Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features

[Acorn]

Ben, thank you for the detailed insights into your logic.

I wish you well with Serif's Affinity suite. Having reasonable understood your objective, I would never have chosen Serif or Xara as a repository.

Your MSA database is an abstract and keyword indexer that leads to a two-step search for a phrase in an actual document.
It does provide a form of digital asset management (DAM) that allows you to link in external assets. By external, I include local filestore as well as Internet.

I would actually develop your Zettelkasten system slightly. Change the date to yyyymmdd. This immediately affords a date order in MS Windows. The ddd abbreviated Month forces an alphanumeric sort that jumbles the months.
CamelCase is good but I would go a step further and include some keywords into the filename. MS W7 accommodates 260 bytes for the full path length. W10 NTFS can be as much as 32,767 bytes.
yyyymmdd-ThisIsAnExceedinglylongFileName-Keyword1-Keyword2-Keyword3.txt

Using this approach, I can use 'Everything' to quickly locate a filename through fragments of words: 'his ord2 word3' catches the above filename and highlight the found fragments in no time: I have 3M files stored locally and I can type in 202403 as fast as I can and I get 604 hits.
Using Obsidian, which comes with its own Search engine, the retrieval is more sedate (way faster than MS Windows), but here, you are searching all content and filenames.
Saving a Search as a Bookmark returns results extremely fast.

Archival storage under W7 is your main problem. At some time your W7 machines will die and your archive and legacy programs will disappear.

I took your https://www.benwiens.com/transportation2.html page and quickly converted it to MarkDown for use in Obsidian.
I renamed it 20230305-UrbanTravelIssues.md.
I added in the keywords as Tags.
I added in all the associated images as adjunct files.
===
I searched for a range of terms and all worked perfectly.
I opened up the Links window and picking any of the images, I could fire it up into its native editor, alter and save it and it immediately updated the principal document.

So provided you have a text editor and a image editor, you could even throw away Obsidian & MSA and still future-proof your active and legacy documentation.

Acorn

[Ben Wiens]

So provided you have a text editor and a image editor, you could even throw away Obsidian & MSA and still future-proof your active and legacy documentation.

Simplest idea is to just use the image editor
Many image editors can create text, vector, and raster image combinations. For example Adobe Indesign/Illustrator/Photoshop, Affinity Publisher/Designer/Photo, CorelDraw, and Xara Designer Pro+ all can do these 3 things really well. If an editor suite exists that can do all these three things, why not choose this editor suite because that way all the work can be done in a single editor suite? This was my original idea till I found out that Affinity files are compressed and text cannot easily be searched for in them directly like with plain text, there was no proper preview, and tags might not be visible in Windows Explorer. That's the reason for using the Microsoft Access index for now. But regarding the big picture, hopefully Sarif will create the equivalent of the Adobe Bridge for the Affinity Suite which could do batch decompression and searching for text plus hopefully have a true file previewer, and utilize the file tags. Adobe Bridge is really a type of Zettelkasten indexing system.

Future proofing
Your idea of future proofing is to have as much information in plain text and as little as possible in image format because text is more standardized and imaged formats are not. My idea is to have as much information in image format and as little as possible in text because pictures are worth a thousand words. Ideally I want the images and text to be all mixed up together. It's the modern way. In the old days the pictures and charts were at the end of the book but now they are alongside the text which is easier to read but this is only possible with the new desktop publishing programs. How do I make notes on which new computer to buy, I create a research report for that. Myself and people in companies are not just using these programs for taking notes like in a classroom or for the grocery list or quick ideas but many of the notes also are converted over time into reports for others to read and should be formatted properly with equation, tables, charts, illustrations, pictures, and should be able to be outputted in Adobe Acrobat format as a single file or printed. Adobe really figured this out at the beginning with the Creative Suite, that the future of all kinds of document creation should be with a suite of high end programs that all work together seamlessly. Sarif is smart and has just recently bought big time into this important concept as well with a suite of high end Affinity programs. How do you print out a report with a Word document and Adobe Illustrator illustrations? You don't, it doesn't work. How about Obsidian text and Affinity Designer illustration? It's not workable. It has to be a suite of programs. This is the future. Is this new concept future proofed? Not entirely, it's all about the converters and always has been. It keeps companies like Markzware in business.

