click outside of a page to return the cursor to an arrow, in Publisher you have to go to the toolbar and manually click back to an arrow. Little things like this add a lot of working time. A 2 hour project will now take 3. That's a big deal to publishers.

Been using desktop publishing daily for 15 years and I've spent over an hour in Affinity trying to create a text document, still can't get it right. Stuck on spacing. No matter where I look I can't find how to set or modify spacing. It's set to 1.5 line spacing. A publishing program shouldn't be this difficult to use or figure out.....  (Link below)

Moderators- please consider simplicity in a complex world. This is what built your company:)

 

Tried to upload image to explain, forum would no allow- look here: http://www.thegriffithsgroup.com/publisher

As Haakoo indicated earlier,the settings are there in the paragraph tab, though if you can't find it you might have to go to View ......Studio..............and make sure that there is a tick beside paragraph.  Perhaps these pictures will clarify the settings more and of course changes occur 'on the fly'  so you see the effect BEFORE you even  return to your text whereas with Pageplus you had to select the text you wanted to alter leading for, type in a value and press <Enter> before any change occurred.  All changes  the paragraph tab are instantaneous (Indent, line spacing and paragraph spacing.

 

 

So, NauticalMile, it takes time but I've been using PagePlus since it came out on a floppy disk free on the cover of PCPlus magazine ,  August 1992 edition.  I am making the transition to Affinity Publisher and yes it takes time to change and to learn; Thomaso uses the anology of moving to a new town and having to locate sites of things you know are in the new town.  I'll give another thought.  When changed from a British car to a well known Korean make, the wiper switch and the indicator switches were  on the opposite sides of the steering column to what I had used for years.  Yes, I knew where they were located but it took weeks before my brain could AUTOMATICALLY select the indicators and not the wipers or more often turning on an indicator instead of the wipers.  I appreciate that it will take time to learn how to do tasks in Publisher that you have done for a long time in Pageplus. Be prepared to use the Help function and  to look up users tutorial videos on the web.  I've produced a 135 page recipe book in Affinity Publisher and it has been a pleasure, especially when wanting to move quickly between pages which are a long way apart.  

Good luck

Pman

 

 

[SrPx]

Our brain is very flexible, pure bubble gum. Just is made of habits...train that lizard part of the brain to do things in a certain way, every day, some minutes, and the brain assimilates that without asking, by repetition is being told that it has to get used to it... and then it does.    You get used to any workflow/UI, this way. Always if relaxing a bit the conscious barrier,  the "what I expect to find and where" thing. Put those preliminary ideas in "blank" when confronting the new UI.   I don't think indeed that can be done in two days.

Sounds to me, tho, that most of the issues are solved if getting into the mindset / fast usage so common in general in professional applications (even explained in the About, clearly Affinity range is the professional take at it) of using keyboard shortcuts. Is simply faster with a little training. IE, ctrl+z for undo (and you can set any shortcut, like ctrl+z, in your pen side button, or any of the tablet buttons, or wheel of your pen-tablet, if you are using one. There are also special mices with X number of buttons, programmable ones, if you dislike the keyboard ( I wouldn't expect that in people working with text, but can happen). I have one friend, you wouldn't expect it from a PHP coder, he has one of those mices, setting ctrl z and ctrl y (redo in every Windows app on earth, some ppl don't know this. In PS u have also ctrl+alt+z or ctrl+shift+z  to go back/forward in history) on the mouse buttons. No issue when the mouse has like 23 buttons.... I might get me one of those. Someday.

I do use keyboard instead, on a side, tablet in the middle, mouse in the other side. A lot controlled by keyboard, as anyways, you need constantly the modifier keys in Affinity apps (alt, shift, ctrl ( and I guess command and whatever in Apple).

So, surely a lot of tools without a direct tool icon, you just assign a key shortcut and problem solved. Pretty fast once you get used to it. Photoshop for example is like 3 times faster when using just a few shortcuts (ctrl + shift + i to invert selection, ctrl + e to merge layers, ctrl+g to group, ctrl + l for levels, space for panning, alt drag to duplicate something, etc, etc). It is waaaaaaaaaay faster, I know all the full deal of handling all PS upside down by point and click, as I handled it so for many years, but once I got to get used to keys, man, what a speed up after just two weeks... really really worth it.

[Dave Harris]

On 12/8/2018 at 7:58 PM, PMan said:

As Haakoo indicated earlier,the settings are there in the paragraph tab, though if you can't find it you might have to go to View ......Studio..............and make sure that there is a tick beside paragraph.

Leading is also in the text Context toolbar, so you don''t need the Paragraph panel.

[Fahneflycht]

AP will be a great application one day, but it still has a ways ahead. By way of the beta process, hopefully most of the missing (or still unclear how to use) features will be added and most of the bugs fixed. I am willing to be patient based on this prospect. In the latest beta version, the automatic ligature settings of Gerhard Helzel's Fraktur fonts work flawlessly, proof that progress is possible. Here's my quick and preliminary list of additional suggestions for future releases:

1. I, too have been using Page Plus for years. I think AP will prove more stable than PP, and I for one would accept forfeiting some of the user friendliness of PP in return for more versatility and stability. Even so, the ability to import PP and Word documents directly (i.e., without intermediate conversions) into AP would rank high on my wish list.

2. In AP beta, the color selection in text styles seems to behave somewhat erratically. I've formatted text in a particular color and the next day, it seems like some kind of default has substituted the color I had defined the day before, even though I had converted the base text style and saved my changes. Maybe I've just overlooked something or done it backwards, I don't know. A nice feature of PP was the ability to select predefined colors according to, e.g., the CMYK or RGB schemes and apply these to text with one click. Would be nice if one could save one's favorite colors and apply these with one click by way of a button or an icon and not have to adjust the individual settings each time.

3. The "base" character style uses Arial 12 pt. When I define a new group style with a different typeface and type size, AP seems correctly to save the corresponding settings for that group. When I then define a character style based on the new group style and apply this new style to existing text, however, I seem to end up with the correct type size, but in Arial. When I try to redefine the tracking setting of the character style, I end up with Arial and the original type size (12 pt). I have to admit, I'm still in a trial-and-error mode with this and have perhaps simply not yet figured out the correct way to do it. Someone who's ahead of me might wish to test to see if the problem described is just my own ineptitude or if it's a real bug that could perhaps be easily fixed.    

4. I haven't detected yet how one can add footnotes or endnotes to AP documents, but maybe this is already in the works?

Greetings, Fahneflycht

[fde101]

30 minutes ago, Fahneflycht said:

I haven't detected yet how one can add footnotes or endnotes to AP documents, but maybe this is already in the works?

This has come up several times; this will not be in the initial release but will be added to some future version later on.