U. Dinser

Why don't you guys get it - Affinity cannot continue in it current form - Simply under-resourced and cash strapped. To survive they need fresh injection of cash and expertise - so you can shout and express until you are blue in the face but you fail to understand Affinity is NOT Adobe or indeed Canva - The list of feature requests are staggering but because they simply have not got the resources (One of the main developers who left), they fall on deaf ears - While Adobe is adding features such as AI powered fills and so on, Affinity is struggling with the never ending list of bugs. So cut them some slack as to move forward they need to rely on external source - What did you expect them to do? A senior programmer gets 60K - where do you think this money is meant to come from? Perpetual licence?
So in short they look like they did the dirty on their users but left's face it V2 is struggling and updates are NOT coming out as frequently as liked or expected.
This is my take on the matter.

Like many here I came to Affinity after I bailed from decades worth of Adobe use. I point blank refuse to use a subscription model for my tools. I've been using Affinty products happily since the begining and have gotten many colleauges switched over.
I'm nervous. I used Adobe for years .. they went subscription and I moved on, I used Hitfilm pro for years. They were bought and promised "They had no plans" to go down the subscription path. Within months they did just that. I now use Davinci Resolve. Which frankly is 10x better but I digress.

To cut a long story medium length. I just want Affinity to know that if you go down the subscription path for V3, which let's face it is what they plan otherwise they wouldn't have been so careful to only speak of V2, then I and all the people I know will move on to other software.
Of course you can end all this doom and gloom speak by categorically stating that Affinity products will ALLWAYS remain once off purchases. I really hope you do.

Trying to get around the problem with an external solution is absurd.
Once again my request to the Affinity team: Make it possible to extend the number of keyboard commands via the Num keys in order to work more effectively. Or at least offer the option.
Thank you.

I have already mentioned this. For anyone who works with keyboard shortcuts, the Affinity solution is a disaster. Serif sees it as an original solution without considering that it artificially limits many work options.
A separation between the normal and extended keyboard is essential for professional use.

Trying to get around the problem with an external solution is absurd.
Once again my request to the Affinity team: Make it possible to extend the number of keyboard commands via the Num keys in order to work more effectively. Or at least offer the option.
Thank you.

I have already mentioned this. For anyone who works with keyboard shortcuts, the Affinity solution is a disaster. Serif sees it as an original solution without considering that it artificially limits many work options.
A separation between the normal and extended keyboard is essential for professional use.

I have already mentioned this. For anyone who works with keyboard shortcuts, the Affinity solution is a disaster. Serif sees it as an original solution without considering that it artificially limits many work options.
A separation between the normal and extended keyboard is essential for professional use.

A few issues.
AD - a small number of shortcut with alt key. For example - Select >same>fill. It is not possible to use it with alt shortcut even though there are many unused letters in this menu. For example "S" for "same"...
But we can use alt Select>Select All despite of that we heve regular shortcut for it (ctrl+A) 🤔
AP - the numeric keyboard potential for custom shortcuts is completely unused. Num eneter is the same as regular enter. Num 1 is the same as regular 1. Why???!!!! It is different key and can be used in different way… 
 

I commented on page one of this thread and only now came back. In the meantime, I was out there doing real work, some of which involved teaching Affinity products. In the interim I updated to version 2, despite the fact Publisher is lagging quite severely behind the other components. 
I have just read several posts saying that Publisher works just fine and is "missing nothing" from Adobe's products. Such comments are simply the product of ignorance. Perhaps it's worth repeating the missing features, so that people joining the thread more recently can learn.
No spreads of 3+ pages. This is a problem I encounter on day two of teaching first year design. Day two. It's not an advanced feature at all, but rather a requirement for covers with spines, flyers, and many other types of publications.  No informal spreads, which allow temporary reorganisation for side-to-side comparison. No scripting, which strictly limits automation, making Publisher unsuitable for complex documents.  No conditional text or objects. Ditto. No regular expression search/replace. Ditto. No global layers. The current layer implementation works on a page-by-page basis which is unsuitable for many use cases.  No Markdown import, IDML export, ePub export, etc. which seriously limits inter-operability in professional workflows.  No cross-references for story text, only indices. No vertical text or RTL (right-to-left) text. No typeface sets, which helps organise resources across project pools. On the plus side, we did get these features:
Footnote / endnote support. Ability to compile documents as a Book. Not all of these features are equally important, but this list should at least demonstrate the gap between Affinity Publisher and the competition. There's far more room for improvement in this application than the rest of the suite. But I suppose that DTP is less glamorous and has a smaller user base. So perhaps we will never have a competitor for Adobe?

