Publisher templates?

[gmilrod]

Where are the templates in Publisher?

Thank you

[Callum]

Hi Gmilrod, 

Welcome to the forums

Affinity Publisher doesn't come with any templates I'm afraid.

Thanks

C

[mharle]

I understand that AP does not include any templates. I am wondering if a good alternative is any of the commercial marketplaces that sell desktop publishing templates, such as https://envato.com/elements/lp/brochures/. The templates sold here, are compatible generally with one or more of these apps: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Adobe XD and Sketch. I don't see any that specifically mention support for Affinity Publisher. So my question - can someone clarify which other DTP formats can be used in Affinity Publisher?

Thanks in advance.

[Granddaddy]

Search the forums for 

publisher AND templates

and you'll find a lot of opinions about templates that began a year ago during AFPub's beta testing. Some want templates. Others say professional publishing applications should not  have templates at all. Does a program become more professional by leaving out useful features that would appeal to a broader range of end-users? Why would a software developer limit its market when simple additions to the product would broaden the market?

I am a rank amateur who thinks templates are important, as in Microsoft Publisher that I have used on and off for the past couple of decades. Whether Serif will supply templates, or encourage others to produce them, depends on how much Serif wants to restrict the market for AFPub. The reasons for not including templates are not clear to me. It seems basic templates could be created in minutes by experienced professionals and the rest of us would not have to stumble around figure everything out from scratch. As something of a computer and publishing geek myself I might find that fun. Most people I know who could benefit from a desktop publishing application will look elsewhere.

[Giggly]

I started thinking that it would be easier to find an Illustrator tri-fold template so I search for those.  I came across this video and translated the instructions to Designer. 

You can create a rectangle and when dragging it horizontally Designer will tell you when you hit 3.66.  You can copy it twice to recreate her 3 rectangles that she then converts to guides.  I figured out that you can just go to - View - Guides Manager - type 3 columns, 1 row, 0 gutter, Style outline, and color light blue, to recreate her guides. 

I created the attached 8.5 * 11 tri-fold flier template, with the .125 bleed by translating her instructions into Designer. 

Someone commented on her video:   Not sure this is a good template to follow, the folds are not all the same size. The cover fold should be slightly wider, the inside folded panel (left), the one that "folds into the middle" should be slightly shorter width wise to accommodate folding inward, better to grab a template from the print vendor you're sending the art file to, or get dimensions from online. 

To heed that person's advice you could just go to - View - Guides Manager - type a small gutter number such as .2. That will create gutter guides that you can snap and align all of your objects to. 

This video has more experienced tri-fold production information using Affinity Publisher.  You replicate the guides he creates in Guides Manager.

Let us all know if this works for you.

Affinity Designer tri-fold flier template.afdesign

[George Vaughan]

Please add the ability to save templates to Affinity Publisher.  Thanks!

[jrdavies]

I used the Serif desktop publisher a number of years ago and found the templates invaluable - so it is disappointing that there aren’t any with this product, even as a separate purchase.

[podge]

In Publisher 1.8.1, under the File menu, is "Export as template."

 

[Roz_afforum]

I bought affinity publisher thinking it was kinda an upgrade to my old serif page plus X7, that indeed was a replacement for serif page plus 1 on ( I wished it could open my old .ppp files.. but it was not campatible...).
Well... did you keep compatibility among affinity publisher and good old page plus x7 files/templates? answer: NO.
Do you provide any templates with affinity publisher? NO.

I'm feeling a lot disappointed by the lack of templates.
Ok, you wanted to start a new market for templates... but come on... a few simple templates wouldn't have hurt anybody!

And most important of all.. in business clarity it's an essential quality.
Why don't you write in large type on the web page of publisher that it comes without any templates?!
 

😆

[walt.farrell]

24 minutes ago, Roz_afforum said:

And most important of all.. in business clarity it's an essential quality.
Why don't you write in large type on the web page of publisher that it comes without any templates?!
 

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums, Roz.

I can only comment as a user, but I think you'll find that the Affinity Store accurately describes the capabilities and functions that are provided. Anything not described is a good sign that it's not provided (such as, for example, lack of compatibility with PagePlus, as it's files are not listed as an accepted format).

And the 10-day free trial (or most recently 90-day) would be enough to show both the lack of templates, and the lack of compatibility with PagePlus.

If you're unhappy, and you purchased directly from Serif within the last 14 days, you can return the software and get your money back.

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, Roz_afforum said:

Why don't you write in large type on the web page of publisher that it comes without any templates?!

What apps have you seen that itemize things that are not included in their product descriptions?

[Roz_afforum]

First... hi to all and thanks for letting me in this forum. I forgot my manners in my first post... sorry!

Templates are not something unusual. Providing them it's considered the norm in quite any software for creating documents of any kind since at least the 90's.
Yet I notice that even Adobe didn't provide templates in InDesign, although  many can be found online in their website.
So ... it seems this is the new business model... the one that moved many of us away from adobe indeed.

