If I were on the Serif team, on a management position, I'd drop everything else for the moment (save, perhaps, stability work Publisher just crashed on me right now) and focus on that one feature for now (assuming, on a worst case scenario, that the devs can only focus on one issue at a time I do believe they have a more complete team and can walk and chew gum at the same time, and tackle more than one feature at once). That “best ‘for now’” you speak about is just not good enough. The autoflow suggestion is about the best "for now" option we can suggest until more complete master page functionality is available. I'm sure that will be coming, it just isn't here yet. I don't think anyone here disagrees that the use of linked text boxes on master pages is the superior solution for this, and the Affinity team has reiterated several times that master page functionality for Publisher is currently incomplete. And the devs at Serif have a history of reinventing the wheel in some pretty debatable ways, like… that crazy artboard/layer implementation on AD, about which I've been complaining for months now. I'm all for challenging preconceived notions, but there are some sacred tenets in raster/vector/DTP apps that would be better left untouched. I get it, it probably removes an extra step, but it doesn't adhere to conventions and may make your work even harder in more complex documents. That still probably doesn't change the fact that the philosophy for editing those after the fact (including parameters like, say, baseline grids, styles, etc) is a bit contrary to all other DTP apps (basically, if you want to change your document, you edit your master pages and styles, and boom, there you go if your content exists outside master page objects, are you supposed to just change system-wide document settings and pray for that not to screw up your document in certain pages? That may be a recipe for disaster, because it doesn't allow for finer control on a per-master basis).
Maybe it already works for really basic stuff. (BTW you can have columns within text box).
Microsoft publisher master page vs normal page manual#
It is just if you want to have several text boxes / page, readjust after setting the text that manual work happens. No need to use master pages for this, text autoflow works in all of them just fine. Conversely, if you can just place your text in empty pages and then have to manually apply masters to them, it's yet another extra step you shouldn't have to take again, that feels like you're fighting against Publisher, instead of having it work for you.įor the record, Adobe Illustrator also allows you to flow content between different text frames, so… might as well create the small leaflets/booklets Publisher is only good for in Ai instead, and keep using InDesign for serious DTP work (not that I wouldn't do all of that work in InDesign anyway… Ai is still pretty dismal when it comes to typesetting and performance after having only a few linked files). What are those good for, then, pray tell? Dividers? Box backgrounds? Page numbers? Give me a break… If you can't create a master column/box/grid layout and fill it out with pre-written text en masse, and just create some pretty page decorations instead and have to do all the typesetting work by hand, that's not a DTP app it is, as I said, a glorified vector editor. You can't place text into text frames from master pages, period. Might already be possible: Odd-page masters: Any page that has an odd-page -master assigned (chapter head) automatically gets its spread extended by an empty even side if the previous non-empty page is on the odd side.Īnd therein lies the only major, absurd, unacceptable limitation of Affinity Publisher. I'd like to mark text frames as truely "auto-extending", so that changing the line height by 5% does not force me to check every chapter.
Repeat for each chapter.īTW: "auto-extend" is a manual process. More or less that's what I'd do now: Delete all but the first two pages of each chapter (to not loose the chapter head but keep the page with the content master), fix the frame positions on page one and two of the chapter, add enough empty pages, auto-extended the second page, remove unused empty pages. if possible, but if not possible this kind of stuff is plain utterly frustrating. I'd probably just reimport the whole thing into a new document with the proper page size, frames etc. This is what you could call a "killer feature" (albeit in the opposite way of how it is normally used as it could kill use of Publisher instead of promote its use).
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