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Missing text editor ?


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Hello,

I tested a little publisher and I must say that, like Photo and Designer, the application is really nice. However, something is missing (or I did not find how to do it), let me explain:

In InDesign, there is a feature that allows you to open a mode that allows you to edit the text in a simplistic window, as shown in the image below:

Text Editor in InDesign

This mode is very convenient because it allows to focus on the text and not on the layout. Besides, closer to Publisher, the older PagePlus version also had this mode.

Unfortunately, I do not find this feature in Publisher.

Did I miss something ? Is this planned in the future ?


Thanks,

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3 hours ago, Bodhi said:

Hello,

I tested a little publisher and I must say that, like Photo and Designer, the application is really nice. However, something is missing (or I did not find how to do it), let me explain:

In InDesign, there is a feature that allows you to open a mode that allows you to edit the text in a simplistic window, as shown in the image below:

Text Editor in InDesign

This mode is very convenient because it allows to focus on the text and not on the layout. Besides, closer to Publisher, the older PagePlus version also had this mode.

Unfortunately, I do not find this feature in Publisher.

Did I miss something ? Is this planned in the future ?


Thanks,

Nope. Some of us have been badgering for this feature for many months. It's vital to anyone who has to be their own editor as well as layout artist, we have been ignored/fobbed off every time. For reasons I cannot understand, in terms of Serif's existing customer base, they don't want to do it. I'm waiting for someone to provide a tutorial for poor sods who, having prepared their layout, get told that one or more articles must be rewritten. I hope this issue has moved on since I - and others - first raised it, but there's nothing I have found in the tutorials to suggest it.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I am extremely disappointed that Affinity Publisher is apparently ignoring requests for a text editor. It is a real blot on an otherwise great program. I have been using page layout programs since 1988, starting with PageMaker 2, and have had extensive experience also with QarkXpress and InDesign. All had a text editing mode, which was vital for my work (I am a writer and journalist as well as a designer). It is essential that Publisher adds this feature -- I would go so far as to say it could almost be a game changer.

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Not sure here what an internal text editor should offer concrete, what external editors don't do anyway much better for ages? Meaning what features should that internal editor offer for plain text input, that I can't do actually in a much better and more powerful way with let's say Sublime Text, Textmate, Emacs, VIM etc. and then copy just over the text?

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On 7/24/2019 at 12:03 AM, johnmcn said:

I would go so far as to say it could almost be a game changer.

I would not go so far. From my own experience I used the story editor quite often, but this is many years ago and more or less the bad monitor resolutions and sizes were to blame. With higher resolutions and bigger monitors (second monitor) I never used it again.

But in a way you can mimic your own story editor. Create a e.g. A3 page in your document to place your text you want to work with. Make all text frames linked in your document. Once you are done with your writing, decrease the height of the text frame you did your writing in to 1 mm. So all the text flows into the other text frames. Yes, I know, this is more a hack than a proper solution, but better than nothing until Serif decides one day to implement a story editor. ;)

 

------
Windows 10 | i5-8500 CPU | Intel UHD 630 Graphics | 32 GB RAM | Latest Retail and Beta versions of complete Affinity range installed

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  • 4 months later...

I purchased Affinity Publisher this week and I was testing it now and quickly realized that it was lacking a Story editor or Zen mode editor, or Distraction free editor, however you want to call it. Just a simple text editor that allows us to edit text without worrying about the layout and that has the usual keyboard shortcuts for moving between words like any other text editing area in macOS.

I was surprised to find that Alt+left/right arrow adjusted the kerning instead of moving me to the next word. Funny thing is that even after remapping that keyboard shortcut to Cmd+Alt+left/right arrow, it still won't work and move the cursor like in any other editing area in macOS.

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On 12/7/2019 at 5:32 PM, Elio said:

I was surprised to find that Alt+left/right arrow adjusted the kerning instead of moving me to the next word.

I think this was taken from InDesign?

In any case, they are addressing this (keyboard shortcuts) in version 1.8 which is currently in beta.

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On 6/20/2019 at 12:15 PM, Bodhi said:

Hello,

I tested a little publisher and I must say that, like Photo and Designer, the application is really nice. However, something is missing (or I did not find how to do it), let me explain:

In InDesign, there is a feature that allows you to open a mode that allows you to edit the text in a simplistic window, as shown in the image below:

Text Editor in InDesign

This mode is very convenient because it allows to focus on the text and not on the layout. Besides, closer to Publisher, the older PagePlus version also had this mode.

Unfortunately, I do not find this feature in Publisher.

Did I miss something ? Is this planned in the future ?


Thanks,

This week I tried to make a simple 20 page publication I made for years in PagePlus. In recent years I made it InDesign instead. I couldn't resist re-creating it in Publisher - layout wise it is very simple and beautiful with... 10 to 15 pages of text.

IMMEDIATELY I needed a story editor for error checking and corrections.

