Brian D

I'd love an answer to this one too.

InDesign exists because they bought Pagemaker from Aldus. Illustrator is what is today because they got Freehand in the Macromedia deal and customers preferred it to Illustrator. Single app is $20. You save $30 per month. Unless you need something else like After Effects, then that's a decent saving over the course of a year.

Of course you can. If you feel Designer and Photo are already capable of replacing Ai and Ps, then just use those and get a single app subscription to InDesign while you wait for Publisher. It'll even be cheaper. They'll play just fine with InDesign, Adobe didn't design their apps to work together, they just bought them from other companies. InDesign can handle embedded PDF, EPS, PSD, whatever you need it to.

Choose "Nearest neighbour" from the resampling dropdown on export and it'll keep all pixels square. Here's your PNG resized to 1000px wide

Thanks for the replies. I'll stick with duplicating then, as slices means multi-page PDF's are a no go.

This may be simple, and I've just missed it, but I can't seem to make it work. If for instance I have several artboards side by side and one background image spanning the width of all the artboards, it seems like I can only make the background image part of one artboard or none. Placing the image below all artboards in the layers panel, while visible, makes it appear in no artboards on export. Is duplicating the image into each artboard the ony option?

When you open the tab panel in Illustrator/InDesign, you can attach it to the top of a text box and physically move the tab stops around... it makes life very simple when formatting text in menus and things like that. https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/tabs.html It's not something that's the end of the world or anything, but it's an excellent feature that really saves time and painful trial and error guess work.

That's what I was thinking... but a man can dream. It's one of the few things I can't do (flowing text) when working on smaller items like DLs/Menus, that are otherwise just as efficient in Designer as Illustrator.

Apologies if this has already been answered elsewhere, but I couldn't find the relevant info. I know that most of the advanced text handling was to be released with Affinity Publisher, and I can understand/appreciate why. So I'm just curious, now that Publisher has been delayed for a bit, do you think any of those features will make it into Designer this year? In particular, I'm interested in flowing text between linked text boxes, and optical tab stops. Thanks.

I'm one of the designers you refer to. I reluctantly pay Adobe a fee every month to use InDesign. I'm not opposed to subscription pricing, but I do think Adobe's pricing is extortionate; so I've long been looking for an alternative. I agree, that Affinity can be that replacement for a lot of people. Small design houses, freelance designers, students - these are the people and businesses that Affinity should target. Move on to much larger companies and agencies, and you will be hard pressed to move any of them away from tools and workflows that they have heavily invested in. It has to happen eventually... just look at Quark, but releasing three Mac apps isn't going to make it happen. Half of Adobe's dominance isn't how capable their tools are, but how ubiquitous their tools are. I was looking forward to a speedy release of Publisher as much as anybody, but it's hard to fault a company for focusing development on an emerging technology where (if done well) they could arguably own customers mindshare. A 30 year old interaction model (desktop PC's) won't dominate in the future, it can't, technology moves too fast. I won't claim that the likes of an iPad is ready to take over and power businesses worldwide right now, but I do believe that thinner, lighter, faster, and more natural (like pen on paper) devices like it are the future in an industry such as design. So while Adobe faff about making gimmick apps designed to tie you further into their world, and require their desktop tools for any meaningful output; someone like Serif can concentrate on making apps that can actually be used for professional output. The next generation of designers will flock to a great app on a device they love, and happily wave goodbye to the desktop. Companies like Adobe will show themselves to be the dinosaurs they are, and continue extorting larger businesses until they're forced to die or change (there's definitely a little hyperbole there). TLDR; There's definitely money to be made by releasing desktop apps, and still years where the desktop will dominate; but there's more money to be made by owning the mindshare of a generation raised on touch devices. Can't say I blame them for focusing a little more on something like the iPad Pro. If released quickly, Affinity Designer could see them on stage at the release keynote for the next iPad Pro.

Holy f*&%... I hadn't looked at the price. This is what happens when Adobe refuse to support standards for years on end. I'll keep you in mind if I come across any other solutions.

I'm open to correction from the developers here, but as far as I'm aware InDesign doesn't support SVG, it only supports PDF, Ai, and EPS for vectors. So, for your request to work, Affinity would need to export the vector data to one of those formats on the fly, then save it to the clipboard. Edit: You can try this, http://svg.scand.com, there's a trial version available.

Until an iPad version is released, you could try this: http://astropad.com, and use Affinity through it. Not as ideal as a natively running app, but it works.

Feature request for the iPad version (that I'm sure you've already thought of); let us install our own fonts within the app from iCloud Drive/Dropbox or wherever. Apps like Anyfont are great for getting around this limitation, but a bit cumbersome. Really looking forward to this next year!

Woot, thanks for this. Bye Illustrator!

The problem is with Illustrator, not Affinity. See my attached screenshot. I exported an SVG with a stroke, then opened the SVG in Affinity, Illustrator CC, Graphic, and Sketch 3... only Illustrator has a problem. Adobe need to work on their SVG support.

I've had success in the past with this in Affinity betas and others. I believe gatekeeper didn't finish verifying the app on first launch, and now claims its damaged for some reason. Maybe because it sees it as unsigned by a trusted developer? Go to system preferences, then security, then allow installing of apps from anywhere. Then try to run the app again. You can switch gatekeeper back on again afterward.

I'm getting a really strange crash in the latest beta... I saved the file, closed it, then tried to open it again. First it said it had to open a recovery version. Then said it couldn't open it at all because it was already open in another app (?!). I quit AD and reopened, and the file opened fine, but now every time I close that particular file it says AD has quit unexpectedly. Finally, every time I opened AD that file was permanently open. I eventually got it to stop by opening a different file, closing the first one, then quitting AD. It's like it was stuck in some kind of crash loop. For what it's worth, the newest beta has solved all of my PDF export crashing problems.

I still have immediate crashes on PDF X4 exports. Not sure if anybody else has mentioned this, but I've just realised it crashes whenever I have an element like a photograph that's over the edge of the canvas. If I keep everything within the document bounds, it exports just fine.

Pasteboard

So happy to see this. Unfortunately PDF export is still crashing the app for me, faster than I can reach the dropdown to switch away from X4.

Can I email a DB link to you? I can't post publicly, it's for a client.

I have a PDF export issue. I've removed the background of two layers in Photo and brought the document into Designer to layout. If I leave the layers with masking applied the whole app crashes while trying to calculate the file size. If I rasterise one or the other layer, same thing. If I rasterise both layers the document will export as normal.

I'm using Popclip for this at the moment. I activated the typography extensions (capitalise, uppercase, lowercase) then just highlight the text I want and tap one of the options. I bought the app for other reasons, but the typography thing was a huge bonus. Unfortunately doesn't adhere to language conventions, and doesn't work with Adobe's apps.

EDIT You can buy them through iTunes from this link: https://buy.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/buyLandingPage Do you have an iPhone or iPad? I don't know why this isn't an option on the Mac App store (or the Apple Store), but you can send instant gift cards using an iOS device. The only caveat is the recipient must be using the same country App Store as you (no cross border gifting apparently). I guess you're still stuck sending them a link to the app, but it's better than the alternatives. Go to the App Store and scroll half way down to one of the featured tiles, it looks like this: