cai

https://affinity.serif.com/de/press/newsroom/affinity-and-canva-pledge/

And who can guarantee that Adobe will not acquire Canva and, that way, kill two rabbits with one shot?

My fist reaction to this announcement – which I got a few minutes ago – is » The end of a brilliant era.
I think the main reason for this opinion is that Canva is such a popular tool for marketers and individuals. To me, this means that it's not aimed at professional designers, graphic artists and artists, but at people who want to be creative by accessing ready-made templates. - I have often feared that this day would come, because I could not imagine that Serif could achieve at this price level what many professionals (often excessively, imho) demand in order to replace the forced subscriptions of the top dogs.
Somehow this development seems unavoidable - and there is still the faint hope that this time things will be different than usual - because Serif is Serif. And because the people at Canva perhaps don't have the greed that is generally assumed.
So I’m looking forward to the lots of cool updates that will come for the 2.x versions, wish all the best for the serif team members and stay tuned!

Cuz our reaction was predictable.

My heart truly sank with this news. I've seen a lot of acquisitions like this, and the time from "we don't have any changes planned, everything will stay the same" to "we are excited to announce we now offer pro features on a subscription basis" is usually about 1 year.
I have some amount of trust in Serif. I thought their transition from V1 to V2 was done very well from a business perspective. It's clear paid upgrades are the model its customers want, and it's certainly a requirement for me. But like others have said, I have no love for Canva. In fact, I don't have any feelings about them at all. I heard about them a while back, checked them out, "oh, it's a subscription service, not for me", and never looked again.
I'll say, as long as Serif produce standalone perpetual-license desktop software, at the quality they are known for, I will continue to be a customer. If Canva think adding such a product to their portfolio is a good investment, good luck to them, I'll be their customer too. The moment that they stop that — by seeking rent, or by pivoting to online SAAS or AI or whatever — I'll look elsewhere. It was very painful to extract myself from Adobe, and all the other little software products over the years which have been acquired and changed to suit the business models of their new owners. But I did every time, and I'll do it again if I have to.

My heart truly sank with this news. I've seen a lot of acquisitions like this, and the time from "we don't have any changes planned, everything will stay the same" to "we are excited to announce we now offer pro features on a subscription basis" is usually about 1 year.
I have some amount of trust in Serif. I thought their transition from V1 to V2 was done very well from a business perspective. It's clear paid upgrades are the model its customers want, and it's certainly a requirement for me. But like others have said, I have no love for Canva. In fact, I don't have any feelings about them at all. I heard about them a while back, checked them out, "oh, it's a subscription service, not for me", and never looked again.
I'll say, as long as Serif produce standalone perpetual-license desktop software, at the quality they are known for, I will continue to be a customer. If Canva think adding such a product to their portfolio is a good investment, good luck to them, I'll be their customer too. The moment that they stop that — by seeking rent, or by pivoting to online SAAS or AI or whatever — I'll look elsewhere. It was very painful to extract myself from Adobe, and all the other little software products over the years which have been acquired and changed to suit the business models of their new owners. But I did every time, and I'll do it again if I have to.

My heart truly sank with this news. I've seen a lot of acquisitions like this, and the time from "we don't have any changes planned, everything will stay the same" to "we are excited to announce we now offer pro features on a subscription basis" is usually about 1 year.
I have some amount of trust in Serif. I thought their transition from V1 to V2 was done very well from a business perspective. It's clear paid upgrades are the model its customers want, and it's certainly a requirement for me. But like others have said, I have no love for Canva. In fact, I don't have any feelings about them at all. I heard about them a while back, checked them out, "oh, it's a subscription service, not for me", and never looked again.
I'll say, as long as Serif produce standalone perpetual-license desktop software, at the quality they are known for, I will continue to be a customer. If Canva think adding such a product to their portfolio is a good investment, good luck to them, I'll be their customer too. The moment that they stop that — by seeking rent, or by pivoting to online SAAS or AI or whatever — I'll look elsewhere. It was very painful to extract myself from Adobe, and all the other little software products over the years which have been acquired and changed to suit the business models of their new owners. But I did every time, and I'll do it again if I have to.

