How do I make a greeting card in AFPub?

[Granddaddy]

How do I make a greeting card in Affinity Publisher?

I'm an amateur who has been using Microsoft Publisher now and then for decades. Long ago I produced multipage newsletters for a few years. Later I made simple things like trifold flyers and greeting cards.

Yesterday I needed a get well card for my grandson. I launched MS Publisher 2000 (yes, I'm a dinosaur) that I haven't used in a couple of years, selected the template for a blank side fold card, added text and photos to the individual pages, printed the card and put it in the mail. I was finished in 20 minutes despite the lapse of time since I last used the program.  Note that MSPub automatically prints some pages upside down so when the printed sheet is folded the pages will be right side up. Here are screen captures from the software showing how its done.

                

I'm hoping someone will make a simple tutorial or at least provide brief step-wise instructions for a complete project that will get me started with APub. I'm looking at producing some family history publications using my scanned slides and photos from the past 120 years.

I see that templates were requested in these forums during AFPub development. I'm disappointed that a few were not included to get amateurs like myself familiar with the workings of AFPub's powerful tool box.

[stokerg]

Hi Granddaddy,

To do this in Publisher, if you start a new document and click View>Guides Manager and where you have the Horizontal Guides, click on the icon to add a new guide and that should appear in the middle of the page.  Do the same for vertical and close the guide manager.  Your page should now be split into 4 sections.  The top two sections, you'll need to rotate your design so it's upside down.  The bottom left section is the back of your card and bottom right section is the front.

Then just print and fold the paper.

I've attached a very basic explain file showing this  

Publisher Card.afpub

[Granddaddy]

Thanks very much. That should get me started. I thought the greeting card would give me an easy start with AFPub since I had just made such a document in MS Publisher and understood the principles and had a specific design in mind.

I expected a steep learning curve with AFPub. But I've always told my kids and employees "What joy to awake every morning in a world so filled with things to learn." We laugh at steep learning curves. It keeps us young.

Then I opened AFPub and felt like I was standing on the gym floor looking 50 feet up at a new climbing route and wondering how in the world the route setter ever expected me to even get on the wall for this one. It wasn't just a steep curve, it seemed vertical with nothing to hang on to at the start. The two sample documents that came with AFPub did not seem too helpful for a beginner.

Someone started a thread asking about templates for AFPub at  https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/88658-are-templates-available/ . I searched the forums and found that templates had been requested during beta testing. Someone else suggested that templates are not appropriate in professional tools like AFPub.

My impression is that Affinity does not want to limit its products to professionals. There must be millions of amateurs who want to make newsletters for their churches, fraternal groups, homeowners associations, and civic clubs. Others want to make flyers and brochures for their small businesses and Internet-based cottage industries. They need both print and PDF outputs.

Serif's extraordinary pricing implies to me that the company wants to tap into that market, just like AFPhoto tapped into the hobbyist and enthusiast photography market. That generated a cottage industry of people making tutorials and offering courses pertaining to AFPhoto at the amateur level enabling people like me to use AFPhoto. I hope such tutorials will be forthcoming for AFPub. While tutorials on using individual tools are important, I also need tutorials on laying out and producing a document from scratch. MSPub made that possible for me with its dozens of templates. I hope AFPub will follow suit.

Thanks again for your help and the sample document that I've already downloaded and looked at.

[DeborahC44]

How would you make an envelope for this card?