Indesign Update

[Victoria Steigerwald]

Ihaven't found a solution to the zooming issue, in fact pinching on my touchpad currently scross left and right. However, I have found that hovering the mouse over the scroll bar, whilst using two fingers on the touchpad, allows me to scroll up and down as normal. Hope this is helpful

Exactly same thing for me, it just scrolls left and right. I already knew about hovering on the scroll bar but the problem is that at that point I might as well use it normally. Thanks anyway for your contribution.

Update:

I reopened Illustrator after not using it for a few years, and browsing through the preferences I found this: (Edit > Preferences > General > ) Force Enable Pinch-to-Zoom on Touchpad.

Selecting it solved the zoom problem.

UPDATE:

Upgraded today to 19.0.

Now trackpad gestures work even worse. Basically 9 times out of 10 it doesn't even recognize them and in the remaining 1/10 they work just as badly as before.

Thank you for answering me.

All drivers are updated.

However I can't update to 23H2 due to a windows update error (0x800f081f) and I'm waiting for info from Windows support.

Unfortunately this can't be the problem: I don't have any kind of problem in any software except indesign (although in general the "gesture" experience is not perfect in all the adobe apps I use) and I have had this problem since I started to use indesing (in 2021), well before 23H2 and Id 19.0.

(I asked for help on the forum only now because honestly I only discovered its existence recently.)

I've already tried resetting the preferences and reinstalling InDesign, I believe I mentioned it somewhere in this thread. If not, here it is. As expected, no difference.

Also, under the post about the 19.0 touchpad bug, now ""resolved"", someone commented on the same issue as mine, so it's definitely not an issue specific to my system. I'll repost the screenshot of one of the comments.

What can't Publisher do yet, that Indesign can, that might frustrate an Indesign user to a point of saying "not...yet..." to Affinity? Or are we only talking about little-known, rarely used features, that Serif has wisely chosen not to replicate to avoid bloat?

I think comparison really depends on what you have used indesign for and what parts of indesign have been used, so in your case, to date, Affinity Publisher is just as featured as indesign. Preempting future feature usage may be prudent but by then any feature that may not have been in Affinity Publisher that was in indesign may have been added. A case in point would be, at the moment Affinity Publisher cannot export to epub files but if you never export to epub you have not lost anything.

A decent font manager is the main issue for me. If you end up with a missing font, you have to use a strange "find and replace" method of fixing it (which doesn't seem to work properly on Tables) rather than opening the font manager and replacing all instances of X font with Y font. The font manager lets you choose a substitute which can just get you by and let you continue, but it doesn't actually replace the font in the document, so it's forever complaining about missing fonts.

IMHO - I think the biggest shortcoming in APub is the lack of footnotes and endnotes. I've never needed to use these until recently, but I'm currently working on a book with my wife which needs quite a number of footnotes. I was intending to use APub, but we are probably going to have to use her copy of InDesign instead just because of this issue.

Foot- / endnotes are things I NEVER needed the last 35 years in business. Everyone has different preferences what is missing then. The last few things I am missing before the complete switch are making forms in APu, tables spanning several pages and plugin support in AD for our Mimaki.

This is really the problem. Everyone has their own ideas of what is "essential"! Until we started working on this current book I would not have considered footnotes/endnotes as "essential", but now trying to add them manually is proving more trouble than it's worth, (when we can just use InDesign instead). It depends on what type of work you are doing. For years my main DTP work involved posters, brochures, booklets and that sort of thing. This is the first time I've worked on a full length "scholarly" type of book, and it's proving to be a completely different ball-game! For my part, I rarely use forms or tables, when I do they are very simple ones, but I can see that, for someone else, better functionality in them is essential.