My heart truly sank with this news. I've seen a lot of acquisitions like this, and the time from "we don't have any changes planned, everything will stay the same" to "we are excited to announce we now offer pro features on a subscription basis" is usually about 1 year.
I have some amount of trust in Serif. I thought their transition from V1 to V2 was done very well from a business perspective. It's clear paid upgrades are the model its customers want, and it's certainly a requirement for me. But like others have said, I have no love for Canva. In fact, I don't have any feelings about them at all. I heard about them a while back, checked them out, "oh, it's a subscription service, not for me", and never looked again.
I'll say, as long as Serif produce standalone perpetual-license desktop software, at the quality they are known for, I will continue to be a customer. If Canva think adding such a product to their portfolio is a good investment, good luck to them, I'll be their customer too. The moment that they stop that — by seeking rent, or by pivoting to online SAAS or AI or whatever — I'll look elsewhere. It was very painful to extract myself from Adobe, and all the other little software products over the years which have been acquired and changed to suit the business models of their new owners. But I did every time, and I'll do it again if I have to.

I must say this was a shock but not a good one - Canva also bought SMARTMOCKUPS.COM which was amazing and now they are shutting it down - I do hope this is not the case with Affinity.
Canva have the cash and resources and do make the final decision which is a shame. All this companies say at the beginning no no we will be independent but in reality that will not be the case.

I've been in the graphics business since the early 90s and have seen a few of these takeovers. Experience teaches us not to trust the acquiring company, because these companies are primarily interested in the customer base of the acquired company and the money of its users, not in making the products better.
And the announcements about the pricing model are just as similar as the statements made by the CEOs of the acquired companies. "A great future in a great partnership with the new partner. Great things are already shining on the horizon." And so on, and so on. All heard umpteen times before. And the real development has been seen umpteen times.
And the contributions to the discussion are the same every time, including the call to have a little faith in the companies. It's all been done before.

My heart truly sank with this news. I've seen a lot of acquisitions like this, and the time from "we don't have any changes planned, everything will stay the same" to "we are excited to announce we now offer pro features on a subscription basis" is usually about 1 year.
I have some amount of trust in Serif. I thought their transition from V1 to V2 was done very well from a business perspective. It's clear paid upgrades are the model its customers want, and it's certainly a requirement for me. But like others have said, I have no love for Canva. In fact, I don't have any feelings about them at all. I heard about them a while back, checked them out, "oh, it's a subscription service, not for me", and never looked again.
I'll say, as long as Serif produce standalone perpetual-license desktop software, at the quality they are known for, I will continue to be a customer. If Canva think adding such a product to their portfolio is a good investment, good luck to them, I'll be their customer too. The moment that they stop that — by seeking rent, or by pivoting to online SAAS or AI or whatever — I'll look elsewhere. It was very painful to extract myself from Adobe, and all the other little software products over the years which have been acquired and changed to suit the business models of their new owners. But I did every time, and I'll do it again if I have to.

My heart truly sank with this news. I've seen a lot of acquisitions like this, and the time from "we don't have any changes planned, everything will stay the same" to "we are excited to announce we now offer pro features on a subscription basis" is usually about 1 year.
I have some amount of trust in Serif. I thought their transition from V1 to V2 was done very well from a business perspective. It's clear paid upgrades are the model its customers want, and it's certainly a requirement for me. But like others have said, I have no love for Canva. In fact, I don't have any feelings about them at all. I heard about them a while back, checked them out, "oh, it's a subscription service, not for me", and never looked again.
I'll say, as long as Serif produce standalone perpetual-license desktop software, at the quality they are known for, I will continue to be a customer. If Canva think adding such a product to their portfolio is a good investment, good luck to them, I'll be their customer too. The moment that they stop that — by seeking rent, or by pivoting to online SAAS or AI or whatever — I'll look elsewhere. It was very painful to extract myself from Adobe, and all the other little software products over the years which have been acquired and changed to suit the business models of their new owners. But I did every time, and I'll do it again if I have to.

