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Affinity publisher save as indesign11/23/2023 ![]() But I really want some attention on that second-to-second workflow, with emphasis on long doc usecases. I'm sure there are ways to configure the UI to something closer to what I'm after. But I'm concerned at how SLOW I'm going, having to find and click buttons when hotkeys for repetitive tasks aren't assignable, or because feature arrangement isn't ergonomic. ![]() Having less features than InDesign: I can deal with that. But I hope you'll note I'm not asking for a single additional feature. I fully understand that Affinity comes in at a different price point than subscription apps (that's largely behind my urge to move away from Adobe). Why is Clip to Canvas buried in a View mode setting, if the background grey level is so dark we couldn't see what was clipped anyway? I'd like to see an ability to bring these UI settings into their own dismissable palette.Īll-in-all, this is a weird app. Oddly, there appears to be a disproportionate amount of effort placed in UI customising to little or no benefit. Page dimensions, units, UI prefs, templates, lots of things that are found in the Settings. I don't like the mandatory facing-page spread view if I'm not working in 2-page spreads: sometimes I'm working in single page docs like scripts, other times I'm working in multiple page gatefold projects, where I need to stay fluid in page order. And because everyone has different priorities on what to navigate through, allowing the user to set that workspace up lets them work faster and more confidently. I want to navigate through the tools and features quickly. I want to navigate through my document quickly. And why is there a dedicated Alignment tools button when the Alignment tools themselves are already exposed? Why aren't they in a palette with Transform, or Constraints? This is how valuable screen real estate gets wasted. By default, the alignment tools are duplicated and placed as far away from the layout tools as possible. All of these tools just create wrapped frame borders. However, the Tools palette shows 5 similar tools that don't offer significant differences: Frame text, Artistic text, all the shape tools and the image frame tools. Publisher's a layout program, placing elements in frames and allowing frames to 'knit' together into a cohesive document. The current style palettes almost serve this function, but I want to arrange these style lists in the order I prefer, with the ability to assign common ones hotkeys. Not only should these tools be easy for me to access, they're easy for me to prioritise and assign hotkeys for fast, uniform operation. For me, these tools largely concern Styles: character, paragraph, object. These are tools/features I'm constantly using in the development of a document. I divide features into four groups (and in order of priority): They might be filling out the toolshed, but I'm not getting a sense of why, or for what purpose. But I don't think the Publisher team has nailed down the usecases they're trying to satisfy. Obviously, being 'indoctrinated' with InDesign's UI I expect to run into a learning curve of sorts. It has a lot of features, but they're weirdly distributed. I've also been with my current employer's UX team in documenting features and services, and doing some UX Writing for the B2B SaaS we produce. ![]() I've started using Publisher to write long docs. I've been a graphic designer/ technical writer for a couple of decades, and a user of InDesign almost since its birth.
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