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Cross Reference Feature and Book Feature


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As a long time User of Adobe InDesign CC, I am very impressed with Affinity Publisher.   We are looking for alternatives to Adobe products and their high priced ripoff subscriptions.

Affinity does practically everything InDesign CC can do and some things better, except for 2 things, which we need.

1.  Cross Reference feature for assigning Figure numbers to images.

2.  Books - the ability to compile sections into a combined book.

Maybe these features exist, and I don't know how to use them?

Or will these features be added in the future?

Thanks,

Bob M 

Book Pallette.jpg

Cross Reference.jpg

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Both of these things have come up multiple times in other threads and they are not currently available in Publisher.  I would expect cross-references to be added within the next few releases, the book feature possibly a bit further off, but we should get a better handle on that when the road map is published, probably within the next few days now that Publisher is officially released.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm in the same boat as the OP, but have a couple more items to add to the list of things that we would need before switching our team over to Affinity.

  • Export to a Word file, or some way for editors to easily edit text only
  • Footnotes and Endnotes
  • Ability to pull some content from a database for things like bibliographies

I couldn't find the roadmap, is that out yet?

I'm very excited about what I see already, we'll buy at least 15 licenses the moment those features are available.

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  • 2 weeks later...
39 minutes ago, sp@sawyerpaul.com said:

+1 for both cross references and book files. Massive time savers when working with large documents. 

 

Hello there,

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Affinity Suite on Windows (V2) and iPad (V2). Beta testing when available.

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  • 10 months later...
Quote

1.  Cross Reference feature for assigning Figure numbers to images

Are there any updates on this? Is it already possible?

I just want a simple reference like “Image X on page Y” or just “X” with a hyperlink to the page to be automatically updated. I have seen a workaround on the forum, but it is too much work (better just go back to InDesign…)

It is almost unbelievable that such a feature doesn't (yet?) exist.

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12 minutes ago, C18 said:

I just want a simple reference like “Image X on page Y” or just “X” with a hyperlink to the page to be automatically updated.

The first requires the workaround you've already seen. The second is simple:

  1. On the page to be referenced, Select the text you want to refer to, and create an Anchor using Text > Interactive > Insert Anchor.
  2. On the page you want to refer from, type your "X" and Select it, and turn it into a Hyperlink that points to the Anchor you created using Text > Interactive > Insert Hyperlink.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
    Laptop 2: Windows 11 Pro 24H2,  16GB memory, Snapdragon(R) X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) 12 Core CPU 4.01 GHz, Qualcomm(R) Adreno(TM) X1-85 GPU
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 18.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sequoia 15.0.1

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Hello

But I want to avoid typing “X”, I want "X" be referenced to the image number. That means if the image number is changed (one Page deleted, or one image added) "X" is also updated. Is it possible? Because in a document with dozens of images, errors will be made if all the numbers are not cross-referenced.

Thank you.

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Sorry, @C18, that wasn't clear to me from your phrasing. That also requires improvements to the cross-referencing capabilities.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
    Laptop 2: Windows 11 Pro 24H2,  16GB memory, Snapdragon(R) X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) 12 Core CPU 4.01 GHz, Qualcomm(R) Adreno(TM) X1-85 GPU
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 18.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sequoia 15.0.1

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On 10/24/2021 at 4:25 PM, C18 said:

Hello

But I want to avoid typing “X”, I want "X" be referenced to the image number. That means if the image number is changed (one Page deleted, or one image added) "X" is also updated. Is it possible? Because in a document with dozens of images, errors will be made if all the numbers are not cross-referenced.

Thank you.

For actually numbering them (captions under the images), this can be done using a paragraph style.  Create a paragraph style and when editing it, under Paragraph / Bullets and Numbering, select a numbering type (1, 2, 3, 4... for example), add "Image " or similar in front of the number placeholder, add a unique "Name" (ex. "image_numbering"), and check "Global".  Set "Restart Numbering" to "Manual Only":

 

1072384143_ScreenShot2021-10-26at7_53_06AM.png.c2539347614d62a059557b15e1d89085.png

 

You can create a list of captioned images by creating a table of contents and selecting this style as the only one to include.

 

 

To create cross-references, you need to create additional styles based on that style (right-click the paragraph style, "Create Style Based On..." for each individual image caption that you want to cross-reference.  If you are using a table of contents to list all of the images, you will need to make sure that all of these are selected for that table of contents, so name them accordingly to ensure it is easy to avoid missing one.

For the cross-reference, create a unique table of contents for the reference and select only the style associated with that reference.  You may need to play with the styles and formatting to get it to look acceptable (sadly there doesn't seem to be any obvious way of inserting the word "Page" before the page number).  Unfortunately the TOCs don't currently work very well if they are not on lines by themselves so you may need to arrange for the cross-references to be on separate lines of the text.

I haven't tried this yet, but I suspect the issue with needing to have the TOC on a separate line could be worked around by placing it in an inline text frame within the text, and that an additional text from containing "on page" could be pinned to the text at about the same place in order to keep it above that frame, though the spacing around that text to account for the possibility of the number changing would obviously be less than ideal.  I suspect it could be formatted in a way that would be acceptable for some documents, but certainly not for all of them.

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1 hour ago, fde101 said:

To create cross-references, you need to create additional styles based on that style (right-click the paragraph style, "Create Style Based On..." for each individual image caption that you want to cross-reference.

I'm not sure that works if you need references to be in a different order, or you need to refer to something more than once.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
    Laptop 2: Windows 11 Pro 24H2,  16GB memory, Snapdragon(R) X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) 12 Core CPU 4.01 GHz, Qualcomm(R) Adreno(TM) X1-85 GPU
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 18.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sequoia 15.0.1

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Just now, walt.farrell said:

I'm not sure that works if you need references to be in a different order, or you need to refer to something more than once.

The numbering would come from the paragraphs being referenced, so the order of the numbers would be established by the caption.  As long as the same "Name" for the global numbering group is used and the numbering is not reset, that will provide an established order with unique image numbers.  The TOC which is used as a reference contains a copy of the number which comes from the caption, so it should always match the one which is referenced.

Using a separate style with the same numbering group for each referenced caption means that a specific caption can be targeted.  For multiple references, a separate TOC would be created each time it was referred to, but they could all point to the same style and would therefore reference the same number.

I checked and this does work.

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1 hour ago, fde101 said:

I checked and this does work.

Thanks. Can you provide a sample document that demonstrates it, please?

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
    Laptop 2: Windows 11 Pro 24H2,  16GB memory, Snapdragon(R) X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) 12 Core CPU 4.01 GHz, Qualcomm(R) Adreno(TM) X1-85 GPU
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 18.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sequoia 15.0.1

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39 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Thanks. Can you provide a sample document that demonstrates it, please?

See attached - quick and dirty demo:

Cat Pen.afpub

 

It would be nice if someone from Serif would spend a few minutes playing with this technique; a number of shortcomings (and several very likely bugs) in the current TOC feature become readily apparent.

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