Hi All,
Well, it’s been a pretty crazy week since the launch of V2!
This has been a real labour of love for us over the last year or so, and I can’t even begin to describe how hard the development team have worked on it. Not only getting the V2 apps launched, but also of course finally bringing Publisher to iPad. 
With this being our first paid-for upgrade there has understandably been a lot of feedback / questions around future updates and our pricing policies. I thought it was worth addressing / clarifying our position on some of these personally...
Updates to V2 moving forward
Buying V2 not only gets you all the new features you have seen, but we have various updates planned – including many more new features and improvements – which you will get for free. This will continue until such a time that V3 is released. We’re not sure exactly when V3 will be, but I can confirm we are not going to move to anything as regular as an annual upgrade cycle as has been speculated.
It’s worth saying too that V2 does include many under-the-hood changes to our underlying technology, and we have also been investing in several new areas of research recently. Some of these haven’t manifested themselves into new features yet, but overall V2 does give us a better platform to develop on moving forward and I’m sure you will be pleased with the updates V2 will receive.
Updates to V1 moving forward
While we did say on the FAQ that V1 would no longer receive any updates, I want to clarify that was about new feature updates. We will be updating V1 to fix any critical problems caused by operating system updates in the future. So if the next version of macOS breaks V1 we will endeavour to fix it. There will be a point in time when continuing to maintain V1 in this way will not be tenable, but certainly for the foreseeable future we will continue to patch. In fact, we have an update to V1 queued up for release very shortly with some fixes for Ventura and issues caused by a recent Windows security / quality update. 
We will update our FAQ shortly to make that clearer for everyone.
Offer period
In case you didn’t see, I’m pleased to confirm we have decided to run this initial launch offer until 14th December to give everyone the best chance possible to get it if they wish / have a decent amount of time to trial it. 
Upgrade pricing
It’s been really hard to see some of the comments about us not looking after our existing customers – we’re pretty devasted that anyone feels like that to be honest. But the fact is we felt our hands were tied somewhat with being able to offer upgrade pricing in a fair way. The main reason for this was App Store customers (which make up around 35% of our userbase). The problems with that are two-fold: firstly, we didn’t have a way from within V1 to validate an App Store purchase receipt to reliably ensure customers who were entitled to an upgrade could get one; and secondly, we could not find a good way for people to get that discount via the App Store. Us pushing upgrade customers to go exclusively via our own site (including customers who were previously acquired via the app stores) may also have put us in violation of App Store Ts & Cs which we were obviously concerned about.
I’m not saying that these issues were completely insurmountable, but any solutions we came up with would be messy, and most importantly could have resulted in some bona fide V1 customers struggling to get validated and claim their discount. We certainly don’t have the support resource here if we ended up needing to manually validate tens of thousands of receipts for example.
The only option we felt was safe to move forward with was a general launch offer, which would guarantee that every V1 customer could get the discount, whether they purchased directly through us or the App Stores. We knew a side effect of that would mean some new customers would end up receiving that same discount – but we felt that was a better option than V1 customers missing out. It’s also worth saying that while there has been some good press about V2, all our main marketing has been via email and through social media to our followers. In other words, we felt ok about it because we knew the vast majority of people who would find out about it or take advantage of the offer would be existing customers. I would be surprised if over the offer period customers upgrading from V1 didn’t make up more than 90% of our sales.
Overall I do believe us giving a 40% discount, along with the addition of the new Universal Licence of course, is offering fantastic value for money for those who want to upgrade. 
However, taking on board some of the feedback there is something extra we can do – we will offer a new free bundle of content exclusively for V1 customers upgrading to V2 as an extra thank you for your support. I’ve seen this suggested by a number of customers and it’s a great idea as it does remove the App Store conflict entirely. 
We’ll need a little time to put something together, but all customers who previously registered or purchased V1 and have since upgraded to V2 will receive a voucher code for this via email as soon as we can.
A comment on no subscription
I do want to say that some of the points above are exactly the reason why software companies move to subscription. Whatever you do with upgrade pricing, you still have the issue of customers who bought the previous version 3 months ago vs. those who have had it 2+ years. Offering perpetual licences also gives the additional overhead of needing to maintain the previous version longer than you would if everyone was on subscription / generally always on the latest version.
We are a small team so some of these complications are not ideal — all we really want to do is focus on developing our latest codebase, push out regular updates and continue with our mission to make great creative software accessible to everyone. 
But it does need to be funded somehow. We know you love our no-subscription model, but there also needs to be a level of appreciation that the alternative is having paid-for upgrades from time to time. That unfortunately comes with its own problems.
All of that said, I have to say we have been blown away with the response to V2 - around 3 times as many people have upgraded in the last week than we expected - and we really can't thank you enough for the support you have shown. More than anything the success of this upgrade puts us in a great place to continue investing heavily in development which is ultimately what it's all about, and we’re super excited to crack on with some great updates coming next year!
All the best,
Ash

Thanks @Jon P, that seems to open fine in my version. I'll check out the beta.