I agree.
I don't believe for a minute they have any disinterested professional consultants on staff, either that, or they ignore them. I haven't seen much evidence that they even listen to their users unless there's a firestorm that could affect their bottom line. Perhaps some consider taking bug reports and feature requests on V1 software that's long been out of development (in favor of V2) "listening"?
I actually prefer working in Affinity programs to anything else, and I'm not a DTP guy, but the lack of footnotes, et al. until this year is literally incomprehensible to me. It speaks volumes to the "professional" consultants they have on staff -- I mean, they couldn't even write a their own Shareholders' Report without completely unacceptable "workarounds"😮. Footnotes have been a core feature in even simple word-processors for home computers since the 1970s. I honestly don't understand Serif's thinking here, as this feature should have been in it before even the first line of code was written.
And now we have footnotes, but since they're a new feature, the user will have to babysit them to make sure they work properly -- although forcing customers to be beta testers is pretty standard in the software industry today these days.
 

To answer the points one by one:
1. Professionally means earning the larger part of your income from DTP.
2. You may be right, but it doesn't feel like it.
3. (ignoring the insulting quote marks) we are not talking here about whether we like the colours of an icon or a hundred and one things that don't matter/have easy work arounds. We are talking absolute deal breakers that anybody who uses DTP extensively for technical reports, books, magazines, company prospectuses, exam papers, etc etc etc cannot do without.
4. I don't use it, because I can't yet, but I do support it because I believe in it as a worthwhile project that I want to see succeed (yes, I know that's old school, but then I'm very old).
5. No there are not - not for macOS anyway. Or does the ellipse signify sarcasm? In which case the implication is that there are not any other such options, in which case it is more important than ever to make sure APub is fit for purpose.

There are about 56 Tools and tool variants, but the limitations on assigning keyboard shortcuts to Tools, particularly the inability to use modifier keys, means that it is impossible to assign a shortcut to more than about 26 of them. Keys 0-9 are used for setting opacity levels, and this cannot be turned off. Several punctuation keys (e.g. the '[' and ']' keys) and the 'D' and 'X' keys also cannot be changed from their defaults.
This may not be an issue for most people. I have an elgato Stream Deck XL, so I attempted to create Stream Deck keys for each of the Tools I use most so that I could access them with a quick button push instead of mousing to the menu. The limitations on Tools shortcuts meant that I could not do this. I had to decide which Tools to assign to the available number of shortcuts.
Could you please allow the use of modifier keys when setting keyboard shortcuts for Tools? Alternatively (or in addition), you could allow the assignment of the number keys to the opacity levels to be removed/changed, which would free up ten more keys.
P.S. There is a set of icons for Affinity Photo available for the Stream Deck from the elgato download page, which is what inspired me to try this in the first place. I recreated the Designer vector tool icons in Affinity Designer so they would appear correctly on the Stream Deck. I would be happy to provide the Designer icons file if Serif were interested in making an 'official' set of Designer icons available for Stream Deck users.

