captain_slocum

In AP, If I cut out a background using the lasso tool to make it transparent then export it as a PNG, it preserves the transparency but puts a fine line around the cut out path when I paste it into InDesign (the latest version). See attachment. I have tried merge down, merge visible and several different ways to export as a PNG but alway with the same result. Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong? If I export as a PSD file it does not display the same problem. Also, it works properly as a PNG if placed in Photoshop, AF or AD but it does not display properly in Illustrator.

Thanks Walt. I was going to the regular website and logging in there where it doesn't give you the Download and Products key option. I must remember in future to Google Affinity Store, not just Affinity.

I have looked everywhere on the forums and in the help but cannot find an answer to this simple question. How do I install on my second computer, a laptop? I have A designer and A photo on my laptop as well as the desktop because I bought them from the apple store but I bought A publisher direct from Affinity while it was on introductory offer. Now when I go to try to download it for my laptop it only gives me the option to buy again. Q1. How to download to laptop Q2. How to convert my online version to the Apple store version without paying for it again.

I would just like to add my request for tables to flow across text boxes on to other pages. Quite essential. I have every confidence that Affinity listen to people like me who use InDesign everyday in the real world and would love to be free of Adobe. With the final release they are so close - but flowing tables and spanning columns are two roadblocks for me at the moment.

Now I have had time to play with the final release of AP, I am very impressed with how good it is, but there are still two deal breakers in it that need fixing before I can recommend it to the various not for profit organisations I advise. The first is the one discussed here, which I posted about in June - spanning columns. This is not a luxury as some one has suggested, but a massive time saver and aid to good layout. (The second is tables not flowing onto other pages, an even worse oversight). I am hopeful that both these will be in future releases as there is some evidence that Affinity do listen, as long as we make our cases strongly and professionally enough. For instance, I, along with many others, bemoaned the fact that the earlier Betas did not allow images and tables to flow with the text. We were told by a staff member this was not on the road map and unlikely to happen, but there it is in the final product (or something very like it, pinning)

I frequently produce A5 booklets of 40 to 48 pages that are printed on A4 paper using InDesign and I find that even that mature programme is not capable of producing booklets properly. The only solution I have found is to use a programme called Create Booklet. This takes a PDF and paginates it correctly so it will print as a booklet. A brilliantly simple but powerful little gem (I am in no way connected to the company). I tried it out yesterday with Affinity Publisher and it works very well. When exporting from AP, make sure in the export dialogue you select PDF - PDF/X-4 - All Pages. And of course, set up your page size as a custom size of 148.5mm x 210mm (A5 is NOT half of A4 remember). I hope that will help anyone trying to create A5 booklets printed on A4 paper.

May I add my request for this, flowing tables, and also convert text to table. So far I have been very impressed and pleasantly surprised with the finished Publisher and have been able to reproduce most of a monthly magazine of 48 pages without too much effort. BUT, and it is a very big but, the reason I will still be using InDesign is the inability to flow tables. Here is a real world example: In the centre of the 48 page magazine is a 3 to 4 page calendar which is sent to me as a table in Word. Yesterday the editor sent me a revision, asking for two extra items to be inserted near the front of the calendar. I inserted them in InDesign and the rows flowed across the other pages - job done. With Publisher, I would have to delete the bottom two rows of the first page and add them and their content to the top of the next page, and so on through all the pages. Not only time consuming but very prone to error. So this is a real biggy for me, and I suspect many real world users, and I am very disappointed that you are only saying "might consider it" Perhaps you might reconsider your approach to this? So much is good about this programme, and I have several not-for-profit organisations waiting for me to help them set up their magazines so they can publish them themselves, but I can't, alas, recommend AP just yet.

A handsome apology thackabay, but your original post was quite understandable - I had no idea either that they had done what we were asking for, as I had stopped updating the beta just before April, having been told by a staff member there was no intention at all to implement inline object flow. It is very heartening that the essential feature that myself and many others have been requesting has been implemented - they do listen. Full marks to them for correcting their oversight. And disappointing that Patrick Connor should post such a disrespectful and petulant reply. I respectfully suggest it is not a good idea to be rude to the people who post on this forum and who might buy your product. Frankly, I expect more from a staff member. A simple "You will be pleased to hear we have now implemented the feature you requested" would have sufficed.

A bit too late now I suppose, but I think span columns is actually a deal breaker for most people. I have two days to produce a 48 page magazine every month and with out span columns I couldn't do it, or certainly couldn't do in a sensible time or accurately. Like most layout people who use two or three columns in their work, the ability to add pull quotes, span a headline and centre it, etc, and have all the text before and after play nicely, is vital. I have pre-ordered Publisher because it is not much money and hopefully they will realise how important span columns is one day. As someone else in this thread said, if they don't think it important, they have not done much serious layout work in the real world. So I will have to stay with InDesign for now. But I hope AP comes up to scratch one day as it would be great to collaborate with many of our volunteers who cannot afford an Adobe sub.

