Affinity Designer is so good its ridiculous

[organicCPU]

Having a third layout tool to use would be appreciated.

What about Viva Designer? I've always wanted to give that a try!

While Quark is obviously a great competitor to InDesign

Quark has been the No 1 and was démodé short time after Adobe released InDesign version 1.5 with the whole CS eco-system containing with InCopy integration and all the other professional publishing apps bundled. I don't see Quark to gain the lead again.

IMHO, just if Serif would be able to provide a whole publishing chain with options for content providers and a design server infrastructure, they could gain a significant market share in the long-term. I keep my fingers crossed.

 

[MacGizmo]

What about Viva Designer? I've always wanted to give that a try!

Quark has been the No 1 and was démodé short time after Adobe released InDesign version 1.5 with the whole CS eco-system containing with InCopy integration and all the other professional publishing apps bundled. I don't see Quark to gain the lead again.

IMHO, just if Serif would be able to provide a whole publishing chain with options for content providers and a design server infrastructure, they could gain a significant market share in the long-term. I keep my fingers crossed.

I was part of the Adobe K2 testing team, I'm well aware of InDesign's history. I wasn't implying that Quark would ever take the lead again, only that it is InDesign competition. Quark Xpress is all but extinct—the latest owner of Quark has already said it isn't the future of the company.

Regarding Viva: The entire reason people want to leave Adobe is the cost of the subscription. Viva is an even more expensive subscription at $80 per month (U.S.) and is only one app. It sounds like a decent layout app, but there is so little information and screenshots on the site that I suspect most people wouldn't even bother. Heck, it took me 5 minutes to find the PDF you have to download just to see what it costs.

 

[organicCPU]

Regarding Viva: The entire reason people want to leave Adobe is the cost of the subscription. Viva is an even more expensive subscription at $80 per month (U.S.) and is only one app. It sounds like a decent layout app, but there is so little information and screenshots on the site that I suspect most people wouldn't even bother. Heck, it took me 5 minutes to find the PDF you have to download just to see what it costs.

I guess you are referring to the VivaCloud & VivaDesigner Packages. That's IMO comparable to InDesign Server where you could offer clients an environment labeled with your logo where they are able to change entire designs (you provided) and pull their print-ready pdf from a web-browser. That's good for big enterprises that need to change and print e.g. business cards on a daily basis.
There is no subscription for the desktop version of VivaDesigner.* Full Edition is $ 399 one-time payment for commercial use. Cross-Grades from older desktop versions of InDesign or Quark are $ 269. Upgrade price from version 8 to 9 is $ 79. Various other offers for private use, NGO or education are even cheaper. Finally there is a free version with some features lacking for commercial and private use. (Just downloaded and installed it yesterday...)

EDIT: *If you rent the hosted web based design server, there is a desktop license on a subscription basis included.

(Agree) IMO, Quark isn't dead and a serious competitor to InDesign. I've been using Quark 3.x and 4.x. years ago at work. It's definitely a very good tool. I'd think about giving Quark another chance, if there weren't some personal bad experiences. These are, hardware dongles that could refuse to work, paralysing the design department or some mysterious failures that prevented printing of certain embedded images even though the files were absolutely fine. Another culprit is the fact that I'm not sure if Quark would come up with a subscription model, as soon as there are enough customers returning.

 

[eyoungren]

I was part of the Adobe K2 testing team, I'm well aware of InDesign's history. I wasn't implying that Quark would ever take the lead again, only that it is InDesign competition. Quark Xpress is all but extinct—the latest owner of Quark has already said it isn't the future of the company.

I'm on the flip side. I've been a Quark forum member since 2001 and involved with testing more than one beta. I know several engineers, one who came from ALAP when Quark bought them out, and the Global Director of their Desktop Business Unit. I'm not bragging, just bringing it up because none of them have said anything to me about QXP dying.