Thanks for your suggestion, this has now been added to the 2.2 beta:
We would love you to give it a go – if you aren't already, you can join the beta program here: https://affinity.serif.com/affinity-beta-program/

Hello
Thank you every one for your answers.
I know about what you say, but I think a solution with one key is better.
I do very often the sequence :  zoom - typing texte - pan - continuing typing. With your solution I have to press ESC -  press V - press spacebar to pan - double clic to re-enter the text frame for typing.
So having a one key fast solution for panning is better. Again the ALT key as InDesign is a good way : press ALT - Pan - release ALT - continuing typing.

Grumpy grandad in:
First; I love Affinity's apps. I'm a total evangelist and convinced a lot of customers and colleagues to purchase it. I have been a "Affinitier" since 2015 and I won't go back. So please, don't take this as a free light ranting.
I'm tired. I'm frustrated. Because of tables. And I have been this way since Publisher came out. I can't understand by Affinity decided to make tables as a separate monolithic object only.
Why, in the name of the design gods, they decided to make it like something outside of the text (Something that even the cheapest, crappiest text editor app understand).
Why, in the name of the design hell's lord they decided that tables can't spread through text containers, columns and pages.
Why, in the name of sanity, can't we set a fixed width to a table, or set fixed width to a column, or block the width to prevent Publisher resizing them whenever I move any other single column, making a nightmare to set the table layout.
I'm tired. This is the single cause of friction and discussion inside out studio team. This is the cause of delays and multiple errors on our work. It is the cause that we have started to make tables in a larger document apart so we can work with big tables before segmenting them to be placed into the final layout. This is why we fear to add or move any design element, because the hideous tables will no spread or move correctly in the documents breaking all the text workflow. This is why we fear to modify a table layout, because we will have to do it on all the segments of the table.
Our last work toke 4 extra hours just because of the tables. Because of the need to segment it and re-layout it after any document modification. And that's 4 hours I can't pass onto the customer because is not their fault.
In 2019, Affinity recognized that this was a very requested feature. Now we are in 2023, and that forum post is deep under into the vault of the lost threads. But we still have to design tables with virtual scissors and glue.
Publisher v2 has been a great improvement on a lot of things, but this table thing is outrageous, and just now, in the middle of a urgent complex corporate document full of tables, it is wat is making us to be working on Sunday instead of walking the dog in the countryside.
I don't know what more to say. I wish Affinity to tell us something more that "we know it is requested we will look into it, someday"
For all the love that I have to the team, I hate tables in Affinity. And I hate to be inside the studio trying to make tables to work on Sunday.
Grumpy grandad out.

So, beta 2.2 is here, and we can see that some very important features have been added, and with remarkable creativity. Development is proceeding slowly but steadily.
Since new features are announced as possible during the next months, it is hard to say what we will have in Publisher before the end of the year. Just to recap, however, I'll write down what I still miss for my own needs.
- Multipage tables. I work with tabular-heavy data, so I can't really use the current feature.
- Object styles. I have to adapt my content to different styles. The current situation is that I should re-apply the object presets to each object in a publication. With their number easily going over 1,000, this is hardly feasible. I need object styles.
- Text variables. Much of my work is referred to products available in different variants. The name of the product and of some of its features and controls can change. Without text variables, I have to use search and replace, with the imaginable risk of changing what shouldn't be changed.
- Conditional text. Product variants also means an abundance of alternative text and images.
- IDML export. This is a show-stopper for two reasons: (1) interfacing with assisted translation software, and (2) compatibility with my colleagues working in InDesign. While some of them may be wanting to switch to Affinity, this is not always possible for a series of reasons (company decisions, unwillingness to change, prestige associated with the Adobe name, lack of support of RTL languages, incomplete support of CJKV languages). And then, back to (1): they wouldn't be able to use their CAT tools.
- DOCX export. I see this file format as the perfect interface for ePub and Web. The tools I use for this type of work require DOCX/RTF files. Copy & Paste from Publisher may work for text, but the lack of images would make rebuilding the project quite hard.
- ICML import. Not a real show-stopper, but a cause of slowdown. It is the file format generated by Pandoc. I described somewhere else in this forum how to go from ICML to IDML, but it is not exactly a quick operation. Since ICML is just a subset of IDML, it would be very easy for Serif to support it. It's just a matter of adding the file into a <Story> element of a IDML template.
- RTL support. Admittedly, I don't have much control on the work of the distributors using RTL languages. And I know that most of them prefer to work in Word or LibreOffice. But I must consider this as a limitation. And it happens, to me, to have to produce short multilingual documents including RTL languages.
- Better CJKV support? I have still to understand if horizontal text is managed correctly or not. There is an inexplicable reluctance in talking extensively about this issue from our Chinese or Japanese fellows here in the forum, that I can't still get if it can be used or not. And I can't yet, for various reasons, get information from my colleagues (who don't use the Affinity suite, or only informally admit to have it installed in their secret computer).
So, another year of InDesign CC subscription and file lock-in is to be expected
Paolo
 

