Books

[MikeW]

19 minutes ago, Andrew Crompton said:

To return to the original post in this topic … 

I too am interested in producing (printed) books using Publisher. I notice in the Publisher help on Adding sections it says: "Chapter Two of a long publication might be in a separate file". So presumably it is possible to set up a long publication consisting of several sections, each in its own file.

However, I have not been able to discover how to do this. Anyone know?

Just create a new file and import your styles and/or colors from the previous chapter. Or, do a save As to a new name and delete the contents. It's the poor man's version of a book module. Without the book module...

The point of the thread is there is no book module that can keep track, synchronize page numbers, headers, footers, master pages etc., etc.

[Nathan Shirley]

4 hours ago, fde101 said:

...Publisher has performance bottlenecks related to large numbers of images (not pages) in a document.  Whether the performance bottlenecks are in its implementation of image embedding (vs. "proper" linking) or in the generic handling of the images themselves remains an open question.

I see. In that case, since Publisher still can't link images, it seems reasonable to assume that's the bottleneck. InDesign gives you the ability to select between several quality levels for displaying linked images -- perhaps it wouldn't be too hard for Publisher to adopt something similar if need be.

I was worried when someone wrote of bringing in hundreds of pages of text and seeing Publisher slow down a bit, which is why I tested a PDF. I was glad to see there were no issues there. I'm assuming the text issue might have just been due to a slower system?

[fde101]

10 minutes ago, Nathan Shirley said:

since Publisher still can't link images, it seems reasonable to assume that's the bottleneck

No, that is a seemingly common guess.

Reading an image from an external file is not necessarily more efficient than reading one from the original document - in theory, there is additional overhead to using linked images since the program needs to go out and find the file that is linked to (ask the OS to look it up and open it, etc.) where it likely already has the document file opened (granted that overhead shouldn't amount to anything noteworthy until you hit a few thousand images or so).  There is nothing about linked images that inherently makes them faster.

It is possible that when Serif actually gets linked files working as intended you might find they are actually slower than embedded ones for all we know...  or, your guess might be right and it might speed things up - or they could be for all intents and purposes the same.  We simply don't have enough information to do more than guess at this point.

 

12 minutes ago, Nathan Shirley said:

InDesign gives you the ability to select between several quality levels for displaying linked images -- perhaps it wouldn't be too hard for Publisher to adopt something similar if need be.

That could also be implemented for embedded images... maybe even more efficiently because the program could cache a scaled-down version and not need to worry about whether the externally linked image has changed since the cached one was generated.

 

2 hours ago, MikeW said:

The point of the thread is there is no book module that can keep track, synchronize page numbers, headers, footers, master pages etc., etc.

Agreed - we kind of derailed and jumped into a discussion of performance concerns over having everything in one document.  The original feature request is a good one, but for workflow reasons rather than performance ones.  If Publisher is choking on long documents with lots of images, whether embedded or linked or self-generating with some kind of fractal algorithm, that is an entirely separate problem from the missing book feature.

[Nathan Shirley]

1 hour ago, fde101 said:

Reading an image from an external file is not necessarily more efficient than reading one from the original document...

But that's not exactly what InDesign does. It seems to simply embed highly compressed versions of the linked images, so only needs to access the original files when exporting (or perhaps on demand when zooming into a specific image when quality is set to "high"). I would think hundreds of highly compressed placeholder images shouldn't be too big of a deal.

Of course as you say it's all speculation until we see how it's implemented. And yes, the book feature probably shouldn't have been derailed. I'd like to see that added as well.

[v_kyr]

4 hours ago, MikeW said:

The point of the thread is there is no book module that can keep track, synchronize page numbers, headers, footers, master pages etc., etc.

That's the essential and important part here!

It can be very time consuming and frustrating to setup all this from scratch, just to find then later out that things get messed up after xxx pages, or are unflexible for making certain changes, if you have to insert or reorder chapters, their numberings, chapter titles, tables, illustration overviews, the text hyphenation and spelling etc. - It's one of the reasons I settled over in the past to use a tool like FrameMaker instead of Word and the like, since with the later (word processors) it was a nightmare to get all that well done for books, manuals etc.

[Andrew Crompton]

12 hours ago, v_kyr said:

That's the essential and important part here!

It can be very time consuming and frustrating to setup all this from scratch, just to find then later out that things get messed up after xxx pages, or are unflexible for making certain changes, if you have to insert or reorder chapters, their numberings, chapter titles, tables, illustration overviews, the text hyphenation and spelling etc. - It's one of the reasons I settled over in the past to use a tool like FrameMaker instead of Word and the like, since with the later (word processors) it was a nightmare to get all that well done for books, manuals etc.

Yes. For really long publications (such as books with many chapters) it is far better if we can keep the individual chapters in separate documents and assemble them into a book while doing the things mentioned in v_kyr's post, such as reordering chapters, synchronizing styles, etc.. The Book feature in PagePlus did it right: we need the equivalent in Affinity Publisher.

PS I know that it is possible to place documents (eg. .pdf or .afpub) within a Publisher document, but this does not provide an effective way of assembling a book (I've tried it).

[Dstinct]

The main reason I use Books in ID is that it allows me to set up individual parts as other stuff is being worked on or at different stages. I may be arranging Chapter 4 while an editor is working on the second pass of Chapter 2 and the writer is working on a later chapter. This allows me to compartmentalize edits and material so that changes don't get undone when different parts are passing each other in communications. It's also a ton easier when you have multiple people working on a project, like a magazine, anthology or textbook. I don't have to open a huge doc and insert the text where it sits. As for art books, this is DOA right now. I tried assembling a graphic novel and the file was brutally slow to work with, and I also use my machine for VFX work. 

So far this look great for small projects and self publishing, but it is no where near ready for production studio use on a larger scale.

[Blair Purvis]

On 4/29/2019 at 12:44 AM, Seneca said:

If you want to design a pamphlet then use affinity Designer.

Quote

While useful, the Book option in Publisher is not essential as you seem to be implying.

 

While useful, the Book option in Publisher is not essential as you seem to be implying.

Some professional use Book facility in inDesign or QuarkXpress some don't and both produce very long docs.

What I'm saying is that we should not exaggerate the importance of that feature.

1

An interesting assessment - it is definitely a feature that I cannot live without and prevents me from making the switch. It is absolutely a feature that I consider essential to my work and workflows. InDesign-InCopy and the management of large documents is a mature solution by Adobe. I hope that future releases of Affinity Publisher can offer a more robust solution that would convince me to drop my (expensive) subscription.

[Distill7]

On 4/27/2019 at 9:16 PM, Jochen Bretschneider said:

Completly agree, Blair. 

Hope there will be something which allows you easily to create books, drag & drop  images & video into it, build interactive items and integrate AR and animations - and exports to formats which unlock the real potential of mobile devices of the readers ... still waiting, with you.

You'll have to waiiiiiiiiiittttttt for that dream of HTML and ePub support.