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

[Ben Wiens]

Last year, I tried Affinity Publisher to recreate a book I had already produced just to see what the process and experience was. And I have to say, I wish I had used Affinity Publisher a long time ago.

Thanks for the suggestion. Affinity was on my list of programs to look into but somehow I had not researched it very well because Affinity Designer doesn't have multiple page capability and hasn't been in the market for a long time and might not be very popular and lasting. My ideal program would be a program that can do note taking as well as books.

Then handrawn mentioned that each of the Affinity programs open each other's files types and this seemed interesting. In the last few days I've researched the Serif company and the Affinity Publisher, Designer, and Photo and it opened up my eyes. These programs have become very popular with 3,000,000 users of at least one of the modules. And version 2 has added some more features and now it has all the book features I would need.

The fact that Designer and Photo can work in Publisher could save a lot of time in writing an illustrated book and the fact that Designer doesn't have multiple page capability might not be an issue at all if I do the notes in Publisher rather. So for books, Affinity Publisher is a winner in my mind, for the note taking it depends on the minimum file size of the documents. Adobe Indesign minimum file size is 144 K with as many things turned off as possible which is too big for note taking.

So I plan on downloading the Affinity Suite tomorrow. Not only is Affinity Suite way cheaper than Adobe Creative Cloud but it might be way faster to work with. Crossing my fingers that Affinity Suite is the Swiss Army knife program that I've been looking for. 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?

[handrawn]

Version 1 is no longer available; also it is not so easy to transfer an affinity licence unless the seller is willing to give over the email address as well, because to quote affinity 'one is encoded in the other' [and you would also likely need their permission so to transfer]

but if you could get it, it should run on windows 7 service pack 1 or later

you only pay once for affinity per version - ie: once for ver1 and then for upgrade to ver2; will be same for version 3; meanwhile all the updates one bug fixes are free; no subscription

xara users should be so lucky, though of course, affinity does not do web-design...

[Acorn]

So then Ben, I wish you well with Affinity.
You originally specified "File size is important then" with "all the graphic files need to be externally linked".

Your 737 MAX file with only text is 132kB and its PDF is 415.42kB for all of two and a half pages.
Affinity offers little in the way of embedding external content.
The switching back and forth with Affinity is on a page-by-page basis.

You also said you were "an early adopter of Windows 10" and getting W11 but here you are now asking about W7.

Xara Pro+ will do what you want with a first page preview image overhead that I have reduced dramatically for you. Xara could probably eliminate this totally if you advised them of the issue.
Xara comes with the joy of in-line graphic and vector manipulation alongside text.
The trade-off is around 10kB per page of text that is a factor of three above raw ASCII.

Both Affinity and Xara use proprietary file structures so if the product breaks or disappears so does your archive or book.

On the other hand, MarkDown is plain ASCII that is parity with plain text.
It is human-readble and there are many applications that will handle .md files.
External image linking is trivial and goes where you put it.

Your only loss is in-line vector creation.
If I did not have XPro+, I would exclusively use Boxy SVG as I can deliver SVG animations and retain the same SVG for re-editing.
The SVG code will paste directly although is is better to use an image link; Obsidian allows drag and drop into any document file as will any other good MarkDown editor.

I will not trivialise the task you have set yourself but you are juggling with system and archive instability without addressing your computers first and then how to handle all the metadata around achieving a fully integrated and searchable archive.

For almost in-line LaTeX in an .md file you could use add a <script> line: <script src="https://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML"> </script>and thereafter surround LaTeX with $$: $$V_{sphere} = \frac{4}{3}\pi r^3$$. This also works in XPro+ but the text needs to be turned into a Named htmlblocktext area.

Obsidian + Boxy SVG >> Xara Designer Pro >> Affinity Suite.
I think you would be better with a purchase (https://www.xara.com/webdesigner/v20/) rather than a subscription.

Acorn

P.S. I would have liked some sort of acknowledgement for the effort put into Post#17.

[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.