Affinity 2 is out

Lots of features, including footnotes, endnotes, and sidenotes, which were not well supported in version 1.

As best I can tell, this is truly an Adobe-killer. $99 initial discounted price for a bundle of Publisher, Photo, and Designer, no subscription.

You can't export to ePub, probably perceived as a big weakness in Affinity Publisher. On the other hand, most of what any desktop publishing package can do is lost to ePub output.

In my use cases, I don't care. Apple Pages will create ePub output about as well as anything else, as far as I've seen.

 

YAWN!

From what I've been reading on the Affinity forum, while the new version of Publisher allows the creation of footnotes and endnotes within Publisher, it does NOT import footnotes or endnotes when importing documents from Word or InDesign. For as long as we have been waiting for footnote/endnote support in Affinity Publisher, I find that omission to be a glaring defect.

And, of course, they didn't add Epub export, which is what I was waiting for.

I guess I'll bypass this version and continue working in Word (or TextMaker).

 

For ePub, are there any desktop publishing tools that do much good? In Apple Pages, for example, you can export either a word processing or a desktop publishing document to ePub, but there are limitations.

An Apple Pages desktop publishing document can only be exported as fixed layout. For general use, you probably want reflowable, which is only available in Apple Pages for word processing documents (Pages has two modes, word processing and desktop publishing).

When I "place" a docx file with footnotes in an Affinity Publisher document, the footnotes appear as intended, and are imported as Publisher footnote objects.

There are differences between footnotes in Publisher and Word.

A footnote in Word is, as far as I know, something that appears at the bottom of a page. In Affinity Publisher, the footnote is tied to the text block. Footnotes can appear below the text, at the bottom of a column, at the bottom of the text frame, or below the text frame. I believe the option to position the notes below the text causes them to appear after the text in the case where the text flows to multiple frames. You could use that to position foot notes at the end of a chapter, I suppose.

If there are any test cases you would like me to stage, I'm at your service. Your posts have always been enlightening and it would be an opportunity for me to explore.

 

By what I have always considered the definition, footnotes appear at the bottom (the "foot") of the page on which the reference is located. End notes can fall at the end of each chapter, or at the very end of the book.

If it's at the end of a chapter, it isn't a footnote.

 

It appears Affinity works the way you would expect. I was wrong about the "below text" option.

Each footnote can have its own placement option. Below text means the footnotes are pinned to the last line of text in the frame, whether or not it flows to other frames. Other options are inside the frame at the bottom, outside the frame at the bottom, and whether or not the footnotes conform to column widths in multi-column text.

At first, it didn't seem like the footnote options were working correctly. Then I realized each footnote can have a different placement option.

The only quirk I've found is mild. If you are focussed on a text frame, you can't set the document-wide foot/end/side note options. Click anywhere outside a text frame and you can set the document-wide options, but not the options per individual note.

 

My assessment on importing documents with footnotes was based on third party reports. As more comments have appeared on the Affinity forum, recent reports sugegst that Word documents with footnotes do import correctly. However, the reports are still unanimous that imports from InDesign with footnotes do not work.

 

I'm relying on unverified community reports for a lot, too. I don't have InDesign, but I believe the reports about footnotes from that source are likely accurate.

I also don't have Word. Docx exports from Mellel, Apple Pages, and Nisus all seem to work fine, so there's full disclosure on that. Curiously, the import content feature doesn't import footnotes, you use the "place" feature for that.

Affinity endnotes are pretty cool, too. You can put them anywhere you want by putting them in a separate frame, and you can also aggregate all the endnotes within a section of the document in a independent frame that can be put anywhere.

My delight with Affinity is that it puts a lot of power on my desktop and it's giving a comeuppance to Adobe and their pricing.

 

You are correct for novels and non-fiction books that are predominately text. However, more graphically-oriented books (such as children's books and cookbooks) typically have the page layout as important as the words. Such books are usually converted to e-books as "fixed layout" offerings. Doing such books would be a natural use for a page layout (i.e. DTP) program, so being able to use the page design program to also generate the EPUB file would seem to be a no-brainer. Except to the people at Serif.

 

Affinity exports to PDF. My experience is with print output, but the PDF output looks fine.

Unfortunately, I think PDF to ePub conversion (not something Affinity will do, anyway) is not always as nice as it should be.

If inDesign does the job you need, there's probably no reason to migrate to Affinity. I'm a cheapskate. I'd rather spend a little more than one month's subscription to Adobe to have an Affinity license subscription-free. By month two I've got money in the bank and a lot of what Adobe does on my desktop.