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

[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

[Ben Wiens]

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.

To be precise, I meant university Full professor. In Canada I've never heard that term used for a high school teacher. In the US it's different. In Canadian universities there are Assistant professors, Associate professors, and Full professors, the later are the highest level.

Until you choose to extract your notes into "full documents" that stand on their own then your Zettelkasten collection is your entire corpus.

I get it. And I had actually warmed up a bit more to Obsidian for my permanent notes. I watched some YouTube videos on Excalidraw and Canvas plugins. Canvas sounded intriguing for stringing together my book ideas. But by morning I had hit a major roadblock when I started thinking of the workflow of Obsidian permanent notes to Affinity Publisher full documents (my book project). And I refer back to my earlier comments in another message. The file formats are different in the two programs and that creates the headaches.

The file formats in Obsidian are text=Markdown, vector=SVG or JSON, raster=PNG, JPEG The file formats in Affinity Publisher are basically all afpub format for text, vector, and raster.

So in the Obsidian Canvas plugin I drag together the text, vector, and raster elements into the linked boxes for the book layout. Once I have the book laid out, then what? The Markdown files don't import into Affinity cleanly, lots of stripping away of coding on each import. Affinity can import SVG but really I should find the original afpub file as I would have made the vector drawings in Affinity to begin with. On edits I have to jump back into Affinity to make the changes in afpub and export out another SVG and this might result in 50 back and forths per item on complex illustrations. Ditto for the raster format images.

So another method of writing I'm thinking of which is not popular but seems to make sense (yes another proprietary paid one) is to use IMatch DAM or document asset management software. I make all text, vector, raster pieces (visual notes) for the book in afpub format. I use IMatch to catalog and index them. IMatch quickly helps me find and group together items I want based on similarities. It can search 70,000 items per second. It's sort of similar to Obsidian. I then drag these these pieces into frames beside the printable areas in Affinity Publisher. I can then re arrange the pieces and reword the items in the printable area. It's like a Canvas alternative but it's right beside my printable text area. I mark notes I have used. I can double click vector and raster items to make changes instantly, no jumping to a different program. The IMatch software can be also used to catalog all the other things on my HDD, databases, letters, pictures, videos, reports that don't fit into a note taking system. I can stay in the original file formats in all my documents.

Comparing the two methods it seems that with computer documents it makes sense to stay in the same ecosystem. For those that only use notes as a knowledge base or those that can publish simpler documents directly from Obsidian that program makes sense. For those that are using Affinity Publisher for the more complex letters, papers, user manuals, and books it makes sense to stay in the Affinity ecosystem. Again my preference would be to marry the two programs, use afpub files instead of Markdown and this would be a perfect world for me. But that doesn't suit many people who don't want the proprietary binary documents.

It's disappointing for me. I have a fantastic Android Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra 5G smartphone and I would love to sync all my notes between this and my Windows computers. How impressive would that be, my entire knowledge base at my finger tips anywhere I go on the Note 20. I can do that with Obsidian. I can't do that with Affinity Publisher and IMatch which are high performance and so likely never will be ported to Android.

[lex]

Version 2 likely doesn't run on Windows 7 and guess there is no way of buying Version 2 and also getting Version 1 which I think can run on Window 7?

Buy version 1 from: https://www.ecrater.com/p/40153234/l...nity-v1-bundle
I did, works fine. Not a scam.