Perhaps you know someone higher up that I do not though. I know Quark, as a company, was bought out at one point by an investment holding company. It was no secret then that they weren't enthusiastic about the core product.

 

[MacGizmo]

I'm on the flip side. I've been a Quark forum member since 2001 and involved with testing more than one beta. I know several engineers, one who came from ALAP when Quark bought them out, and the Global Director of their Desktop Business Unit. I'm not bragging, just bringing it up because none of them have said anything to me about QXP dying.

Perhaps you know someone higher up that I do not though. I know Quark, as a company, was bought out at one point by an investment holding company. It was no secret then that they weren't enthusiastic about the core product.

They've been bought and sold several times... At one point, I'm not convinced the people who bought Quark even knew they owned XPress.

In any case, my point is that Quark has been dying for nearly two decades... right about the time that Adobe released InDesign. The current ownership has publicly stated that their focus moving forward are their content automation and multi-platform publishing efforts (read in a few places referring to some industry event/announcement that Quark was involved with). In fact, the title of their website is "Quark: Omni-Channel Content Automation Software" and nowhere on the homepage do the words desktop publishing or print publishing even appear.

It's not difficult to read between the lines here. XPress isn't being killed off by Quark, but make no mistake, it is dying a slow death and Quark doesn't appear to be doing anything drastic to stop it—including lowering the cost to an even semi-competitive price for the desktop market.

 

[whitedragon101]

They've been bought and sold several times... At one point, I'm not convinced the people who bought Quark even knew they owned XPress.

In any case, my point is that Quark has been dying for nearly two decades... right about the time that Adobe released InDesign. The current ownership has publicly stated that their focus moving forward are their content automation and multi-platform publishing efforts (read in a few places referring to some industry event/announcement that Quark was involved with). In fact, the title of their website is "Quark: Omni-Channel Content Automation Software" and nowhere on the homepage do the words desktop publishing or print publishing even appear.

It's not difficult to read between the lines here. XPress isn't being killed off by Quark, but make no mistake, it is dying a slow death and Quark doesn't appear to be doing anything drastic to stop it—including lowering the cost to an even semi-competitive price for the desktop market.

This explains why Affinity have prioritised their Desktop publishing app Affinity Publisher as their next release.

I hope they make a big splash.

https://www.creativebloq.com/news/is-affinity-about-to-launch-an-indesign-killer

 

[macuser453787]

Soon, Affinity will be releasing their InDesign competing app, Publisher.

Why, oh why, did they have to name it Publisher of all things??? That's just not a good name association at all!
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Because…money.

They know that a vast majority of design is done using the big three (InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator), or at least one of the big three.

Just like Quark used to, they hold the industry hostage to their pricing plans because they can. Where else are you going to go (right now)?

Dig it. And look where Quark is now, because Adobe came up and innovated and improved (talking about the rise of InDesign beginning with the original CS version in the early to mid 2000's -- long before all of this CC subscription business).

To your other point, it's important to be able to import/use PDFs in a pass-through manner. I personally prefer that whenever possible rather than opening a PDF in Illustrator and trying to deal with all of those potential issues. In my situation it's much safer and more expedient to edit on top of customer-supplied PDFs after placing into InDesign, when possible.

When not possible, we inform the customer for them to either deal with it or else to tell us to go with it as is.
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Right, but there's a huge price point differential between the $10/month plan I pay for right now and the $50/month plan for everything. Although looking at their pricing page, I can see now that they offer a single app for $20/month, and for the right situation I guess that might be feasible.

They could really take a hint from the pricing structure of services like Sling TV, where you pay a certain amount for your desired plan and then add to it on an a la carte basis ($5 for this extra, $5 for that extra).

I let my CC subscription expire because of the cost AND because I wasn't using it for anything besides occasional personal use. It just didn't make sense to have it in the monthly budget at that point. But if Adobe did that, I'd seriously consider getting InDesign/Illlustrator/Photoshop/Acrobat package for like $25 or so per month, with the option to add on and remove at will and the ability to do so within each billing cycle, not having to commit to an entire year of my initial choice.

