wonderings

I have no answer but this is one of the issues trying to collaborate across different software from different developers. I know it does not help you now but if this is something that you will be regularly doing it might be a smart idea to work with Photoshop and know that you are not going to run into issues exporting too PSD from Affinity Photo. The potential headaches are huge and if one little thing goes missing between conversion and it goes out to print, or whatever you are doing with the end result it can be very costly. Hope you are able to find a solution, nothing worse then figuring out weird issues while a deadline looms!

I don't think preview shows the checkered background. I did a test with Designer and Illustrator and both PDF's have no background but do not show the grid in Preview or Acrobat DC. I dropped them in Indesign on top of another image and the background is transparent. I never have issues when printing white on a transparent material. You can do your own test, make a new designer file, make a box a solid colour and then place the PDF you made on top of that. If you still see a white box and not just your image there is a problem somewhere down the line. I could not replicate in that when placing the file in Indesign or Illustrator it has no background. If you want to upload a test file as well I am sure people could look and possibly help you out if there is indeed some glitch happening here.

You would buy at any price? Think they can fund this app along with porting over to Linux all with your multimillion dollar purchase of a single unseen app. There are plenty of video editing options out there for you right now, from free to expensive, not sure why Affinity needs to be in this space from their perspective. I get it from users and others like you, hoping for powerful software at a cheap price. I would not say Affinity is more powerful then all the others out there, they have a long way to go before they match the industry standards from Adobe.

The way Adobe handles it is great with packaged Indesign and Illustrator files. I use my font software a lot less now (Font Explorer Pro).

I would expect idml files from older versions of Indesign to open fine in newer versions of Indesign. It is the same software that created so unless Adobe actually removed something that was in CS4 that is not in CC I would imagine it would be pretty flawless. It is a very different story when opening in software created by another company. I do see the value if you are just using it to convert your files if you are moving to Publisher. You would still need to adjust as needed obviously. I think the issue is for people wanting collaboration or to be able to send a working file for someone to continue working on or for print.

IDML export will never be perfect, you can work on a file, make it pretty and then export to IDML for whatever reason and open in Indesign and you can have a host of issues and changes that you will need to correct and change again. I would recommend working in the software that whoever you need to send the files to is using, unless of course they are just printing and can take a PDF. Not sure why you would want to setup keynote and powerpoint in Publisher.

What constitutes price gouging? The fact that you think it is too expensive or it is not affordable for what you want to use it for? There are plenty of video options out there for every budget. Final Cut and Premier are pro applications, not your hobbyist's software. A lot of work goes into these applications, not sure why you or anyone thinks they should be cheaper. I guess when you do not see the effort put into them and because it is all done on a computer it can be easy to devalue what they have done. If you make your living with Adobe or any other pro level application, the price is not all that prohibitive.

Printed magazines have definitely gone down, had a few regular ones that moved to all digital. Newsletters are definitely not being replaced by facebook posts, at least from my experience, we are going strong with them. Same with company reports, a youtube video does not cut it. Tech manuals as well, these have never slowed down for us and personally I would question a company that sells anything beyond consumer goods that does not include technical manuals for operating. Affinity is making software that does close to what Adobe does. Affinity Photo = Adobe Photoshop, Affinity Designer = Adobe Illustrator, and Affinity Publisher = Adobe Indesign. Personally I do not think they can replace Adobe at the moment, but they are a fraction of the cost and will accomplish a lot, maybe even enough for some pro needs, just not mine and many others at the moment. I would at least try the demos and see if they do what you need to do. Take that most difficult jobs you have and do them in Publisher, if it all works and you can live with it then you have found a really great, feature rich, affordable application suite.

If exporting as a PNG you are not maintaining the vector elements. If you export as a PDF from Designer does it remain vector or is it being rasterized? Lastly for print PNG is not a great option as it is RGB and will have to be converted to another format to be CMYK.

Well vinyl sales have surpassed CD sales in the first time ever, so maybe there are a few more people designing for vinyl! You can save your own presets, not sure why you need Affinity for a basic page setup template.

I would not say Serif is better than Adobe, there is plenty missing from the Affinity apps and this forum shows that pretty regularly when people try to switch but find things. Serif has made 3 great products that are feature rich and are very affordable especially for the more casual user or hobbyist. Adobe is not priced for these people, they are in the pro market and for people who make a living with their software. The monthly price tag for Adobe is not bad for this. The software is good, what you get for the price is full featured and has plenty of bonuses and most importantly it is a standard that the vast majority use. If I was printing posters out of my home on the side I would use the Affinity software, but not for our print shop, I don't have the time to fight or do without features that I depend on. I am not sure if a poll is really needed to gage the interest in the Linux community. You could look at the estimated number of Linux users and then go from there finding data on how many of that small number would be people who would want to pay for this software. I do agree if there is money to be made in the Linux community for this type of software someone will eventually do it. Adobe looked into it and opted not to venture down the Linux path. I am guessing they did not see a large enough user base for them. As I mentioned above this user base would be different though so there could be something more for Serif then Adobe for the casual user who'd does not want a monthly payment.