@SPaceBar, this issue of "missing content" seems to be reproducible just by modifying the linked resource without updating it by preference or manually when opening the .afpub. In this situation the Resource Manager doesn't display "Modified" (as expected) but says "missing content" and has the button "Update" grayed out. Then using "Replace" confirms that the file path is correct and the file not really missing. Try this:
Download both files. Open the .afpub & replace to adjust the path to your needs. Save + close the .afpub. Open the .afdesign, modify it & save. Open the .afpub again without updating (neither auto nor manual) –> Resource Manager will say "Missing Content" & "Update" is greyed-out. v193 missing content.afpub   v193 test.afdesign

@SPaceBar The file has changed since I made that post, and the issues is intermittent, but I've uploaded the current version in the hopes that it is still of use.

I hope positive feedback is welcome here. I’ve been using AD intensively for about a month now, and I just love it! Yes it has quirks to work around, but it’s amazingly powerful and easy to use, especially considering the limitations of the touch interface.
I used to work a lot with Illustrator, and I would have never believed it possible to bring something like it to iPad. But Affinity is getting there, and with a UI that is better and easier to use than many desktop graphics apps.

I did the same thing. I can't find a way to reset view rotation on a document, but you can get around this with: View > New View. For me this opens a new tab of the same document with a straight view. Then I can just close the old tab.

Unfortunately not... that version of the file doesn't exist any more.  But this happens relatively regularly to me so next time it happens I will attach here.

This would be useful.
Think of a simple example with a parent master page with some details (running head, page number, other design elements), and then three child master pages: each for different common types of layout in your document: say one with a passepartout image, another with a full-page text frame, another with a chapter start page.  Then if you want to change the running head you can change the parent master page just once rather than all three (or more) master pages.

I did the same thing. I can't find a way to reset view rotation on a document, but you can get around this with: View > New View. For me this opens a new tab of the same document with a straight view. Then I can just close the old tab.

I think we have received all the feedback we need for PagePlus import. I will end this thread by saying that if we did produce an importer we would wait until Affinity Publisher supports enough features that the importer would be better than our current PDF import. Sorry but that's best we can say at this time.
 

Chris,
I admire your ingenuity of suggestions for a work around which may well be needed, but I think it misses the thrust of the thread. Getting content into a program by a convoluted path is not the same as having a native file importer. For example PagePlus master pages and hierarchical text styles have no equivalent in the intermediate epub epd pdf or rtf formats. Consequently a file in Affinity Publisher that has been through another file format may look the same/similar to the PagePlus original, but it would not have the same integrity and objects as if it was made using Affinity Publisher objects. It would lose much of it's editability by going through any intermediate format (including our recommended path of PDF).
No other company is ever going to make a PagePlus file importer, so these customers are rightly explaining and appealing to us to reconsider. They do not consider it a waste of time as it is the only chance they will get their existing files into Affinity Publisher "intact" or as designed. I would argue that the time and effort it would take to write such a convertor is not worth it in relation to the many other things that could be done instead, and that as PagePlus still functions that the number of documents that "need" conversion is smaller than some think. NOTE: Even a native file importer would not work 100% as there are no Affinity Publisher equivalents of many of the objects in a PagePlus document.

As a printer, I prefer when customers don't impose documents. Just saying. 

I'll add my vote for footnote and endnote support.
> Hope you can implement it in a similar way like in InDesign, . . .
Please, Affinity, whatever you do, don't look at InDesign's notes. Footnotes are at the document level in InDesign, they should be at the level of the story. That way each story can have its own numbering style and start number. It should also be possible (as it isn't in InDesign), to set the first footnote in a text as an uncued note. And users should be able to define their own sequence and appearance of note symbols (asterisk, pilcrow, dagger, double dagger, paragraph symbol, etc.).
> Visit any university library and you'll find that endnotes replaced footnotes long ago, perhaps in the 1950s.
Complete nonsense. Academic publishers prefer footnotes.
> In the era before computers, endnotes were far easier to typeset.
That's why notes were set as endnotes at some stage. Endnotes hung on for non-academic texts and in texts published by penny-pinching publishers, but nowadays footnotes are preferred by many. Footnotes are still more labour-intensive than endnotes, but the difference in effort is not nearly as big as it used to be.
> In today's world, their appearance at the bottom of a page is seen as clutter by most readers. 
In my experience, readers just get annoyed by having to go to the end of the book (or worse, to the end of the chapter in multi-authored volumes).