Are Templates available?

[bici]

On 6/3/2022 at 11:36 PM, Catshill said:

Why not import templates from InDesign which has a much greater user base and therefore examples?

luckily i have a few idml files, but what does a newbie to APub do if they never used InD? try and find a decent free template to get one started. if you find a link let us know.

PS. As i really don't even want to import IDML files i am going to use the Affinity Publisher WorkBook and start a Newsletter Project from scratch. Wish me luck

[Catshill]

Creating a layout, with margins, bleed, layout guides, master pages and styles takes a little time but produces a better result and is far more satisfying in the long run imho.

[PaulEC]

When I go to create a new document, I have this dialogue in "Templates" (I assume they came with APub). I've never used any of them (although I do have a few templates that I made myself that I use occasionally). 

Assuming everyone has these, I wonder how many people actually do use them. I would suspect that most people who ask for templates would say that these are not the ones they want! (PagePlus had dozens of the things, I don't remember ever using any of them, because none of them were exactly what I needed!) So the question is, if APub did include a number of templates, just how many would have to be included to cater for all the different needs of the people who are so keen on having templates included in APub?

I don't believe that the lack of templates in APub is intended to put anyone off using APub, it is simply practical. If it's a really simple template, it's really easy to make one yourself, rather than trying to have all possible variations. (For example, why not include a "simple" three leaf folder? – Trifold? or "Z" fold? For A4? A3? Letter size? Legal size? All in portrait or landscape format. – That's sixteen different templates to start with!) The more complex the template, the more variations will be possible. If you want newsletters or magazines, just think of all the possible variations and layouts there are! There could be hundreds of templates included, but there would always be people who want something else.

As has been said, if you do want templates there are plenty out there to choose from. However, I'm sure for the majority of users, they prefer to create their own documents/publications etc, exactly how they want them, rather than relying on a template that lot's of other people are also using.

Personally I don't want software bloated with endless templates, that I'll never use; I'd rather Serif spent their time and efforts on new features and bug fixes. 😉

 

EDIT: Just for the heck of it, I thought I'd have a quick check of how many templates were included in PagePlus. I gave up at 500 and I wasn't anything like half way though the list! No problem for Sefif to do all those for APub! 😁

[GarryP]

PaulEC: I don’t have those templates in Publisher, and I can’t remember deleting them, so I don’t think they come with the application.

---------------

I’m having difficulty understanding why some people think that this is much simpler than it actually is.

To take the first suggestion of an example of a template given early on in the discussion, I’ll look at “Side-fold Greeting Card”.
Try doing a web search for side-fold greeting card and seeing how many examples there are with different layouts, purposes, sizes and complexities.

If Serif were to include a “Side-fold Greeting Card” template, which should they choose?

• A “Happy Birthday” card?
• A “You’ve passed your test” card?
• A “Congratulations on the new baby” card?
• A “Sorry to hear of your loss” card?
• A “Good luck in the new job” card?
• One of the hundreds (maybe thousands) of other purposes?

If you remove the purpose of the card from the template then all you have are some margins, and maybe a guide down the middle, and anyone can make that.

And, as asked above more than once, which size should it be?

• A4
• Legal
• Letter
• A5
• One of the hundreds (maybe thousands) of card stock sizes?

Why should Serif's preference be the one which is chosen? What about the people who want a different size?

Since Publisher is a ‘fixed layout’ application, with no automatic reshaping of the layout possible, unless a template just happens, by luck, to give you exactly what you want then you will have to manually move/resize pretty-much everything to fit the size of card stock (or paper) which you want to print on.

And the list of questions just goes on and on for all of the different types of things that people might want to make.

If Serif were to include templates with the software then those templates would have to be so generically-bland – to cater for the most possible use-cases – that hardly anyone would want to use them because they would be so boring.

In this discussion, when people have been asked to give details of what they want I have noticed a lack of answers, just rebuttals along the lines of “Why do you think I shouldn’t get what I want?” People have given some vague suggestions as to what they want but they have not given any specifics. If anything is to be made then details are needed.

If anyone is willing to give their version of an optimal list of templates, with details, then please do so. Otherwise you are just asking for vague ‘things’.

I don’t have a problem with Serif supplying templates, if they want to, but I don’t think the time and effort to do so would be well-spent.