What are you doing in Affinity that is that much quicker than doing with Illustrator or InDesign? I get files all the time that are not set right, no bleed, incorrect size, etc etc etc. These do not take me ages to fix and generally are simple fixes in Adobe. What is easier in Affinity?

It is their business and their choice. They have heard that some Linux users want their software. This is not the government working for the people, they do not owe the Linux community anything. There is no voting, no anything unless Serif decides they want to do it and they have made that pretty clear that they are not going to at the moment. Do you use the Affinity software on Windows or Mac?

This is how I work in Indesign, basically the tool bars are floating. They snap to the sides of the screen but with nothing open or minimized I see the desktop. Is this what you are talking about?

I don't think Adobe is worried about Affinity. Now if Adobe's user base was dropping then yes they might look at reasons like Affinity but as far as I can tell their numbers are slowly rising. From 2017 to 2020 they grew their user base 85% for the CC. They have gone from 12 million users in 2017 to 22+ million in 2020. Not everyone is hindered by the subscription fee, it really is not all that bad for pro use. For those not making a living with the apps or just small projects here and there then yes it is cost prohibitive, but this is pro software that is vital for may businesses.

What question is asked about Adobe that compares to what you asked? Indesign was not an update from a completely different app, it was from scratch just as Affinity has done with Publisher. Think I am missing something as I am not sure what you are referring to.

This is not an update to PagePlus, this is a new from the ground up application, so expecting feature for feature from page plus is not realistic. It is SO different because it is not PagePlus. There is nothing stopping you from using PagePlus as far as I know, if that works for you why switch to something different? If you think Serif has done something to purposely make your program crash all the time why would you even think of buying from them? That would make Serif a pretty bad company that I don't think anyone would want to support. They are not shooting the paying customer, they are giving the paying customer great tools for a more then fair price. There are demos that you can download and use for 30 days and sometimes 90 days, this gives you plenty of time to make an informed decision on if the Affinity apps are right for you. I am not sure why you are being so insulting to Serif, they are a company making software so they can make money. They have made 3 great programs that are feature rich yet you infer they are not even working "They could have worked harder (or even at all)". Again, this is not an update to your PagePlus apps, they have continued to update and bring about great new features that are bringing it closer and closer to Adobe which charges far more for their software.

Creating and designing in Designer and Photos is very different then page layout. I would be happy to be proven wrong but there are a few things I don't see going well for page layout on an iPad. The size of the iPad screen itself would be a drawback to me, I like to work as near to 100% as I can, iPads are seriously lacking in screen real estate compared to a desktop with a nice size monitor. Now I would like to have my page layout software on my iPad if I needed to do a quick edit when not at my computer but I could not see sitting and working as I do now on any project.

There are specific apps for making mosaics. If you search these forums you will find a thread about it that has a list of some free apps you can use to do this easily.

I think that is a limitation with PDF's in general. You were making PDF's with a size larger than 5080m in either direction? The big large format stuff uses Corel I believe as a standard because Corel does not have the size limitation. If your artwork is vector and not rasterized there should be no issue or concerns with quality if saving a reduced file size and them blowing it up for full size print.

seems like it would take longer to search for the image in the shape tool then just make it yourself.

Assuming you have a perpetual license of Quark there is no rush to push into something else. What I would do, and did do when I switched from Quark to Indesign was not recreate everything Quark file in Indesign but take all new files coming in and use Indesign. As old jobs came that used Quark I would either just use Quark again or a simple form I would reset in Indesign. This takes the big burden of converting years of files in on go. You will also probably find a lot of files never need to be touched again and they can just sit collecting digital dust while you know you could open in Quark if you ever needed to.

can you add the file you are having this issue with? I can't repeat it when placing a PDF in and cropping. Everything stays the same.

Out of curiosity what do all the other video editors out there not offer you that you want something from Affinity?

Not sure how Photo works with stuff like that but that would be a pain in Photoshop and not what Photoshop is for. I would definitely be looking at Publisher to set that up with all the text. Manipulate your photos in Photos and do your page layout in Publisher.