The main problem
The main problem for my work is that programmers that work on retail type programs focus more on text than illustrations or images. Maybe most programmers actually hate graphics, this seems to be the case at Microsoft. What is called plain text still has to be encoded in some binary format just like illustrations though. The modern ASCII format dates back to 1961 but before than it was IBMs EBCDIC, and since around 1992 Unicode has become more popular. The only reason we can somehow live with these different text formats is that converters are common and most people stick with a single current standard. Next in line are the raster images, many have been around for a long time and converters are also common. If vector illustrations were considered equally important to text then illustration formats would be more standardized and converters more robust. Many years ago when computer aided drawing started being used in large companies, the US Military insisted that a single computer aided design drawing file format be used in the US, that this would be essential in time of war when work would be farmed out to various companies, the compromise was the dxf exchange format.

Which came first, CAD or word processing?
Computer aided design came before word processing. In early 1962, Itek began actively marketing the EDM computer aided design system and General Motors was rasterizing paper drawings already in 1957. It was years later in 1969 that IBM introduced their Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter and Magcard based word processing system. In the corporate world, more money is spend on individual drawing programs than with desktop word processing and desktop publishing programs.

Breaking the bonds of plain text
My project to find the ideal system for all types of documents is not only for myself. I'm a futurist. Our world presently lives in the unfortunate grip of the text based documents. It makes our whole world inefficient and drab. Microsoft Word handles complex text formatting, illustrations, and pictures so badly that people just leave out that. Unfortunately, Word has become the standard word processor in the world. Adobe Indesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop are way too expensive for most people and companies and the file sizes are huge for no apparent reason. CorelDraw is a a nice drawing program but where can you use these, they disbanded Ventura Publisher years ago so these drawings have no home in a document. Xara Designer Pro+ almost is there as a universal document format but it's not for books or complex illustrations or image editing and so could get run over. Inkscape uses the open source svg file format which can also handle a mixture of text, vector, and raster images but has never been made into a full featured program suite. But the Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo suite can be used for almost any kind of document, from plain to very complex, it's main limitation now is automation plug ins which is being worked on. So my hope is that this Affinity program suite becomes wildly popular and this new file format turns into a standard just like docx or plain text and pushes out most of the other document file formats. It's a cruel way but that is free enterprise. In the end Microsoft allows others to use the docx format and Adobe allows others to use the pdf format, and Xara published their document specifications, so I'm hoping this or a licensing system will happen with Affinity. Both Microsoft and Adobe are still strong in spite of this but it's always a risk.

Conclusion
The big picture is that the Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo suite is marketed mostly for desktop publishing but is perfect for almost any type of document creation including notes, research reports, letters, illustrations, images, user manuals, and books. It's file size is small and suitable for the smallest of notes. If Affinity creates an Affinity Bridge, then this suite will be totally suitable for managing large collections of files.

[Acorn]

Ben, thank you for the history. I have survived most of it myself.

You seem to have thrown away the synergy of hyperlinking across multiple documents.
With Affinity, you will need to 'publish' every document and then work out what its link path will be.
Both Xara and Serif (noting your typo) handle internal links adequately but external ones require a collection area (c.f., the Internet).
With Obsidian (and MarkDown) the connectivity is down to the folder location (even across Vaults).

Using images and PDFs squander their information value. Most file formats wither. .txt (a.k.a., .md), UTF-8 et al, ASCII & extended and system flavours of EBCDIC all have simple (Regex) convertors, which I have had to use all of my career(s). Anything proprietary and you are out of the picture.

You were rather emphatic that your images were in an external file store.
In Obsidian, I can quickly link to any image with ![[...]]. If it is a mix of text, vector and graphic then I can link to its .XAR (or other file extension with [File](file:///I:\TG\2023.xar), edit that and export it as an image back to the required location.

Why stop at pictures?
With Boxy SVG, which I use, I can add in images, vectors, text and animate them.
The SVG format payload is quite light too and readily embedded into a MarkDown file.

Acorn

[Ben Wiens]

You seem to have thrown away the synergy of hyperlinking across multiple documents. With Affinity, you will need to 'publish' every document and then work out what its link path will be. Both Xara and Serif (noting your typo) handle internal links adequately but external ones require a collection area (c.f., the Internet). With Obsidian (and MarkDown) the connectivity is down to the folder location (even across Vaults).

