Transitioning from InDesign to Affinity Publisher: First Steps

There are plenty of reasons why you might want to make a move (or at least take some baby steps) from InDesign to Affinity Publisher. Maybe you’re dissatisfied with the current state of InDesign or with subscription software in general. Maybe you’re a true publishing geek and are itching for some new tools to play with after 20+ years of same-old, same-old. Or maybe you’re looking to cut costs and curious to see what Publisher can do for a one-time payment of just $55. InDesign and Publisher share many fundamental features and concepts. So, as an experienced InDesign user, you will probably get acclimated to Publisher very quickly. And if you’re aware of some key features and differences, you’ll be in for a smoother ride. In this article, I’ll lay out some of the basic steps in setting up Publisher to your liking and converting legacy files from InDesign and/or PDF to Publisher documents.

Setting Up Your Work Environment 

When you first get started in Affinity Publisher, you might want to adjust elements of the interface so it looks more like you’re used to seeing in InDesign, especially if you want to continue working in both programs. In Publisher, you can select which panels you want to show by choosing View > Studio, selecting or unselecting the panels, and then dragging them where you’d like them to appear onscreen. In InDesign, I prefer two stacks of panels on the righthand side of the screen (Figure 1).

In Publisher, you can’t do that, but you can choose whether you want a left or right studio

(or both) in the Studio submenu (Figure 2). You might also wish to customize Publisher’s keyboard shortcuts to match what you use in InDesign. To do that, choose Affinity Publisher > Preferences, and then select Keyboard Shortcuts (Figure 3).

Similarities and Differences 

An experienced InDesign user will quickly recognize many of the tools and commands in Publisher. However, there are also some significant differences between the two programs that you should be aware of.

Missing features

Publisher lacks a few features that may be deal-breakers for a particular job. If you’re producing a long document, be aware that Publisher does not have features for importing or creating footnotes or endnotes. If you place a Word document with footnotes or endnotes, they are simply ignored. Accessibility is also a problem because Publisher does not offer the ability to export to a tagged PDF. Support for interactivity in Publisher is limited to basic hyperlinks and bookmarks. So, you won’t be able to work with fillable forms, object states, buttons, audio files, or video files. Finally, if you use an XML workflow, you’ll need to stick with InDesign, as Publisher cannot open or place XML files. 

Master pages

Master pages in Publisher work a bit differently than their InDesign counterparts (now known as parent pages). When you add an element to a master page, Publisher adds it to its own layer. Each master page element is displayed in the Layers panel with a vertical bar on the left so you can distinguish them from regular page elements (Figure 4).

If you create a child master page (one that is based on another master), the elements from the master it is based on will be displayed in a group with that master page’s name (Figure 5). If you add new elements to the child master, they will be displayed outside of that group. If you drag a master layer to the top of the Layers panel, those items will appear above other elements on a page. This is how you would make sure elements like headers, footers, and page numbers always appear above other content.

Text styles

Paragraph and character styles in Publisher work similarly to how they do in InDesign, but they are all contained in one panel called Text Styles. If you’re looking to create something like InDesign’s nested styles, create a paragraph style and look in the dialog box sidebar for Initial Words, a similar feature that lets you set one character style to be applied to a specific number of words or up to a certain dash, space, or character (Figure 6).

You can apply keep options in a paragraph style as you would in InDesign, but they are called Flow in Publisher (Figure 7). 

Placeholder text

What InDesign refers to as placeholder text, Publisher calls filler text. To generate some, you simply select a text frame and choose Text > Insert Filler Text. By default, filler text is dynamic. As you adjust the text formatting or the size of the text frame, words are automatically removed or added to fit. Filler text also behaves as one collective object. You cannot select any portion at the paragraph or character level, much less edit it. If you don’t like this behavior, you can edit the preference for it, which will allow you to select and edit text at the paragraph or character level (Figure 8).

If you don’t like the fake Latin, you can add custom text in Filler Text preferences (Figure 9). As in InDesign, changes you make to some preferences in Publisher affect only the current document. To have the filler text preference affect all new documents, set it while no documents are open.

Table of contents

Creating a table of contents in Publisher is a similar process to how it’s done in InDesign. Place your text cursor where you want the table of contents to appear, then choose Text > Table of Contents > Insert Table of Contents. Select which styles were used to format the content you want in your TOC, along with page numbering, PDF bookmarks, and other options (Figure 10).

Converting Layouts to Publisher Files

When it comes to converting InDesign layouts to Publisher files, you can start with a PDF or an IDML file, or you can take a hybrid approach and use both.