And without early cancellation penalties.

 

[eyoungren]

In my situation it's much safer and more expedient to edit on top of customer-supplied PDFs after placing into InDesign, when possible.

What I will do is pull the PDF in to ID and depending on if I need to manipulate the size or not, take care of that first.

Any edits I do, such as simple type fixes (price changes, expiration dates), removing pics, etc I will use PitStop Pro inside Acrobat and then update the PDF inside InDesign. Sometimes that requires loading a font, but that's where Suitcase comes in.

It's just easier to deal with the placed PDF than to try masking crap off inside ID.

We work off an optimized copy of the PDF though. Originals are left alone in case we need to go back to them.

 

[organicCPU]

Trying to contribute to the original topic of this thread, here is a short comparison of Adobe Illustrator and Affinity Designer (v.1.5) features:

if I need to manipulate the size... (note: of a PDF)

Finally I've found out the route to go just with Adobe Acrobat Pro without involving Adobe InDesign.
Acrobat has the feature of resizing while passing through embedded fonts since version DC. In the Preflight panel, select the Acrobat Pro DC 2015-Profile library, choose PDF corrections and you'll find a preset for scaling pages to a standard size. It's easy to duplicate that preset and modify it to your needed sizes. Once the preflight preset is created, it's a lot faster to resize a PDF than in Adobe InDesign.

 

[Aron Peterson]

Trying to contribute to the original topic of this thread, here is a short comparison of Adobe Illustrator and Affinity Designer (v.1.5) features:

Finally I've found out the route to go just with Adobe Acrobat Pro without involving Adobe InDesign.
Acrobat has the feature of resizing while passing through embedded fonts since version DC. In the Preflight panel, select the Acrobat Pro DC 2015-Profile library, choose PDF corrections and you'll find a preset for scaling pages to a standard size. It's easy to duplicate that preset and modify it to your needed sizes. Once the preflight preset is created, it's a lot faster to resize a PDF than in Adobe InDesign.

Thanks for sharing

 

[MacGizmo]

Why, oh why, did they have to name it Publisher of all things??? That's just not a good name association at all!

Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo aren't exactly great either. Both are plays off the original Serif Apps: Draw, Photos and Pages Plus. Obviously Apple already owns the name "Pages" - so they had to come up with something appropriate. In the end, I don't think anyone really cares about the name of an app.

But yeah, "Publisher" for Mac-using designers is probably not the best choice... especially older ones like me that remember the day when Publisher was pretty much the only "page layout" app for Windows. It was a nightmare to print, the JPGs it produced were awful quality, and we were forced to work with the damn files.

 

[eyoungren]

Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo aren't exactly great either. Both are plays off the original Serif Apps: Draw, Photos and Pages Plus. Obviously Apple already owns the name "Pages" - so they had to come up with something appropriate. In the end, I don't think anyone really cares about the name of an app.

But yeah, "Publisher" for Mac-using designers is probably not the best choice... especially older ones like me that remember the day when Publisher was pretty much the only "page layout" app for Windows. It was a nightmare to print, the JPGs it produced were awful quality, and we were forced to work with the damn files.

I still have people who send me PDFs made with Publisher. One person has to use an older version because the later versions do not allow export of CMYK PDFs.

And I still repeatedly get asked by one of our ad reps if we can take a Publisher file itself, despite those having been listed as non-acceptable on our submission guidelines for years.

We still have a few PCs with Publisher installed in case I ever have to deal with one of these stupid files.

 

[MechaSpanky]

I too have horrible memories, much like MacGizmo's, of Microsoft Publisher. I always hated receiving Publisher files and the PDF's produced from them were also so bad that I would end up rebuilding them using Indesign or Illustrator (depending on the file). I hated Microsoft Publisher but because of it or the lack of knowledge of its users, I made a ton of overtime! I don't care what Affinity names their layout/publishing app, I just hope that it is as good as Designer and Photo are!

eyoungren,

I can't believe that people still use Microsoft Publisher to submit files! Does it even support CMYK? Ever single PDF file I've ever received that was made using Publisher was always in RGB but I wasn't sure if the program doesn't support it or the users don't know what it is? They also never added bleed either but I'm sure that the program supports bleed.