[PaulEC]

31 minutes ago, GarryP said:

PaulEC: I don’t have those templates in Publisher, and I can’t remember deleting them, so I don’t think they come with the application.

I did wonder! - I can only think they were a freebie from somewhere! 😁 

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, GarryP said:

I don’t have those templates in Publisher, and I can’t remember deleting them, so I don’t think they come with the application.

Publisher currently comes with:

Possibly you have them in the Affinity Store section of your Templates dialog but haven't looked? Or possibly you just haven't chosen to have My Account install them?

 

[PaulEC]

I wondered why I had them and where they came from! 😄

[PaulEC]

On 6/25/2019 at 5:02 PM, Granddaddy said:

I got a chuckle while searching for DTP software reviews and found this statement at

https://www.g2.com/categories/desktop-publishing

To qualify for inclusion in the Desktop Publishing category, a product must:

• Provide templates for constructing layouts of publishable materials (e.g. newspapers, flyers)

That was the very first requirement. DTP software lacking templates will not be reviewed. The review site uses an interesting interactive grid to display the relative merits of different DTP applications.

Strange that they do still include APub and give it 4.7 stars out of 5. It's odd that they also include several apps that are not DTP apps (eg PDF editors.) that also don't meet all their (slightly odd) criteria! – I don't think I'd give much weight to their opinions! 😄

To be honest I always get a bit of a chuckle myself when people try to prove a point by referring to comments on some obscure website, as though anything said by anyone online must be a fact written in stone! 😁

[Old Bruce]

8 hours ago, PaulEC said:

Personally I don't want software bloated with endless templates, that I'll never use; I'd rather Serif spent their time and efforts on new features and bug fixes. 

I agree with bug fixes and new features needing to done before Templates that I will never use.

I have never used any of the templates that any of the software I have used over the last 30 years have included. I have 'looked at' some occasionally and always decided that it would be easier and quicker to start from scratch. I also make my own templates for various projects I do, and I aggressively edit (delete) the ones I make.

[MikeW]

1 hour ago, Old Bruce said:

I agree with bug fixes and new features needing to done before Templates that I will never use.

I have never used any of the templates that any of the software I have used over the last 30 years have included. I have 'looked at' some occasionally and always decided that it would be easier and quicker to start from scratch. I also make my own templates for various projects I do, and I aggressively edit (delete) the ones I make.

If I recall, the templates Serif previously supplied were not made by themselves. I might be misremembering...

But, that also means, if true, there was likely on-going royalties, likely based on sales which is one thing on new sales when in general the cost to the customer was $100 on average. Quite another when $50 per license. While, again if true, that means less/little taking time from development, it lessens profit.

If Serif owned those templates outright, they could contract with an idiot like me to convert them for very little cost and/or simply give permission to do so for those of use that have them.

[Granddaddy]

5 hours ago, PaulEC said:

Strange that they do still include APub and give it 4.7 stars out of 5. It's odd that they also include several apps that are not DTP apps (eg PDF editors.) that also don't meet all their (slightly odd) criteria! – I don't think I'd give much weight to their opinions! 😄

To put into context my comments from three years ago on 6/25/2019, we should take into account the content of the G2.com page as it was three years ago, not as the page appears today. Sadly, I cannot find a revision date on the page, but we can still learn when the page started to include APub by taking a quick visit to the Wayback Machine.

In 2019 and 2020 the page from which I quoted did not include APub. For example:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190711154413/https://www.g2.com/categories/desktop-publishing
https://web.archive.org/web/20191024222725/https://www.g2.com/categories/desktop-publishing
https://web.archive.org/web/20200426211843/https://www.g2.com/categories/desktop-publishing

Eventually the site did include APub, as shown in the page capture for August 19, 2020
https://web.archive.org/web/20200819015631/https://www.g2.com/categories/desktop-publishing

As to weighing the site's opinions, they themselves do not seem to have any opinions. Instead they describe an algorithmic process for scoring based on reviews collected from other sites.

On August 22, 2020, the site explained its scoring procedures as follows
https://web.archive.org/web/20200822180842/https://research.g2.com/g2-scoring-methodologies

Today's scoring procedures are at
https://research.g2.com/methodology/scoring

At the moment the G2.com site ranks APub ninth on its list of top 10 products. APub is rated as having higher than average performance with middling market presence. I assume that will not surprise anyone in this forum.
https://www.g2.com/categories/desktop-publishing#grid
https://www.g2.com/categories/desktop-publishing

[Granddaddy]

Those amused as I am by the various directions of this thread might also enjoy reading F. M. Cornford's classic 30-page monograph titled "Microcosmographia Academica." 