Text based vs binary formatting
Looking at history, there seems to have been two streams of formatting for output, either for the screen, or for printing, on computers. MarkDown is similar to html and Wikitext coding. Back in 1981 one of my brothers published his book "How To Design Your Very Own Solar Home" on a 6809 Southwest Technical Products computer using Flex and a type of crude desktop publishing program similar to NROFF which used text coding because people didn't even have monitors then and the only input was a keyboard. But I was not exposed to this at all having got my first computer in 1990 when all the programs I had like AutoCAD, Word, Microsoft Access, CorelDRAW, and Ventura Publisher were now completely binary. So I'm guessing that still, high level document workflows like desktop publishing and Computer Aided Design are binary so only using text based formatting for all work flows is not practical.

What are notes going to be used for?
I think the bigger question is, what do I and other people want to collect notes for? Just for knowledge? The original goal of the Zettelkasten note taking system was to collect information for writing reports, papers, books, public speaking, and movies. In the field of computer aided drawing, blocks are created which are common items that can be inserted into drawings to save time. These blocks need to be created in the same computer format as the main drawing so they are compatible. So I think the same rational could be used when deciding which program to use for creating notes. I want to create notes in a program that uses the same file formats as I will use in the final publication.

The reason for program suites
The Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo program suite is a great program for publishing a book in, is low cost, is considered very user friendly, and has small file sizes. Program suites were developed because that is the only way to ensure compatibility of three different file types. Can I use the Affinity Designer, Photo files in Obsidian? No. Can I use the svg and png files that are used on Obsidian in Affinity Publisher? Not really. So in my note taking I want to collect files that I can use directly in Affinity Publisher. So it makes sense to use Affinity Publisher for notes, letters, reports, user manuals, papers, pamphlets, and books. I save time only learning one program instead of many and save time by recycling material in the same format.

A super digital Zettelkasten system
In the original Zettelkasten system, there were three work flows. (1) Taking notes on the cards. (2) Typing the book draft from information on the cards. (3) Typesetting the book. In the super digital Zettelkasten system we create the pieces for the book digitally in the notes over time, then combine them together into letters, reports, user manuals, papers, pamphlets, and books without having to retype or recreate a lot of the text and images by using the same program. My training is in manufacturing engineering and this sounds like an efficient work flow. I think this is even more integration of work flows than Sarif even dreamed of when they decided to create the Affinity suite or than generally happens in the industry. In fact experts keep telling me that there should be more steps. But why? I think in the traditional publishing industry there is a great division of labor and many people are involved each doing a small part but this was the way letters were written in companies many years ago with many people involved in writing a single letter, now the executives just do it all themselves on a computer.

New Steps
In the fascinating 1992 Australian movie "Strictly Ballroom" there are those who want to do the "New Steps" while the traditionalist wanted to do the "Accepted Steps" But New Steps are only good if they make sense. So what do you think, do these "New Steps" make sense? Does using a desktop publishing program for notes lack some features of established note taking systems? Yes? But they could be added.

[Acorn]

Ben, I am finding you are rather quick in conflating concepts.

MarkDown and WikiText are out of the same stable and a far cry from HTML. A wiki link [[...]] differs from an HTML hyperlink as it will create a placemarker for you to go back at any time and fill in the dots. In HTML, you would get a file not found or similar (404 error). MarkDown is human-readable, not binary, so with nothing other than its printout or a simple text editor, you could make sense of it. In comparison, HTML has a lot of scaffolding and requires a browser (viewer) to understand it more clearly. HTML has its own syntax and so a browser is not always an editor. Yes you can use a text editor but it is onerous.

Wikis are content management systems whereas MarkDown is focused on the content and HTML is a high mix of semantics and syntax, usually swamping content. MarkDown is the closest to pure text with a lighter sprinkling of syntax that allows easy conversion to HTML, allowing for all the formatting and styling without the need to learn a language or use a specialist tool.

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You mention three file types. I can only guess these are text, raster and vector.
SVG is a file format that handles and edits text and vector and manipulates raster to a limited extent.

Program suites were developed because that is the only way to ensure compatibility of three different file types.
Can I use the Affinity Designer, Photo files in Obsidian? No.
Can I use the svg and png files that are used on Obsidian in Affinity Publisher? Not really.