 

[macuser453787]

I still have people who send me PDFs made with Publisher. One person has to use an older version because the later versions do not allow export of CMYK PDFs.

I wasn't aware that it stopped supporting export of CMYK PDFs. But that wouldn't have mattered to me anyway, even if my company was still using Publisher, because I found that converting to CMYK in Publisher produced very poor, dull color results. So after discovering that I started leaving the Publisher files in RGB, exporting to PDF and placing the PDF into InDesign and allowing its color tables to do a much better looking, proper CMYK conversion. The only potential issue with that was rich K text with a higher than desired TIL (due to RGB black being converted to CMYK rather than just a solid black), but the trade-off was much better color.

We used to charge a fee to convert Publisher to PDF, but for many years now, we just kick back any Publisher files we receive (which are very few and far between) and have our clients resupply a PDF to us instead.

BTW, I too learned Freehand in high school (v2 which was owned by Aldus at that time). Thought it was a great program. Illustrator was at around v3 at that time, and once I learned it I started to prefer it over Freehand, though I used both for many years. Eventually Illustrator won out when CS, CS2, and subsequent versions were released.

Perhaps they tried to do too much with Freehand. There came a point when they expanded it beyond what it did well, which was vector illustration, and they tried to make it sort of a combination of that and page layout, and it seems that merger wasn't very successful. Although, they did innovate with the ability to do multiple pages in a single document (and at different sizes) -- though to me this seemed to be more cumbersome than it was worth at times.

It may be of interest to note that neither Freehand nor CorelDraw (I don't like that program either btw) handled raster effects well at all, at least not in my experience. I think this was and is something that Adobe does very well, and rightly so since Postscript is their language.

 

[eyoungren]

eyoungren,

I can't believe that people still use Microsoft Publisher to submit files! Does it even support CMYK? Ever single PDF file I've ever received that was made using Publisher was always in RGB but I wasn't sure if the program doesn't support it or the users don't know what it is? They also never added bleed either but I'm sure that the program supports bleed.

We have a customer who builds two full pages of ads and information for one of the local chambers. The lady who built it sent me test pages and everything but the black type was RGB. I pointed all this out and she did her research. Based on what she told my boss, Publisher stopped being able to export CMYK PDFs past a certain version.

So, she had to find a version that was still capable of that. I have no idea which version.

As to bleed, it's not something I deal with. We're a weekly newspaper and all our stuff goes out on newsprint. Ads are dropped in along side editorial content so we don't deal with that thankfully.
[doublepost=1519051593][/doublepost]

I wasn't aware that it stopped supporting export of CMYK PDFs. But that wouldn't have mattered to me anyway, even if my company was still using Publisher, because I found that converting to CMYK in Publisher produced very poor, dull color results. So after discovering that I started leaving the Publisher files in RGB, exporting to PDF and placing the PDF into InDesign and allowing its color tables to do a much better looking, proper CMYK conversion. The only potential issue with that was rich K text with a higher than desired TIL (due to RGB black being converted to CMYK rather than just a solid black), but the trade-off was much better color.

We used to charge a fee to convert Publisher to PDF, but for many years now, we just kick back any Publisher files we receive (which are very few and far between) and have our clients resupply a PDF to us instead.

BTW, I too learned Freehand in high school (v2 which was owned by Aldus at that time). Thought it was a great program. Illustrator was at around v3 at that time, and once I learned it I started to prefer it over Freehand, though I used both for many years. Eventually Illustrator won out when CS, CS2, and subsequent versions were released.

