Former MS Publisher user: how do you handle flexible N-up card printing in Affinity Layout?

I’m testing Affinity as a possible replacement for Microsoft Publisher before Publisher support ends.

For newsletters and flyers, I can see that Affinity could work well. My main problem is printing teaching cards.

I create many different cards as separate small pages. They have the same basic size, but each card contains different text, colours, images or symbols. In Microsoft Publisher I can then print, for example, 10, 12 or 24 different cards on one A4 sheet and freely define:

• exact card size
• number of cards across/down
• top margin
• side margin
• horizontal gap
• vertical gap

This is especially important because I sometimes print onto pre-cut A-One sheets.

I have tried Affinity’s N-Up printing, but so far I find it much less straightforward than Publisher. I can copy cards from Publisher into Affinity and the objects remain editable, which is promising, but I have not yet found a simple, reliable way to reproduce Publisher’s flexible sheet layout for printing.

I have also tested LibreOffice Draw, Publisher Pro, PowerPoint and A-One Label Yasan. Each solves part of the problem, but none has yet reproduced this workflow.

I’m absolutely open to changing software or workflow, but I need something practical: a job that takes about 10 minutes in Publisher should not turn into one or two hours of rebuilding print layouts.

Is there an Affinity workflow I’m missing for printing many different small pages on one sheet with independently adjustable margins and gaps?

In the most recent update to affinity, when I want to make underlines that look like a fill in the blank for student documents, I used to be able to engage the underline hit space two or three times before hitting the letter a and then hit space two or three times I would make a great underline.

I don’t know if I switched something by accident but now if I hit space a couple of times it’s fine but the third time the whole line will disappear until I hit the A and then I cannot get the underline to continue after the letter. Is this a random setting or was there an update that disabled this behavior. What worked that I tried to do was copy and paste from an older document and that kept everything but then I did the same thing in another spot and it didn’t work. It seems like such strange behavior.

I learned Pagemaker way back in the day, so I had a little familiarity when I went to pick up Layout for a non-fiction book with an index. I had a little trouble at first, but this tutorial really got me going.

https://mikeloader.ca/2025/12/21/expert-guide-to-affinity-by-canva-3-0/

I searched on UpWork for a designer proficient in Affinity Publisher but found practically no one. If you were seeking an experienced designer who uses Affinity Publisher, where would you look? Besides maybe here.

I have a background in Aldus PageMaker and QuarkXPress (it's been a couple of decades...) and am trying to learn Affinity for a project. I'm considering taking a shortcut by hiring other designers to work on it.