From InDesign to Publisher via IDML

You cannot directly open native InDesign files (in INDD format) with Affinity Publisher. Instead, if you’re using Affinity Publisher 1.8 or later, you can directly open files in InDesign’s IDML format, which you can create with Save As or Export. (IDML is an XML-based file format designed for compatibility and automation and often used for troubleshooting documents in InDesign; you can find a good introduction here.) In Publisher, choose File > Open and select the IDML file to open it directly. The advantage to opening the IDML file (as opposed to converting a PDF), is that the resulting Publisher document will retain any paragraph styles, character styles, and master pages that were set up in the original InDesign file. The downside to opening an IDML file is that you will probably need to adjust your Publisher file to restore your design to its original state after the conversion, especially if it was a highly designed layout. Note: Conversions from IDML files are a one-way street. You will not be able to save the layout to a format that allows you to get back to an editable InDesign file. However, you can export it to a number of other file formats, the most common of which are PDF, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, PSD, SVG, and EPS. If you no longer have access to InDesign, you’re not totally out of luck, as long as you have a PDF version of your document, because Publisher can open PDFs directly. There’s also a third-party utility you can use to generate IDML files without InDesign; see the sidebar on IDMarkz for details.

From PDF to Publisher

You can open a PDF directly in Publisher—either an entire document or specific pages. Note that opening a PDF in Publisher is different from placing a PDF. Placing a PDF acts just as it does in InDesign, except that you can modify an embedded PDF directly from within Publisher in a new window, via a process that’s similar to Photoshop’s Smart Objects. Simply double-click the embedded PDF in the layout, and it opens in a separate window where you can make changes. When you save those changes, they are reflected in the embedded PDF. You cannot edit linked PDFs in Publisher, but it’s easy enough to embed them in the layout by choosing Document > Resource Manager. In the dialog box that opens, click the linked file and then the Embed button (Figure 11).

If you want to embed placed files by default, choose File > Document Setup and choose Prefer Embedded from the Image Placement Policy menu (Figure 12). If you decide to open a PDF with Publisher instead, you can get a new, fully editable multi-page document based on the PDF. A dialog box will ask you which pages to load and to select a target resolution and color space. Select Favor Editable Text Over Fidelity and Group Lines Of Text Into Text Frames to maximize the editability of the text content (Figure 13). The latter is particularly important to turn on. Otherwise, every line of text—even within the same paragraph—will end up in its own text frame. With most of the files I’ve worked on in Publisher, layouts created by opening a PDF didn’t require much, if any, tweaking to retain the visual look of the original. The design was more intact than when I took the IDML route. But, be aware of a couple potential problems: Any hyphenation in the PDF will be rendered in Publisher as “hard” hyphens, as if you had typed them. That’s not too much of a problem if the text won’t change. But if the text reflows, so will the hyphens, and you will need to manually remove them. This is a case when you’ll want to use Find and Replace (Text > Find) so you don’t miss any rogue hyphens. Because they’re not retained in a PDF, you won’t have the benefits of master pages or text styles. This may be fine for short documents, but for long documents, this can be problematic—especially if you’re going to continue working in the document. 

The best of both worlds

If you want the visual integrity of opening a PDF and the preservation of styles and master pages you get from an IDML conversion, you can split the difference. Here’s how:

1. Open a PDF in Publisher, and save it as your working file.
2. Open an IDML file in Publisher, and save it as a new, temporary file.
3. Copy and paste master-page elements from the temporary file to the working file.
4. Reapply the masters to the document pages.
5. Import the text styles from your temporary file to your working file (Text > Text Styles > Import Text Styles), then apply them to the text.

IDMarkz Bridges the Gap

You can automate the conversion from InDesign, via IDML or PDF, to Publisher with the help of the IDMarkz application by Markzware, which combines several of the company’s previous software conversion products. IDMarkz costs $99 per year as a subscription service or a one-time purchase of $149 for a perpetual license. The software also eases conversion to and from other programs, including QuarkXPress, and offers utilities to analyze and preview your files.

Using Publisher-Specific Features

As a fresh competitor in the design and publishing software space, Publisher offers several notable and unique features. 

StudioLink

Publisher’s StudioLink feature allows you to use features of Affinity’s companion programs—Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer—directly in Publisher while you work in your file. See Mike Rankin’s feature article in this issue for an example of how you might use StudioLink.

History

Publisher allows you to save the file’s history with the document by selecting File > Save History With Document. This allows you or someone else to see the steps you took while working in the file—and jump back to any of those steps (Figure 14). That information can be helpful if you need to train a coworker or client or if you want to go back to check if you already did something in the file. Note: When this feature is turned on, the file size increases. You can turn it off and resave the file to decrease the file size.

Easing the Transition

Making the transition from InDesign to Publisher doesn’t have to be a permanent choice. Since Publisher is relatively inexpensive, you might decide to keep both programs in your repertoire, using one or the other depending on the needs of a project or a client. Or, you could take the plunge, knowing that Adobe will gladly take you back (usually at a discounted subscription rate), if things don’t work out with Publisher. Either way, Affinity Publisher is a powerful alternative worth exploring, and one that you will likely find easy to pick up if you have experience using InDesign.