Perhaps they tried to do too much with Freehand. There came a point when they expanded it beyond what it did well, which was vector illustration, and they tried to make it sort of a combination of that and page layout, and it seems that merger wasn't very successful. Although, they did innovate with the ability to do multiple pages in a single document (and at different sizes) -- though to me this seemed to be more cumbersome than it was worth at times.

It may be of interest to note that neither Freehand nor CorelDraw (I don't like that program either btw) handled raster effects well at all, at least not in my experience. I think this was and is something that Adobe does very well, and rightly so since Postscript is their language.

If only I could kick things back. Sometimes I can, if I know that the customer the ad rep is dealing with will understand.

But most of the time our customers are dumb as hell, know nothing about anything and could care less (that's my job right) so a lot of the time I just have to deal.

It's easier for me to deal with color conversion as earlier as possible. Acrobat does a fairly good job of converting from RGB to CMYK so that's usually where I start. Between that, Quite A Box of Tricks and PitStop Pro I can usually make it happen. Our customers complain most when the colors are muddy, so getting that resolved first eliminates that problem.

 

[macuser453787]

We have a customer who builds two full pages of ads and information for one of the local chambers. The lady who built it sent me test pages and everything but the black type was RGB. I pointed all this out and she did her research. Based on what she told my boss, Publisher stopped being able to export CMYK PDFs past a certain version.

So, she had to find a version that was still capable of that. I have no idea which version.

As to bleed, it's not something I deal with. We're a weekly newspaper and all our stuff goes out on newsprint. Ads are dropped in along side editorial content so we don't deal with that thankfully.

The last version we used here was v2003 IIRC. As for bleed, Publisher didn't do those well either, or handle "transparency" effects well, or do a lot of things very well at all. One of the most annoying things about it was that moveable ruler, that behaved like the old-school sliding T-square tables like we had at the ad agency I interned at. Never made sense to me why they did that, instead of having a fixed ruler and allowing the user to drag guides out of it. Anyway, I saw Publisher as a botched attempt to create a sort of super-charged version of Microsoft Word that tried to be a program suitable for the printing industry but also be usable for people not in the industry.

If only I could kick things back.

But the upside is that you have the liberty to do whatever you need to do to get the job done with impunity. There have been times I would have really liked to have that luxury. My processes and procedures have to be air-tight and beyond reproach, so that if there's an issue with a job, my part of it withstands scrutiny. This is because of who I work for, and to be frank it's really only by the grace of God (and I mean that sincerely, not saying it flippantly) that I've been kept from so many problems in this area. Not that I haven't made mistakes, because I have. Like i said, the grace of God.

 

[eyoungren]

But the upside is that you have the liberty to do whatever you need to do to get the job done with impunity. There have been times I would have really liked to have that luxury. My processes and procedures have to be air-tight and beyond reproach, so that if there's an issue with a job, my part of it withstands scrutiny. This is because of who I work for, and to be frank it's really only by the grace of God (and I mean that sincerely, not saying it flippantly) that I've been kept from so many problems in this area. Not that I haven't made mistakes, because I have. Like i said, the grace of God.

That's an upside I guess. Hadn't really thought of it that way.

I guess I whine a lot because one particular long-term ad rep is always a problem in many different ways. I will just say that I am expected to make it work but she is not expected to do her job.

I always make it work, but it gets old fighting her every second of the work day.

 

[macuser453787]

That's an upside I guess. Hadn't really thought of it that way.

I guess I whine a lot because one particular long-term ad rep is always a problem in many different ways. I will just say that I am expected to make it work but she is not expected to do her job.

I always make it work, but it gets old fighting her every second of the work day.

I understand.

There's been similar situations here with lack of diligence/thoroughness in one way or another with the parties responsible for creating accurate and complete job envelopes.

I really dislike that because it has slowed down the production flow when it's happened. It's not my place to correct the people that do it, and even if it was I doubt they'd receive it and make the necessary changes. We've tried in various ways for years to bring things to the attention of responsible parties, yet the same issues have come up time and again.