  • We have studiolink for fast editing of pixel images that needs to be adjusted 
  • We have studiolink for fast editing of vector illustrations that needs to be adjusted 
  • We have only clumsy in page editing of text and try that in huge publications (books) - text editing is slooow

I am not struggling with old habbits - the story editor is for fast and focused changes, changes to paragraph styling and for finding and correcting incorrect styling. Focused editing of the text, just like what the studiolink feature offers for graphics. You also have access to all the placed text before it is shown in its entirety. Today you only have access to text that is actually displayed in linked text boxes. Text is overflowing, but how much is there left?

Simultaneously Publisher started to behave strangely. I think because of a bug, but it was like there was three copies of the text in the linked frames. The TOC repeated itself three times and I had to insert pages and linked text frames to see what was going on.

Publisher is no faster or no different than PagePlus and InDesign. You need specialized tools to work with content. Internal or external. WYSIWYG editing still doesn't replace those tools. And certainly not when you need to change lots of content fast end efficiently close to a deadline. Not making changes to what the author sent you - but to the structure, styles, structure and tons of other layout issues.

My experience with Publisher 1.7 was a classic 1.0 experience. Plenty of tools implemented but unstable and very v1 like. There is no way I would trade in PagePlus x6, - x9  or InDesign for this version. And never without a lean text editor.

So, in short, a text persona with a story editor would do wonders. 

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
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32 minutes ago, Jowday said:
  • We have only clumsy in page editing of text and try that in huge publications (books) - text editing is slooow 

Why would you want to do text editing of books in Apub? I would say that I work with a word processor, LibreOffice in my case, and review the text there. Once it's reviewed and approved by author I copy it in Apub so that only previously uncatched typos need to be corrected. Heck, I even do text and character formatting in LO and it carries to Apub pretty nicely with a Ctrl+V (I won't dare to convert odt to .docx/rtf and import from there to Apub. I found that doesn't convert page styles to master pages anyways).

Quote

Publisher is no faster or no different than PagePlus and InDesign. You need specialized tools to work with content. Internal or external. WYSIWYG editing still doesn't replace those tools. And certainly not when you need to change lots of content fast end efficiently close to a deadline. Not making changes to what the author sent you - but to the structure, styles, structure and tons of other layout issues.

Structure is one thing and styles is another. I'm quite new to Apub, but I already found the find and replace options for styles even though I'm still learning how to use them. I might be missing the footnotes, the chapter numbering options from LO, the epub export option, stuck myself with the master page starting in the wrong side on the document (I found that is a bug that is being corrected in 1-8) and would have liked to be able to combine drop caps and first word/s styling at the same time to get a first chapter paragraph with drop cap for the first letter and small caps for the rest of the word and maybe one or two additional words.

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11 hours ago, lmarcos said:

 

Why would you want to do text editing of books in Apub? I would say that I work with a word processor, LibreOffice in my case, and review the text there. Once it's reviewed and approved by author I copy it in Apub so that only previously uncatched typos need to be corrected. Heck, I even do text and character formatting in LO and it carries to Apub pretty nicely with a Ctrl+V (I won't dare to convert odt to .docx/rtf and import from there to Apub. I found that doesn't convert page styles to master pages anyways).

Structure is one thing and styles is another. I'm quite new to Apub, but I already found the find and replace options for styles even though I'm still learning how to use them. I might be missing the footnotes, the chapter numbering options from LO, the epub export option, stuck myself with the master page starting in the wrong side on the document (I found that is a bug that is being corrected in 1-8) and would have liked to be able to combine drop caps and first word/s styling at the same time to get a first chapter paragraph with drop cap for the first letter and small caps for the rest of the word and maybe one or two additional words.

I am takling about the many edits for the layout of the publication that is needed after import in my use cases. Making these changes focused and isolated in a story editor is smart and effcient when dealing with big publications. WYSIWYG is slow and clumsy. There is just no way WYSIWYG would work.

I am not talking about changes to the content from the author. 

 

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
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12 hours ago, Jowday said:

So, in short, a text persona with a story editor would do wonders. 

+1

Acer XC-895 : Core i5-10400 Hexa-core 2.90 GHz :  32GB RAM : Intel UHD Graphics 630 : Windows 10 Home
Affinity Publisher 2 : Affinity Photo 2 : Affinity Designer 2 : (latest release versions) on desktop and iPad

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Similar reaction to others. Just purchased Affinity Publisher and brought in a (text-heavy) publication from Indesign.  Editing text of more than a few words is basically impossible. I don't know what to do  – resume $20/month to Adobe?

I was worried that I would discover limitations like this after purchase.  I hate to take up Affinity on their generous  offer of a 14 day refund, but I have spent days reviewing and learning Publisher. This small thing means I cannot switch from Indesign, much as I would like to.

Edited by HonestAbe
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On 12/13/2019 at 10:39 AM, Jowday said:

I am takling about the many edits for the layout of the publication that is needed after import in my use cases. Making these changes focused and isolated in a story editor is smart and effcient when dealing with big publications. WYSIWYG is slow and clumsy. There is just no way WYSIWYG would work.

I am not talking about changes to the content from the author. 

 

Maybe your big publications are bigger than mine, since I avoid creating books with more that 200,000 thousand words or so (I usually limit print books to 5-600 pages). I haven't needed editing the text yet with more than one or two print quality illustrations added, though. But for that page count I've only run into problems with old PC processors that wouldn't even allow working with documents that large.

