OzNate

Coming from the InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator trio, I had a very set way of working - create your elements in Photoshop and Illustrator, bring them in and place them in InDesign. Images are pre-sized to correct resolution in Photoshop. Anything too tricky such as gradients and shadows can be built into the Photoshop file background, etc. All in CMYK of course, unless you were one of the people that saves RGB to CMYK conversion to the output stage. I would routinely have a folder full of huge PSD files to support a given publication. Watching the StudioLink announcement and working with it a little, I realised that we can probably be more free to mix and match, and there's no particular reason to have every single image live as its own layered file. If you're just placing a stock photo, why not place the JPG directly and do your minor edits right in Publisher. I don't see any need to go to all the bother of creating a separate file (PSD equivalent) for a lot of that work, unless it's a special composition or something that will be reused elsewhere. David Blatner suggested something similar with InDesign a few years ago, but I never really took that up because I wanted really clean files going to pre-press, plus InDesign had limited tools for image manipulation. But with StudioLink, I don't think it really matters anymore. Provided the RGB to CMYK conversion is going to be straightforward and predictable at the point I make a press-ready PDF (haven't delved into that yet with Affinity), I'm really starting to reimagine how to build a publication. Artists coming from other software or workflows may already be in this mindset but I've come from a background in serial publications where it was very much a folder full of linked images that are all prepped and managed in Photoshop, nothing embedded (only linked), nothing RGB, nothing straight from JPG or not appropriately resized prior to placement, etc. Interested to hear what others think. Cheers.

How did you go? I've been pushing out projects left and right as soon as I downloaded the retail version of Publisher, just love the integration. :-)

I'm tired, have to sleep, will catch you all later. Too bad for the Aussies, I'm keen but not enough to stay up or get up that early. :-)

Hmmm. Now it's the same for me. Weird. Maybe this is a non-issue after all but I am going to keep testing.

I have done this too. Ever since my work stopped giving me a licence I haven't had the option. But even if I had the option I wouldn't want to install it on my new laptop. GIGABYTES worth of stuff that wants to update itself constantly. Ugh. I remember the days when Adobe was cool. They were innovating. They did performance releases sometimes (anyone remember Photoshop 7?). I went to their launches and conferences. I was at the original InDesign launch tour. You wanted to buy in because there was just nothing like it. When they put everything together into CS I wanted the Master Collection. It was great! But with CC, it was too expensive, too problematic (licencing errors like we all know too well). And if you don't pay the bill, it all stops working. When Premiere started having problems, and InDesign started taking forever to launch, I had enough. I struggled for a few years getting by with other alternatives. When I found Affinity last year I didn't look back. Publisher has completed the suite of design apps for me. For all things video I went to Davinci Resolve. I understand that a lot of people still need Adobe apps and that's cool, this is not a hate club in my view. In fact, I actually hope Adobe is listening. But having moved from Quark years back I'm no stranger to moving on if need be. When the market leader gets comfortable and their customer experience goes down, that's just not good. Me? I'm done with Adobe. No regrets guys!

I've just briefly tried out the accidental reveal of this. It will be worth the wait. :-) This is the sort of thing that we all could have hoped Adobe would have done but could never seem to pull off. This is waaaay different. And it's like lightning. I feel like I've finally come home!

Oho! Just saw this. I fetched the .371 installer out of my trash and took it for a spin. Niiiice! InDesign, eat your heart out.

Ah, thanks Pedro. I was just about to look that up. To be honest, it's a bit early for me to bother. I hope we catch up on the news a few hours later as you suggest. :-)

Oh, ok, so we're only halfway there. That will be interesting. I will test a little more. Kinda funny, space savings from using native document file such as .afphoto or .psd is lost because of the embedding (make a separate .TIF to switch to linking and we're not saving much space). Anyway look forward to further improvement.

Just some early results from me and comments after reading some of this thread... having migrated from Quark to InDesign years ago, I found at that time that converters didn't really do the best job. If you are talking about handing files back and forth and you think you are going to do that between different applications, it's a waste of time. Converting should be a one way thing really. Anyway, what I've found is that Publisher does a great job of opening PDFs. I always had a habit of saving PDF versions of all projects (that's how we would do proofs anyway). Today I opened a 32 page full colour publication from a PDF. It was good enough that I could probably just tweak or make necessary changes and go to press. If I wanted to fully regain layout functionality, I would need to recreate master pages, styles, and re-link columns and text boxes back into stories. Not that hard really. When we went from Quark to InDesign for our magazines I just created a new template in InDesign from scratch, including master pages, text and object styles. That was a good time to clean up our styles and layout, and didn't take that much time. So for me I've come to realise that I don't actually need to open my InDesign files. I have the PDFs for existing work, and so far either Designer or Publisher has been able to open them to use as necessary.

Opened the file created earlier which was 505MB, and replaced all linked images to trigger a true linking. The result is 427MB file. Still bigger than it should be. Now, these are PSD files so that may make a difference. I'll have to rebuild the document from scratch in the current version and see if that will change things.

Obviously 399 (GM) is not totally final as this is still not working. Looking forward to the 19th!

This is still present in 399 (GM) so I guess could be addressed in a post-release update.

Alt-Space has been around in Windows for decades. It is the equivalent of clicking a program's icon (to the left of the file menu). I have decided to use the InDesign shortcut, which is Ctrl-Alt-x. They also couldn't use Alt-space to match the Mac equivalent, because of Windows using this combination.

Thanks, I am aware of this, but reporting this as a bug, since the current default one will never work on Windows. Has anyone found a workable alternative? The ones I tried didn't seem to work.