Program suites use concepts like object linking and embedding to switch modes into different editor programs. Basically, replacing the tedium of copy & pasting provided you have the right convertors built-in.
APhoto files (proprietary) into Obsidian -> No but a raster version Yes and a link back into the AD Photo program of the master file. So AD and Obsidian have an interchange mechanism.
Obsidian SVG -> APub - Yes; Obsidian PNG -> APub - yes. Both SVG and PNG are open source and AD has convertors for Import and Export.

You want a mix of Text, Raster and Vector all in the same file. Well you could with an SVG but MarkDown handles Text and embeds Vector (SVG) and, better, links in Raster & Vector (SVG).

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What confuses me is Obsidian readily capable and can hold all types of digital content (your "blocks") and mash them in countless combinations:

• You can embed a block into another.
• You can collation any number of block into a book, PDF or HTML.
• You can choose you own native editor for Raster (e.g., APhoto or Xara or Adobe CS).
• You can choose your native editor for Vector similarly.

What Affinity does not do is present a cohesive content management or retrieval system and you will be reliant on your tacit knowledge that necessarily has a shelf life.
Obsidian is extensible and handles "New Steps" while Affinity is definitely "Accepted Steps" so you will always be dancing a jig to its tune.

Other Wikis are available and we still use keyboards on computers for a number of reasons.
Thank you for helping me reaffirm my Weltanshauung.

Acorn

[Jonopen]

@Acorn Obsidian sounds interesting. Before downloading and trying it, are there any examples of where it's being used, you can point me to? I don't have a specific need right now, but there might be something in the future. Thanks.

[handrawn]

@Ben Wiens - and anyone else reading

it has now been officially announced that affinity is being sold to canva:

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/pre...nva-statement/

you may wish to take this onboard...

[Acorn]

@Acorn Obsidian sounds interesting. Before downloading and trying it, are there any examples of where it's being used, you can point me to? I don't have a specific need right now, but there might be something in the future. Thanks.

Jon, here's a heavy example: https://publish.obsidian.md/myaiba/

Most Obsidian Vaults are running locally. There is no need to publish if it if you your own use.

Another example - https://notes.philoserf.com/Index.

Hope the offers a flavour of its richness.

Acorn

[Ben Wiens]

Ben, I am finding you are rather quick in conflating concepts.

Should we call you Professor Acorn? You used three words in your post that I had to look up. But that's what quick access knowledge systems are for, so I learned three new words in less than a minute.

You want a mix of Text, Raster and Vector all in the same file. Well you could with an SVG but MarkDown handles Text and embeds Vector (SVG) and, better, links in Raster & Vector (SVG).

So I've never been a fan of this concept you describe. Actually I've disliked this for the last 30 years. I see an interesting web page and would like to save it to my Zettelkasten full documents folder but I can't because it's a whole collection of things that's linked together in so many weird ways it's impossible to do that. But I see a scientific paper in Acrobat pdf format which has a collection of text, vector, and raster images all bundled together in a proper way and I can save it, move it around, email it, print it, and I love that. The pdf is about 10,000 times more useful than the html document. I wish the whole Internet would be based on pdfs and millions of other people would like that too.

Obsidian (is) readily capable and can hold all types of digital content (your "blocks") and mash them in countless combinations.

OK, I actually did download and install Obsidian and also Excalidraw and have been trying them out for two weeks already. Here is an initial summary of my thoughts. If the founders had just used the JSON language which is used by the plug in Excalidraw, or SVG, instead of Markdown, it would be a great program for me as these other types can do much more complex arrangements of text, vector, and raster. And all three file types are text searchable. I like to have notes where the text and drawings are all mixed up together and trying to do that with linking is impractical as each note would be a collection of up to 100 separate files and if there were up to 100,000 of these types of notes in my system that would be 10,000,000 files and that arrangement isn't even possible in Obsidian. CAD drawings are such a collection of masses of text and vector blocks that are packed in one file so that's how it's done in that industry for good reason.

What Affinity does not do is present a cohesive content management or retrieval system and you will be reliant on your tacit knowledge that necessarily has a shelf life.

I hear you loud and clear! But I'm in a bind, yes I've tried many workarounds over a span of one month already to use Affinity as a note taking system and none of them even work 10% as good as Obsidian but Affinity has the complex document format I want and Obsidian does not.

Obsidian is extensible and handles "New Steps" while Affinity is definitely "Accepted Steps" so you will always be dancing a jig to its tune.