When my boss gave me a copy some 50 years ago, I was far too young to make sense of it. After years of observing the habits of mind and patterns of thought in academia, meaning emerged. I came to appreciate the wit and wisdom of this Cambridge classicist.  His insights, published in 1908, have wide application in our own times, as revealed in episodes of "Yes, Minister."

You can find a copy at, among other places,
https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/iau/cornford/cornford.html
https://archive.org/details/MICROCOSMOGRAPHIA-ACADEMICA
https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/baked/micro.pdf
http://educ.jmu.edu/~brownet/Microcosmographia_academica.pdf
 

[Catshill]

What I should do is save my designs as templates.

What I actually do is recycle the last copy of my design and strip out dynamic content. And repeat…

[bici]

On 6/5/2022 at 3:29 AM, walt.farrell said:

Publisher currently comes with:

Possibly you have them in the Affinity Store section of your Templates dialog but haven't looked? Or possibly you just haven't chosen to have My Account install them?

 

well li'll be a horses ass!!! why did i not ever notice those before! i can only guess because the thumbnail is not very eye inspiring. Small quible : Master page is blank and not in the least bit instructive. 

[walt.farrell]

7 hours ago, bici said:

Small quible : Master page is blank and not in the least bit instructive. 

If instructions were on the Master pages, then they would repeat on all the document pages and would need to be removed from them. Also, when you open a template, you're on a document page, not a Master Page, so I think it's better to have the instructions there. And they do have them on the document pages (at least 2 of those templates do; the Cookbook one seems to have no instructions, but it's pretty clear what you'd need to do even without them, in my opinion).

[PaoloT]

8 hours ago, bici said:

not in the least bit instructive. 

I dunno, but I found the bonus templates very instructive. Very good modern design, in my view.

Paolo

 

[Pšenda]

1 hour ago, PaoloT said:

I dunno, but I found the bonus templates very instructive. Very good modern design, in my view.

... There is just a small bug - maybe training for users to use Preflight 🙂

 

[walt.farrell]

30 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

... There is just a small bug - maybe training for users to use Preflight 🙂

 

That looks like you're using the Letter version of the template (as the A4 version has "Content" there, not "Gradient").

However, in mine, there's only 1 T in "GRADIENT", so I'm not sure why yours has two of them.

The is a spelling error ("EDITON" rather than "EDITION") in the A4 version, though.

[Pšenda]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

That looks like you're using the Letter version of the template (as the A4 version has "Content" there, not "Gradient").

Edit: letter version has'nt bug (double TT), but it is also "Gradient".

Edited June 7, 2022 by Pšenda

[PaoloT]

1 hour ago, Pšenda said:

... There is just a small bug - maybe training for users to use Preflight 🙂

Funny, I have different content, and no reported errors. In any case, is someone reusing the text from a template? If so, Publisher's filler text might generate even more interesting results!

I insist to say that these templates are a great school, and great design.

Paolo

 

 

[walt.farrell]

27 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

Edit: letter version has'nt bug (double TT), but it is also "Gradient".

I'm puzzled why your A4 version has GRADIENTT, but my A4 version has CONTENT?

Did you download from the Store via a web browser, or via My Account (as I did)?

 

[Pšenda]

I downloaded them today via My Account.
I tried uninstall and download - and it's still Gradient(t).

[walt.farrell]

29 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

I downloaded them today via My Account.
I tried uninstall and download - and it's still Gradient(t).

Thanks. I have them from awhile ago. Maybe there's a newer version that has a problem. I'll check further.

[bici]

On 6/7/2022 at 3:54 AM, PaoloT said:

I dunno, but I found the bonus templates very instructive. Very good modern design, in my view.

Paolo

 

yes, yes... i didn't mean to slag  them. But should not the master pages show the guides, margins etc etc? or have i missed something  yet again!

[PaoloT]

2 hours ago, bici said:

But should not the master pages show the guides, margins etc etc? or have i missed something  yet again!

They do, if you turn them on.