It is such a shame that Serif spent so many years improving and adding functionality to Publisher and are not developing some of the most useful functionality for their new offering.
Much as I like some of the new things that Affinity can do, I really do miss the basic things that it cannot do.

Super excited when I got an email about V2 and even downloaded the free trials, but after looking at the lack of added features, it's a big pass. I'll wait for V3 or V6 or V9, what ever it takes to make this software compatible with the printing industry (Almost 1 Trillion Dollar (US$) industry worldwide).
There is still no support for overprint fills and strokes for ink trapping and color mixing, spot or CMYK color separations, non-printable layers for die cut rules or digital finishing equipment. Let's not even mention the still clunky interface. It's not workflow, it's work stoppage. Need to pull down menus to change stroke weights and type sizes, really???
I have worked in the graphic arts industry for over 40 years from paste up and film to digital prepress and digital printing, and every major graphic software package since the original Pagemaker. I know a thing or two about the industry. The reason professionals use Adobe products is because they support this kind of work. Our designers and prepress technicians agree that Affinity files are challenging to work with, and the only thing worse is Canva crap. We charge extra for such files because of the time it takes to make them work with our equipment.
Bottom line is if your like me and don't want to pay for subscription software, be prepared to pay for it on the back end.

No global layers.
No multi-page spreads.
No scripting.
No typeface sets.
No informal spreads (so pages can be reorganised for side-to-side comparison).
Apparently there is footnote and endnote support. Anyone upgrading can tell me how that works. 
Ratio of 1 in 6 is not very good progress, IMHO. Publisher is way behind the other products in the suite and needs some TLC.

After banging on about tables for years in this forum, I had hoped that Publisher version 2 would have addressed the glaring issues. Alas no text to table, no table to text, no flowing tables. And no span columns. These are essential tools.
It's hard to see what is that different. I am beyond disappointed. This is a dot update, not a version upgrade.
I said recently I would wait for a major upgrade before passing further judgement, and have wanted to support Affinity by giving them the benefit of my 35 years experience in DTP. Sorry folks, this is not yet a serious publishing tool, it is still just a flyer app. Hey Ho, can't ditch Adobe yet I'm afraid.