I was one of the original posters pointing out this crazy omission, and I see it is still rumbling on and no sign from Affinity they have heard. Hopefully the design team will have a meeting where they discuss this and see how important it is to the customer and to the future of Affinity. I have been in the computer design game since the early 80's and I am an IT and design consultant, and I can assure you this is a deal breaker. Quite simply, a DTP app that does not have inline Graphics and Tables (something that even the humblest of text editing apps, even the dreadful Word, has) will not be taken seriously. Frankly, a DTP programme without inline graphics is like a car without a steering wheel. When you buy a car you don't expect to have to ask, does it have a steering wheel! You just assume it does. A newcomer earlier asked what were the benefits of inline graphics. Well imagine this: You have produced a 24 page technical manual with illustrations every 2 or 3 paragraphs. The client asks you to add a new section near the beginning of the document. With inline graphics you just add the paragraphs - done. Without inline graphics you have to go through the whole document dragging the illustrations back into place. Even if you don't make a mistake (unlikely) it will take you hours. This is not a hypothetical example. It just happened to me. But I was using InDesign, so it took a couple of minutes and I knew I was not introducing errors. So why do I care? Two reasons: 1. I am always glad when something pricks Adobe's bubble and forces them to up their game. InDesign has had no real competition for years and needs a jolt. 2. Now I am semi-retired I do a lot of pro-bono work in our local community. I advise and help set up village magazines, church magazines, charity publications, etc. These outfits cannot afford to take out an Adobe subscription, but something like Affinity Publisher would be affordable. I have already promoted Affinity Designer (and indeed use it myself in preference for Adobe Illustrator) and Affinity have benefited from several sales due to my recommendation. But I cannot at the moment even contemplate recommending AP until it has at least inline graphics and tables. Affinity, if your publicity about wanting the design community to tell you what they want from Publisher is real, and not marketing hype, then email me and I will help you..

Recently, ads I design in Affinity Designer and export as a PDF suddenly will not open properly when placed in InDesign 2019. Some elements are missing. I am using Mac OS 10.14.1, Affinity designer 1.6.1 and InDesign 14.0.1 The screenshot shows very clearly the problem. Other applications I own will open the exported PDF correctly (Adobe Acrobat, Mac Preview, MS Word, Pages, attachment to email, etc, etc, except for InDesign 2019 and Photoshop 2019. At first glance, this would point to it being an Adobe problem - except for the fact that if I roll back to previous versions of InDesign, the problem is still there - pointing to a change in AD. Interestingly, the parts that you see missing in the InDesign placement were all parts that, prior to exporting, I altered or added to a page I originally made about a year ago before the latest AD update. Only the parts altered or added after the AD update are affected. I have tried all the different options for exporting a PDF from within AD. I hope you can shed some light on this as it is causing me considerable work flow problems. I would be grateful for your thoughts.

I can't think of a single app with a word processor in it that doesn't have inline graphics; the graphic is seen as just another character. It's really easy to implement. You might wonder, given that I have to have Adobe Creative Cloud anyway for all sorts of reasons, why I care about this. Well, I do a lot of work with communities and education and they can't afford an Adobe CC subscription. When I am trying to set up charitable and not-for profit organisations with a good, cheap, multi-platform, shareable, print based system for newsletters, journals, historical documents, magazines, whatever, there is surprisingly little out there. So come on Affinity, admit you've taken your eye off the ball on this one and put in-line graphics on the agenda - you'll have a winner.

