plxs

The good news: I really like Affinity designer. Now for the bad news: Among other things I use Affinity Designer to write patents. Usually this means that we create anywhere between 5 and 30 figures to go along with descriptive text. Inside each figure are literally tens of callouts to things like "1307" in "Figure 13" that point to a particular item in a particular figure. Unfortunately, it is impossible, in practice, to know a priori what the flow of the text is going to be and what figures are going to be included and in what order. To prepare the patent we use place marks in the text like "Figure QQ" that will eventually be turned into something like "Figure 13", etc. when the document is in it's final stages. In the text document that is a simple "Find and Replace" operation. But in the figures it is an absolute nightmare to find QQ07 and manually turn it into 1307, for example. It is made even more complicated because 1307 can also appear in a later figures too so this operation has to be done globally through the text and all of the figures. The issue is that we usually end up with tens of figures and up to about 30 callouts per figure. So, every time I start another patent (about once a year) I review my software options to see what I should use this time. I have used Affinity Designer for the last few patents. Now I am starting the preparation of a new patent and I am going through the software review process yet again. I was very surprised to see that "Find and Replace" functionality still does not exist in Affinity Designer. It is hard for me to understand how a developer ignores users' requests to add such a basic thing as "Find and Replace" functionality. Virtually any mac program that uses text has it. Is part of the problem that Affinity decision makers just cannot understand that there are many users that use their software in ways that they did not anticipate? I would like to hear from Affinity what their rational is for ignoring their users in this regard. Since this is a deal breaker for me now I just have to ask – Can anyone recommend a good alternative to Designer?