After Adobe went to subscription-only, I coasted on CS6 for a while and then switched to Affinity, and have never looked back. OK, well, I do fire up Photoshop every now and again for one reason or another, but overall I've been delighted with the Affinity products, and the value proposition they offer.
Market-wise, Serif's products lie in the middle of the huge gulf between expensive, rigid Adobe, and free, freewheeling open-source alternatives (GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus...). With respect to communication with users, I find myself wishing that Serif would lean more toward the behavior of open-source products.
Serif's communication is hit-or-miss. The v1 Beta programs did a good job giving users an insight into short-term plans for features and bug fixes. But this was all users could see in the way of a product roadmap. And the long gap between v1 and v2 with no public Beta left users in the dark for a very long time. For the most part, we were left guessing. Just the fact that there was a thread entitled "Is Affinity dead?" exemplifies that situation.
In the forums, Serif staff are very responsive to questions about bugs, existing features, and product behavior, which is absolutely wonderful.
On the other hand, my perception is that questions about Serif's short- or long-term plans, or even in some cases questions about existing policies, are greeted with a frustrating silence. 
Recent examples include the v1=>v2 upgrade pricing kerfuffles (there are two of them: one for longstanding v1 users, and one for recent v1 purchasers), the Windows msix installation debacle, and the aforementioned radio silence after 1.10.5.
Some of this secrecy might be justifiable (if somewhat cynically) for business reasons. For example, prospective first-time customers looking to buy Affinity v1 this past July might've been discouraged if they knew that v2 would be released in November, but they would have to pay the going rate for the upgrade. Or, if they learned that their hoped-for feature would not be implemented. So they might have chosen to hold off, impacting the timing and amount of revenue to Serif. 
However, for the most part, I am having trouble understanding the rationale for much of the secrecy. Seeing a product roadmap can be an incentive to buy into a product at an early stage. Maybe someone doesn't want to purchase Designer because they're not sure if there'll ever be a bitmap trace feature. If they see it on the roadmap, perhaps they'll take the plunge now, to start their transition. 
And most of us understand that there will be uncertainty. Even without a definitive answer, a response is superior to silence.
It's fine for Serif to say, "This is the fairly firm roadmap for v2.2 through v2.3, the tentative roadmap for 2.4-2.8, and the speculative feature set for v3. Any of this is still liable to change. Feedback welcome."
It would have been fine for Serif to say on the day after the v2 announcement, "We understand that some users have an issue with the MSIX installation. We're going to be discussing it among ourselves to determine what, if anything we will do in response. Stay tuned." It obviously would have been even better if the plans to use MSIX had been divulged months before announcement, since it would have better prepared Serif for release.
Posts like Ash's, which explain details surrounding the pricing and upgrade decisions, are fantastic, but IMO they could've been published MUCH earlier.
Most of the people who follow the forums, myself included, are committed Affinity users and supporters. We're going to be upgrading to v2, and we're very likely to pay again for v3. So I'm just not clear on what Serif gains by being so reticent to tell us what's going on, and what the plans are for the future.

Most of Data Designers use Illustrator to create charts… except that the chart tools in Illustrator haven't been updated for 27 years!!!
 
There's a huge gap in the market for a chart designing tool, that is powerful, up-to-date, and easy to use. I'm fed up with Illustrator for that matter, as you really can't create anything (dynamic) except pie charts, line charts and bar charts…
 
We need flow charts, treepmaps, etc. I know a bunch of designers who'd switch to AfDesigner if there were chart tools included.
 
We don't ask for a Excel replacement, but we need/want a not-stuck-in-the-past vector tool!

Hello,
 
I am a graphic designer in the financial services industry. We regularly create charts and graphs for printed materials. We are stuck with Illustrator since it is the only tool we know of that will generate a chart from data that stays intact for updating and provides us with a vector final format.
 
Now Illustrator is okay, maybe even good. But the chart/graph tool hasn't changed much since 1990. Really. I do know. There are other programs that can make charts but that don't provide the use of Pantone colors, easy updating, and that vector format plus will easily import data from Excel or other spreadsheets. Designer looks like it can take the place of Illustrator in most cases. Why not take Illustrator's place as a charting tool too? Or you could go the extra mile and create a vector chart making application that ticks all the necessary boxes.
 
Thanks.
Paul Bunyar
Shawnee, Kansas, USA

The first time I want to use Publisher and I run into this. How can this thread be alive since 2018 and multi-page spreads not implemented yet?
Please Affinity, what is the problem? Back to InDesign...

Every time I see there's a new version of Publisher, I install it and I run to see if "spreads of more than 2 pages" is between the new features.
And, every time, I end up disappointed.
I swear, I can`t understand why this feature isn't implemented yet, when Serif PagePlus X9, the grandfather of this Publisher, have got it...