That's exactly what I was trying to say. And there's more to it: What I've learned from following these forums is that people are not equally flexible in transferring their knowledge and experience to a new piece of software. There are users (and I think and hope these might be in the majority) who can adapt to different implementations quite easily and can find and accept workarounds for missing features. On the other hand, some users really seem to expect that the entire UX needs to be perfectly identical to the software they come from. I've actually seen someone complain about the foreground and background color swatches of Affinity Photo being arranged differently than in Photoshop. (Now wait until they figure out that e.g. there's no such thing as Smart Objects in Affinity Photo. ?) So even if feature equivalents do exist, people may not necessarily be happy with the solutions the program offers. In the end, it's a question of how much the end result counts vs. the way to get there.

Good for you! If you run into problems or difficulties, just post here in the forums. There will be many who can help or can offer the "workarounds" that @kaffeeundsalz so nicely stated. We used Pagemaker for years, then InDesign (which I always hated) for several more in my publishing business. For me, Publisher/Photo/Designer have been a breath of fresh air from the very beginning. And they will only get better and better.

Lucky you.

I've tried several times between 2014 and 2019, and I usually ended up rebuilding the whole thing in ID or in AI respectively because I couldn't get any accurate PDF/X-3 output from Affinity.

By the end of 2020 when v1.8.x appeared to have somewhat matured, it got better, so I decided to convert my projects from CS5 to Affinity, but still pulling my long but increasingly scarce hair while at it.

Let me put it this way:

As long as the design stays within the Affinity window, all looks fine and well. Most minor bugs can be worked around by trying a different workflow. I, for one, even prefer many Affinity workflows to Adobe's. Affinity Photo's workflows are great for what I need. (I didn't even know about so many PS CS5 features until I read user complaints here on the forums about what Photo lacks compared to PS. D'oh! But then again, I'm not necessarily a "pixel guy".)

But if you can't output what you want your print guy to print on paper by delivering them the PDF document they need, you're pretty much s*wed.

As noted in some of those aforelinked threads, in those cases the best option remains PDF/X-4 export from Publisher, import that to InDesign, export to X-3 from there.

To clarify: by "freed myself from the Schmadobe Mindset" I mean that I'm no longer attempting to replicate Adobe's workflows in Affinity. Instead, I'm accepting that various things have to be accomplished differently. And finding that I like it that way.

APhoto's approach to the Crop tool being an example off the top of my head here: It made me crazy literally for years because I wanted it so desperately to work the same as the PS crop tool. Until just last year when I figured out that to crop an image fast and efficiently, I only need to change or switch a few steps in the workflow. Now it does what I want it to do, much better than how was doing it in PS previously.

I don't want copies of the Adobe apps (or workflows) in Affinity apps, but I do want consistent, well designed mental models and workflows within the Affinity suite. It's not like there isn't a TON of prior art on which to base best-practices and avoid 'things definitely not to do'.

Essential in the sense of what, things I personally would have mainly used it for, if it could deal with those things it's missing? - Well, in this case every thing which is essentiell for technical book writing and publications here.

So to say all the good stuff Indesign has knowledge wise (obviously) stolen from their aquirement of FrameMaker, like book projects with seperation of TOC, chapters, abbreviousion-/ citations-/ bibliography - references etc. into single project-files which together build the whole book/publication. General for technical writing essentiell sidenotes/footnotes/endnotes, a formular-/equation generator (math, physics/chemistry), sentence & word count etc. for article writers. ... And so on, to much to list them all here ...!

In it's actual state Publisher lacks all what is needed for more serious academic book and especially technical book publishing here. - So it might actually be more useful for building flyers, hand outs, business cards, fashion articles, non technical brochures, photo booklets & books, maybe novels/simple books and the like, but overall mostly all things advertising agencies and fashion magazines do and play layout wise with. - Another important and urgent point, independent from what you finally use it for, is overall stability, it's sadly still very buggy.

The fact that APub is mainly (not only) an app which increases the workflow efficiency of the available design, editing and layout features of AD and APh makes me assume that a feature of "Scriptability" could cause a series of other missed features become available. From this perspective a Script interface is a true essential feature, also for those who don't do coding.

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

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