Having fought the good fight against “InDesign is the industry standard” ~10,000 times — with no one willing (or able?) to show me what’s so important about anything InDesign does, or even what it does in any detail — I’m drifting toward Affinity Publisher for final formatting. I find its documentation and interface far more accessible than InDesign’s which seems totally opaque (by design?) until a user pays Adobe’s high price.
I think AP’s master pages act something like Scrivener’s section layouts, with a couple of improvements: multiple masters can apply to the same page and they can be overridden at the page level to deal with white space and other issues.
On the down side, I don’t think they allow an equivalent of <$img:<$label>>.
I agree. These days I would be more likely to recommend Publisher than InDesign. It’s definitely good enough for most, and is available for a small one-time purchase price (about as much as Scrivener in fact) vs expensive ongoing payments that, once stopped, prohibit you from fully accessing your work.
I mention InDesign above more as a format, in that Pandoc can create an InDesign file, but it can create other formats as well that are probably better for various publishing workflows.
That is surprising to me, linking to image resources is typically bread and butter for DTP, to avoid massive file sizes.
Publisher doesn’t display info like Scrivener. I’m far from an AP expert, but when I place an image in an AP document, the preference I have set for linking or embedding takes effect but the image looks the same whether it is linked or embedded. If you bring up the Resource Manager (Document / Resource Manager), you will see if it is linked or embedded:
Linking images is not the issue. I know how to do that. But Scrivener Compile lets me use Label to determine which image is used. I see no way for Publisher to do that, even if Label were an available bit of metadata in Publisher, which it isn’t.
Your post prompted me to look up Affinity and I found that it is the successor to Serif. I have good souvenirs of using a Serif office suite of products on Windows 95 or possibly 97 but after that, I lost sight of them. They were good value, low cost products.
Last night I realized Label isn’t a large issue after all. I can tweak Compile to enter the image path and, in Publisher, turn that into the linked image … a manual step for each use of an image, but not a deal breaker.