I didn't check for templates presence before buying ... my fault. It doesn't mean that a few basic templates for flyers,brochures, envelopes wouldn't  be very appreciated. Why reinvent the wheel eveytime?
I didn't check because I came from page plus x7, it's predecessor, full of templates.  And because the name "publisher" reminded me the Microsoft application by the same name, that is similar to page plus x7.
Now I realize that Affinity Publisher is more a competitor to InDesign rather  than the to  MS publisher or page plus "home" applications.

I'm ok with that. No problem.  I'll create my own custom template collection.

Thank you for your replies.

 

[walt.farrell]

13 minutes ago, Roz_afforum said:

I came from page plus x7, it's predecessor,

You're welcome, Roz.

One point: Publisher is not technically a successor of Page Plus. They are entirely unrelated products, with no code in common, and are connected only by the fact that both come from the same company.

[R C-R]

2 minutes ago, Roz_afforum said:

I'll create my own custom template collection.

Support for templates is a new feature of the Affinity apps, only added to the retail 1.8 updates about a month ago.

I suspect that as users begin creating their own .aftemplate files, some of them will be willing to share at least some of them with other users, possibly in this site's Resources forum or elsewhere.

[Alfred]

17 hours ago, Roz_afforum said:

I bought affinity publisher thinking it was kinda an upgrade to my old serif page plus X7, that indeed was a replacement for serif page plus 1 on ( I wished it could open my old .ppp files.. but it was not campatible...).

PagePlus X7 can open very old PP files, but only if you’re using the 32-bit version. Although the 64-bit version will have been installed by default on a 64-bit version of Windows, you can run the installer again (without first uninstalling the 64-bit version) and choose to install the 32-bit version: please note that although the two versions will happily coexist on your PC you can’t run both at the same time.

[dar4char]

Deal Breaker--I am a graphic Designer and really need the support of templates.  I Purchased every product you had with Serif, I loved starting off with a template and putting my twist on it--Sorry Affinity, I'm moving on--SO SAD

[KC Honie]

Bye...

[SeaCow]

just purchased publisher for my Mac Pro w/iOS in mid - July 2020 ...where are the templates?  Can anyone help me?  I also have Mac versions of Affinity Photo and Designer

[MikeW]

20 minutes ago, SeaCow said:

just purchased publisher for my Mac Pro w/iOS in mid - July 2020 ...where are the templates?  Can anyone help me?  I also have Mac versions of Affinity Photo and Designer

Only help I can offer beyond what is previously written here and other threads is that APub can open InDesign .idml files.

Which means one can find plenty of InDesign templates that come with .idml versions. You'll often find .idml listed, but sometimes the format is not mentioned. So search for...

free indesign idml templates 

And you'll find them. 

[MikeW]

Here is one such place where the .idml format is not specifically listed. I downloaded 3 various templates and opened the .zip files and .idml files are present. I didn't open them in APub, so do note know how well the do open.

https://stockindesign.com/downloads/tag/free-indesign-templates/

[khalid miller]

Agree with the disappointment!

I bought it thinking it would have followed PagePlus too. 

I used PagePlus a lot for business and found most of the templates to be unuseful to me, but to not include any! that is a gap. even 7 or 8, just as examples of how you set up a template would have been useful. 

I think that AP is leaps ahead of PagePlus, so I am not going to 'return' it, but I would appreciate this gap being filled

[Nita Reed]

Anything new on this?  I'm perfectly fine with Publisher not coming equipped with templates.  I am, however, curious if a resource for them has been found?  And I'm not interested in anything that requires a subscription to download.  I prefer to pay outright.  Or free is always good lol

 

[GarryP]

Have you tried here?: https://affinityspotlight.com/article/20-top-class-templates-for-affinity-publisher/
When you ask for templates it is probably best if you say what sort of templates you are looking for as “template” covers such a wide range of things. Technical manual? Lifestyle magazine? Business report? Cafe menu? Book? Flyer? Etc. Etc.

[Nita Reed]

On 5/29/2021 at 5:00 AM, GarryP said:

Have you tried here?: https://affinityspotlight.com/article/20-top-class-templates-for-affinity-publisher/
When you ask for templates it is probably best if you say what sort of templates you are looking for as “template” covers such a wide range of things. Technical manual? Lifestyle magazine? Business report? Cafe menu? Book? Flyer? Etc. Etc.

Need a novel

 

[GarryP]

Since Publisher has only been out a short time, and templates have been part of its functionality for even less time (if I remember correctly), its unlikely that many people have published a novel with it (some may have, but I'm guessing the number is small).
It’s probably more unlikely that those people will have made a template in case they needed to make another similar one.
It’s probably even more unlikely that, if they did go to the trouble of making a template, they would want to share it publicly after taking so much time to prepare one.
This doesn’t mean that novel templates doesn’t exist – there might be loads out there that I’m not aware of – just that it might be difficult to find one.
But, even if you could find one, you would probably need to modify it anyway unless you wanted to use the same page sizes, bleeds, fonts, formatting, page numbering, section numbering, etc. etc.
It might take more time to find one and modify it than it would to make your own to your own specifications.