Maybe, but there is a much bigger picture which is part of the whole note taking system. In the original Zettelkasten system there were (1) fleeting or rough notes, (2) A file box of permanent notes on cards containing titles and reference numbers, (3) An index with card title and reference numbers to find the cards, (4) full documents such as articles, papers, and books which might be in various places.

In the new digital Zettelkasten system, we often have the full documents in the form of the Internet or PDFs saved to the HDD. So then how do we find the information without the permanent notes and index cards? Digital indexing systems. In the beginning of the Internet people at companies like Yahoo manually created indexes for web pages, but this was obviously way too slow, and along came Google with search engines to do that job. In much the same way, the modern digital library might be able to live with mostly machine indexing. And we might use that rather because creating all those permanent notes manually is way too much work. But human written notes do have a place for one's own material and with so much information out here we need to make a note of where we found it.

But the human and machine indexes have to live in harmony. And how? First, the likely focus for me and most other people should be to create full documents, letters, note books such as lecture notes, research documents, user manuals, books and these should be done in a nice format that can be distributed in organizations, sent to colleagues, or even to customers. These should be done in a desktop publishing program to properly combine the text, vector, and raster in a professional format that can also be printed. If there is time left then we could make some permanent notes, but actually the permanent notes might just grow to eventually become the full documents, as is so often the case in my experience, so I might as well do everything in longer full documents in Affinity Publisher because indexing can now find the information in the longer documents and because short format permanent notes if used at all are now between 0-10% of the entire workflow.

The present dilemma is that Affinity Publisher doesn't have a Document Asset Management system to search the compressed file format. Obsidian does have this built in and their system is simpler because of the uncompressed text based Markdown and I understand indexing is also used. But just yesterday I did tests with indexing Adobe Acrobat documents and found I could find words in 0.027 seconds per instance and it produces a list of documents which are expandable to list all sentences with the word which is highlighted. Does this look like Obsidian or what? Indexing pdf documents results in 126 times faster searching than without indexing. Also pdfs can be previewed in Windows Explorer. Using Adobe Acrobat however is a two step process. But imagine if Affinity had a proper Document Asset Management system and the same type of indexing and searching plus a preview. Yes, this would be just as great as Obsidian now. No it's not Markdown but I don't think complex documents could ever be done in Markdown, all programs that output complex formats like Affinity Publisher, Adobe Indesign, CorelDRAW, Word, are binary. So I have no idea what I'm going to do in the interim while hoping for a proper DAM for Affinity. Maybe use the kludges.

[Acorn]

Ben, again, thank you for sharing your thoughts and conundrums. Rarely do people take time to develop arguments nowadays.

I often forget that a 'professor' in America is a colloquial sobriquet that a high-school teacher may adopt in addition to academic rank at universities. I would be honoured if it were the latter.
I shall guess at my "three words" might also appear in the next sentence. Don't conflate tacit Weltanshauungen!. Note, I didn't call you out over you using "Zettelkasten".

Until you choose to extract your notes into "full documents" that stand on their own then your Zettelkasten collection is your entire corpus.
Each Obsidian note can be a micro-collection of your images, vectors and prose. The key point is such a grouping has all the back-links accessible and you have an automatic visual graph of all of these to interact with.
This diverse dataset can be collated and distributed as a standalone entity. The end-user's "reader" is simply Obsidian, free to all.
If unavailable, the note can be exported as PDF or HTML.
In contrast, Affinity can produce an integrated PDF but all associations and interconnectivity now has to be hand-crafted. Users can search the PDF but not readily across a clutch of them. Few will have access to Affinity so your source is locked away, binary-encoded.

Producing a "website" of PDFs is a non-starter. PDF viewers are not standardised and rarely accommodate display sizes. I use a Kindle and reading a PDF book is dire at best.
Do read https://www.thesitewizard.com/webdes...e-in-pdf.shtml

In Windows, indexing of PDFs is usually done with an installed Adobe PDF IFilter for full-text searching. Needed as the PDFs are binary-encoded.
In Obsidian, you are full-text searching on plain text. The search results of both are sentence fragments but Obsidian's is across your entire Vault (corpus).
Timing is therefore immaterial.

If you have a closed community like Apple, Adobe and Microsoft, even Serif & Xara, you will always be at their mercy.
Open formats like XML, JSON and Markdown transcend the bearer systems.
If it were my legacy, I would be after something that will be preserved for decades. Paper is still the best medium with and for plain printed text.

Acorn