I can agree that for texts that size the about half second lag in APub is annoying at best, but I rather have footnotes/endnotes than a fast plain text editor since I use APub for books and the working tool of choice for text editing there is the word processor, which allows to follow up changes, commenting and so on.

By the way, if I were to chose another persona for Studiolink, it would be something like a full fledge LibreOffice Write persona (with the collapse content at header level from MS Office and the writer2xhtml and writer2latex extension for epub and latex export) and not a plain text editor. That would make much more sense to me for an additional Studiolink persona. A photo editor to edit photos/illustrations, a word processor to edit text and a designer tool for vector graphics (or whatever, that's the part of studiolink I have yet to play with).

Actually, for fiction and some technical books I'd say a word processor with page layout capabilities is better than a page layout program with text editing capabilities, which might be better for magazines and catalogues.

And I'll stay as far away as I can from installing anything remotely connected with Creative Cloud on my Windows again. It installed a lot of unwanted and unsolicited software and was pretty time consuming to get rid of all of it even with Adobe cleaning tool and Windows unistalling.

PS Maybe an editable link for the default plain text editor that brings up the selected text would work for you?

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On 12/12/2019 at 10:40 PM, lmarcos said:

 

Why would you want to do text editing of books in Apub? I would say that I work with a word processor, LibreOffice in my case, and review the text there. Once it's reviewed and approved by author I copy it in Apub so that only previously uncatched typos need to be corrected.

This is how book editing is done, I'm afraid. Even approved word document gets imported into layout application and given to editors or author himself they will still find corrections.

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  • 1 month later...

The only thing that keeps me using PagePlus and not switching to Publisher is that I need to edit text in a simpler form than a WISIWIG one. I sympathise with those who rely on a text editor in InDesign or any earlier DTP software, there is no better way of dealing with editing within the application, especially for long texts of many chapters.

Individual stories may be seen in Writeplus as simple text, CTRL commands are so easy to move text around, edit and revise, without having  all the links and the extras connected with showing text frames getting in the way.

Please oh please supply us with this feature.

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  • 3 months later...

I also want this. Import with styles is so lacking I can't expect to go back and forth. I want to set up my styles and layout, then work with the text. In my publication, content and style must be edited together.

I can do this wysiwyg, but it would be nice with a text editor that supports setting styles.

A tagged text format that could be synced to an external file would also work. But then I am back at my starting problem, inadequate import.

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I do not understand this "requirement". Publisher supports »formatted cut and paste«. Therefore, any text processor (MS-Word, LibreOffice,…) can be used as "editor". You simply have to set up a document with the formats of publisher (demo text with formats → cut → paste to "editor" to catch them). There you have all the possibilties of a text processor. Paste back to frame(s) – done.

For the foreseeable future - probably always - these tools will offer better editing possibilities for set text than an integrated editor ever could.

And – to be honest – in my opinion the "inline typing possibities" of publisher are terrific. It is possible to create a text from scratch there compareable to a classic text processor.

Edited by NoSi
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3 hours ago, NoSi said:

I do not understand this "requirement"

That is right. You don't.

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
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Wow. This is a very helpful comment. Remember the times when you where a newbie and how it felt to get such an answer and what you thought about the guy who wrote it.

Possibly this may increase your willing to share your reasons, why you think that an integrated editor is a "must have".

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if I would use formatted cut and paste I would miss out all the formatting possibilities of AP. My workflow is to write and set styles (Heading 1 etc) in the editor. Format styles in AP. Import. Except it doesn't work to import styles.

I was adviced on these forums to start my project and only work in AP. It works fairly well. But an editor would be better.

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1 hour ago, MarkusKr said:

My workflow is to write and set styles (Heading 1 etc) in the editor. Format styles in AP. Import. Except it doesn't work to import styles.

What do you mean by this?

1. You write your text in your editor and set styles.

2. You place the text file in APu.

What do expect now from APu? To use the Text styles in APu with the same name? Unfortunately if there are styles of the same name, the styles from the text file will be changed from e.g. "fliesstext" to "fliesstext 1".

But there is a small workaround. Set up all the styles in APu having exactly the same name as those in the text file. Save the APu document as textstyles.afpub somewhere. Make a new blank APu document (without styles), place the text file and import at the text styles panel the document textstyles.afpub. You will be now asked what should happen with the conflicting styles. Replace them.

Or use Find and replace to replace the styles from the text file with the ones from your APu file.

------
Windows 10 | i5-8500 CPU | Intel UHD 630 Graphics | 32 GB RAM | Latest Retail and Beta versions of complete Affinity range installed

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I am testing Publisher currently for creation of manuals. Because poor cross referencing capacities it is probably not suitable for that. Which is sadden me because the paragraph formatting is really great. 

Due to this test I tried to move existing documents into Publisher and back. As described above this works fine for me, formatting ist preserved with a few clicks that reuse the given formats from Publisher. 

Beside that I create new pages with directly writing in text frames – which works formidable. Together with the property bar active on the top whilst writing it is close to text processing and behave mor fluent than some of them.

This is the reason why I can not see an advantage of an additional text editor.

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