 

[eyoungren]

I understand.

There's been similar situations here with lack of diligence/thoroughness in one way or another with the parties responsible for creating accurate and complete job envelopes.

I really dislike that because it has slowed down the production flow when it's happened. It's not my place to correct the people that do it, and even if it was I doubt they'd receive it and make the necessary changes. We've tried in various ways for years to bring things to the attention of responsible parties, yet the same issues have come up time and again.

Yeah, it's always the simple things. And unfortunately, the first job I had in this industry was at a Gannet daily where their processes and procedures were already established and you were expected to do what was within your job description.

I don't expect the ad reps to do my job, but they look at these materials all the time. A simple glance at Acrobat to determine what size a PDF is can tell them if it's the wrong size. A JPG blown up and all blurry can tell you that it's not print quality. But no, they pass crap like that along to me and then ask me if that will work!

Gannet taught me that the ad rep is the first line of screening or defense. It's even better if you have an Ad Coordinator who traffics all the garbage the reps deal with. But we don't have one of those and so it falls on the ad reps who for whatever reason, just don't care to bother checking this stuff.

It's really in their best interest though because they won't have to deal with me coming back to them.

 

[ThatSandWyrm]

My knowledge is mainly print so I have minimal experience with web design tools. But Adobe dominates. It would be nice to have some real competition where Adobe is actually forced to innovate and adapt instead of adding "features" and increasing prices.

It just ends up in bloat and if your workflow doesn't change from version to version you end up with "features" you never use.

Look no further than the video editing features that they added to Photoshop. They couldn't even give a good reason why they did that in the promo video for the feature.

 

[organicCPU]

I need it to just pass through the embedded fonts (like with EPS).

Hi @eyoungren, it's been a while back that we had this discussion and it took me a while to search for it. Though it´s an old thread, I think it´t o.k. to bump it.

On Thursday AD and AP 1.9 were announced with that feature (from

Affinity Designer for macOS - 1.9.0

We are pleased to announce an update for the MacOS release of Affinity Designer, to version 1.9.0 Changes in this build A highlights explanation can be found here: 5 things you should know about Affinity Designer 1.9 The detailed changes in Affinity Designer for MacOS 1.9.0 over the release build...

forum.affinity.serif.com

Affinity Publisher for macOS - 1.9.0

We are pleased to announce an update for the macOS release of Affinity Publisher, version 1.9.0 Changes in this build A highlights explanation can be found here: 5 things you should know about Affinity Publisher 1.9 The detailed changes in Affinity Publisher for MacOS 1.9.0 over the release build...

forum.affinity.serif.com

Support PDF Passthrough to ensure perfect representation of original PDF when exporting, without the need to have embedded fonts installed

So finally it seems that we got an alternative to InDesign for passing through a PDF.

 

[MBAir2010]

Does the affinity art and design program include layers?

 

[organicCPU]

Does the affinity art and design program include layers?

Yes, all of the Affinity apps (Photo, Designer, Publisher) are supporting layers.

 

[SigEp265]

Does the affinity art and design program include layers?

It's a fully capable design suite very similar to Adobe -- I grew up with adobe so it took me a minute to get used to all the tools but most of it is the same. Even most of the hot keys.

And as I mentioned before you can do almost everything in their iPad apps as well. Importing fonts on ipad is a bit tricky though.

 

[MBAir2010]

It's a fully capable design suite very similar to Adobe -- I grew up with adobe so it took me a minute to get used to all the tools but most of it is the same. Even most of the hot keys.

And as I mentioned before you can do almost everything in their iPad apps as well. Importing fonts on ipad is a bit tricky though.

Thanks,i used that program on a dell xps in 2019 and took a while to get comfortable with the 2 tool set but the results were solid, i think.....
i would only use the design program for organizing and editing over a thousand cartoons i draw on an ipad if i get the M1 macbook this season.