I have come back to this after a bit of respite from it because I do care about whether or not this software is going to be successful. Re-reading Hawk's reply to my post, I don't want to go over old ground endlessly, but there is one important point that I think, Hawk, with the greatest of respect, you have misunderstood. It could be my fault as I have posted in two different threads about the issue and I may not be clear about what I said, where. You imply that I am being unreasonable to expect the beta to have all the important features in it - but that is just not so. I don't expect that. I was an early adopter of Final Cut Pro X and there was all sorts of problems with a professional work flow. We were saying, oh no, where's the XML support, where's this, where's that etc, Apple are going all consumer with this. But now FCPX is superb, I wouldn't go back to Avid or Premier Pro for a big clock. But regarding Affinity Publisher, I had a reply from (I think) a developer who told me that inline graphics and tables was not being contemplated any time in the future. Had they said - hey, we understand, it's an important feature, but we need to get the bare bones out there first - in the way that Apple did with FCPX - that would have been very different. So perhaps you can see where I'm coming from. By all means add inline graphics in a later version, but don't say it isn't ever going to happen. Just admit that it is an important part of a serious DTP package and put it in the pipeline. As Grapher says, it really is not technically difficult. Even Apple Notes has it. In fact I can't think of a single app with a word processor in it that doesn't; the graphic is seen as just another character. You might wonder, given that I have to have Adobe Creative Cloud anyway for all sorts of reasons, why I care about this. Well, I do a lot of work with communities and education and they can't afford an Adobe CC subscription. When I am trying to set up charitable and not-for profit organisations with a good, cheap, multi-platform, shareable, print based system for newsletters, journals, historical documents, magazines, whatever, there is surprisingly little out there. So come on Affinity, admit you've taken your eye off the ball on this one and put in-line graphics on the agenda.

I've written about the following three requests individually but thought it would be useful to pull them together in one post. I have been using DTP professionally for many years and have recently spent quite a lot of time using this beta in a "real world" situation - ie trying to reproduce one of the magazines I currently produce in InDesign. As others have noted, the depth and amount of features in this beta is impressive. However, I feel APublisher needs to be clear about what it is. As it stands, it is a competent and well featured poster or 2 or 3 page newsletter app. It could be an InDesign beater, but to do that, Affinity need to listen to seasoned designers and publishers who know what they are talking about, and then publish a road map for the near future. Here are three things I have identified so far that APublisher does not have, but that in my opinion no serious publisher of printed material could live without: Inline graphics and tables. (A curious and fatal omission this - what were they thinking of?) GREP customisable presets. (An enormous time saver.) Spanning paragraphs across multiple columns. (Multi-column text becomes unwieldy if spanning headlines have to be in separate, unlinked, text boxes.) These were the first three problems I came across and they became apparent very early on in my testing. I am prepared to continue to evaluate APublisher if Affinity will publish a road map with these items on it. Otherwise there is little point, as I, and anyone who earns their living through DTP, will not be using it.

There seems to be two similar threads to this and I have contributed on this topic to both. Reading my original post here perhaps it came over as unnecessarily harsh snd censorious, so let me post on this forum the piece I wrote elsewhere this morning, which I hope gives a rounder picture of my feelings. (I was responding to a poster who suggested I was being unfair and I should be privileged to have the chance to test out the beta.) I wrote: Hawk: The absence of inline graphics and tables makes InDesign unfit as a professional tool. So would not having the other features you mention of course. But you are creating a false dichotomy - it is not a case of choosing between essential features. If it really would take another 2 - 5 years to create a professional DTP app (where did you get that figure from?) then either they should hire an extra software engineer or throw in the towel. The important point that I and others have made is that Affinity did not ask us professionals what was essential in a DTP app. They cite their 25 year experience in DTP (with the dreadful Serif!) but ignore the collective experience of many real world users such a myself who have been using DTP to make a living since its dawn. Nobody expects the first iteration of new software to be perfect. (When InDesign first came out it did not have tables.) And I know I speak for others when I say we have nothing but goodwill towards the Affinity team's efforts, and that we do not wish to nit-pick. But there are certain elements that have to be in place if an app is to be seen as a viable replacement for an existing go-to app. Without inline graphics and tables (something a developer colleague assures me is quite easy to implement - even the humble Notes on the Mac has it) APublisher just becomes another village fete poster app. [Having read the above post regarding the holy grail ability to open APublisher in ADesigner and APhoto I would suggest that for longer documents (which is what we are talking about here) it is an ambition that could be implemented in full detail later.] Our motives for these posts is not to have a pop at Affinity, but to help them in their endeavours, which we applaud. We understand that this is a beta and that 1.0 will look different, but we are dismayed that a moderator has said this is not on the immediate feature list. As for having the beta to play with being a privilege, I think the boot is on the other foot - Affinity should feel privileged that there are seasoned designers out there freely giving their time to make the app viable. I suspect that privately there are red faces over this, and (assuming they read these posts!) hope that wiser counsels prevail and that this issue is given the priority it deserves. As someone has noted elsewhere, a road map of future features would be very useful. If inline graphics is on the list, at the top, then great; if it is not there at all then at least we know not to bother looking at APublisher as a viable ID alternative. My experience of 55 years of business is that openness always pays off in the long run, and I know you guys are committed and working hard to that end. PS: I use ADesigner all the time, you did a great job. Illustrator was always impenetrable to most people who just wanted to get a job done and you nailed it. But knocking ID off its perch I think is bit harder. But I am sure you will get there - if you listen!