A Shallow Dive into the great Affinity Publisher

[@lorensims4846]

Yes, page design is very different from writing but equally important.

[@johnnyragadoo2414]

A delightful video! There's a trick with that red triangle flow thingy. If you shift-click it, Affinity Publisher will clone the current page and flow the text to a best guess text frame on the cloned page. It will do that for as many pages as necessary to flow all the text. Shift-click won't produce what you want in all cases. Where it works it saves time, and you can manually flow to a different master and then shift-click from there to continue with the new master. Writers have to be publishers, at least occasionally. James Bond is a master of tradecraft but wouldn't be the same without his Savile Row haberdashery. Writers must similarly shake and stir their readers. Full force aplomb requires sartorial standards. Besides, AP is cheap!

[@WilliamGallagher]

Okay... KZbin is insisting I didn't reply to this but I saw me do it. I saw me enthuse at you: this is superb, thank you enormously.

[@TherealPaulMounts]

Great as always. A sort-of non AD tip - I get scripts from various writers that I have to “text-clean” all the time. I used to do special character search-and-replace in MS Word to get rid of all of the double spaces, multiple tabs/returns, but there is a way to do this in Pages that works great (and would be easy to build a shortcut for on a Mac). This video runs through it pretty thoroughly: kzbin.info/www/bejne/jKLbdoygjq6rerMsi=hzxuTrnaVb7JRka4

[@WilliamGallagher]

That looks like RegEx to me. Thanks: that video is playing as we speak. I'm going to pause it for a moment, get some tea, and enjoy it.

[@peterc2248]

Arrgh, saw the notification and thumbnail and went giddy with excitement BUT I'm heading out the door to an avoidable posh do. Can you tell I'd rather stay home and watch your (very brightly lit) sachet through this 'applicatione fabulosii'? TTFN but catch you in the morning with coffee and Anadin Extra :-)

[@WilliamGallagher]

Well, that has made my week. Thanks.

[@saintdonoghue]

I'm now certainly going to start using the phrase "avoidable posh do" ...

[@peterc2248]

I just watched this William, very large coffee and paracetamol in hand. Terrific as always. Your comments about the 'thinking' bits before opening the app resonated. Perhaps a video on page design for us doughnuts and numpties? I'm working on the dullest book ever - a compendium of Parish Council Minutes from 1895 - and I need all the help I can get to apply a million volts of life to it. A hundred and thirty years of utter tedium, so stupefyingly boring it makes fresh laid concrete seem like a psychotic episode. Many thanks Sir

[@WilliamGallagher]

@@peterc2248 I'm not going to ask why you're doing this, I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. But other than a Very, Very Good Index, I don't know what to suggest. Could you highlight all the rude bits in red?

[@WilliamGallagher]

@@peterc2248 Wait, I forgot: how was the posh do?

[@ghost-user559]

Have you used the Studio Link feature much yet? It’s brilliant to switch between Designer and Photo apps while staying in Publisher. Don’t use it very often but in theory it’s very nice to have.

[@WilliamGallagher]

Yes! To be fair, I most often use it to enjoy that it works. I skipped from Publisher to Photo to adjust an image, but actually the image was fine already, I just wanted to play. Love it, though.

[@ghost-user559]

@@WilliamGallagher Same here. I wish I had need of it more than I do. But I do find myself gravitating towards those little icons more often than not just to remind myself of all the features that I wish I had an excuse to utilize. Let’s hope Canva can refrain from breaking all our toys in the year to come.

[@tripley66]

I did indeed enjoy this, and the end stories. I did download Affinity Publisher, trial version, after your recent video. Fiddled with same, and then deleted....having no experience with prior software of the same type. BUT that does not keep me from enjoying what it can do and how you do it. The closest I come to a similar experience is uploading an EPUB file to kindle to publish a paperback and getting those awful messages that 'cannot print' and you gotta do something or this will self explode, or something like that. I try not to take it personally.

[@WilliamGallagher]

You'd be a demon a book design in this app.

[@tripley66]

@@WilliamGallagher This intrigues me. Could you say a bit more....have you used Affinity Publisher to do a book. I have done print books with lots of photos.

[@WilliamGallagher]

@tripley66 I haven’t, but the Radio Times book I mention was entirely set in Adobe InDesign so it can be done well.

[@FOBob-sr1fd]

I would love a short demo of the batch job feature. 😃

[@WilliamGallagher]

I've not used that. But I am compiling a list of features people have told me about and ones that they're looking for. If I get enough for a video, and if I can figure out the answers, I'll be sure to include this.

[@ashcross]

Useful and interesting as always, William, thank you. Although everyone is a bit worried about AI taking over creative jobs, desktop publishing reminds me that software has been democratising all sorts of skills over decades. The ability to create good quality magazines from home, using DTP, is one example. Sourcing images from Pexels instead of an expensive image library is another. Maybe AI is just a continuation of this, but of course we didn't reckon on software that had 'intuition' and 'intelligence'. Where is the creativity or humanity when we can just tell AI to create us a magazine filled with content? The next decades are going to be very odd for us (ahem) old timers.

[@WilliamGallagher]

I was with you until the last words. La la la, not listening now... La la...

[@ashcross]

@@WilliamGallagher 😁

[@barryporter6993]

basically a style sheet.

[@WilliamGallagher]

The flat plan? Not really, though until you said this I hadn't realised I left that out: every publication I've ever worked on has had a comprehensive and sometimes extremely highly debated style sheet. The stories I could tell you of Radio Times meetings over whether there should or shouldn't be a hyphen in "The X-Files", or whether it should be "thirtysomething" (which it should) or "Thirtysomething" (which it should not).

[@websiteckron8591]

Started also with quark depression… try to learn affinity..

[@WilliamGallagher]

Quark Depression! I love it. Wish I'd thought of that name.

[@anthonygladman6558]

Maaaaate... one text frame for the whole page set to two columns. Flow to same again on the recto and you're laughing. You can fiddle about with the gutter to your heart's content.

[@WilliamGallagher]

Brilliant, I’m having that right now. Thank you hugely.