affinity publisher Magazine Spread Experiment - Radio Times

[GarryP]

Just for fun - and a bit of learning - I decided to try and create a spread from a UK TV listings magazine with Publisher.
It's not totally accurate but I'm quite happy with it. It doesn't look much but there was a fair bit of fiddling around - my fault, not the software - to get it looking the way it does.

If you have a copy of the actual magazine then please have a look and feel free to pick my rendition apart if you think I've missed something important or made any big mistakes.

Some known issues:
* The colours used aren't totally accurate but I wasn't really bothered about that;
* The typefaces used aren't the real ones but I'm guessing they're bespoke for the magazine;
* The bulleted list under "Best Live Sport" isn't right as I can't figure out how to change the bullet size irrespective of text height;
* The text was mostly taken from various Lorem Ipsum generators and the rest was just me being silly, so you can ignore it.

[Wosven]

Hi,

That's one of my favorite exercises with APub (or AD and some illustrations). It helps creating styles and searching to find clever tricks to do pages faster. 

[Alfred]

7 hours ago, GarryP said:

the rest was just me being silly, so you can ignore it

Why on earth would we want to do that, Garry?

I particularly like ‘Secret Life of Offshore Money Farms’ and ‘Strictly Come Dine With The Apprentice’.

[GarryP]

elfred: The text itself isn't very interesting but if people want to read it then I have no problem with that. (I had other TV show titles but they weren't the sort of thing I'd want in print.)

@Wosven I totally agree. I'm not very artistic so I often find that this sort of exercise gives me a way to learn how other people may have done things. One tip I have is to put the guides for different sections/areas of the spread on different master pages and apply those master pages when needed. This helps to reduce the confusion between guides.

[Wosven]

I usually create a lot of Master pages too, since when you create and use a new document, all is fresh in mind, but 3 or 6 monthes later, you'll rely more on good Master pages and Styles than your memory to remember how or why you created such things and how it should work.

Another important point is that you should be able to give the document to someone else and he/she should be able to use is easily, looking at Master pages, styles and few PDFs as example.

That's why we need real groups for text styles (that we can name in relation to master pages, so it's evident they're to be use with those).  APub is really fun to create new documents and styles, but it miss some long term features for a nice workflow (the creator isn't always the one using the document on the long run).

 

Doing a newspaper was more fun that I would have expected, since less colorfull, but details were more subtles.
It would be nice to be able to have "filets" (lines) for the frames and between columns

[GarryP]

I still need a lot of practice with text styles as they don't work the way I think they should. (Probably because I'm just used to doing things a different way.) This is one of the reasons why I tried this experiment but I'm still not anywhere near enough comfortable using them and I haven't even started to look at group styles. Hopefully, one day, they'll be second-nature to me, but not quite yet.

You could probably spoof the lines in the gutters/alleys by using paragraph decorations but they would require different styles for the first column and it wouldn't be a nice solution. Maybe something to be requested for version 1.8 after version 1.7 comes out for real?

[Wosven]

Style group work like this: you create a main (group) style, (impact font + black fill), and each new paragraph style "based on" this group will keep those attributes, and in hierarchical view will be positioned below the group.

For example, you can create "based on" style with different colours (or size, etc.).

 

Those groups are usefull when creating documents, when in hierarchical view we can see dependencies. If I modify the font of the base style, all the "children styles" will use this same font.

It's a parent-children type of groups.

 

What we need now is "real" groups for styles, that'll be used to store all the text styles needed in a part of our document (for example, all the red text styles that'll be used on the red master pages should be store in a group "red part"... the same with the orange and the yellow styles in their own group).

 

That's why it's fun to create documents and styles in APub. Not so much later, when you need to search for the text styles when they can't be grouped the way we usually group them in folders.
Or we need to use prefix for those styles... for them to be together when not listed hierarchicaly.