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I am interested in downloading the v2 apps from the Mac App Store and purchasing the Universal license. But it is not clear to me whether the Universal license can be shared with my Apple Family. The app store only says that "some" in-app purchases may be shareable. Can Affinity confirm that the Universal license can be shared via Family Sharing from the Mac App Store?

Thanks for the pointer @garrettm30. I may end up going that way myself. But I also really believe that this is something Publisher should be able to do for itself.

I am having very similar problems to those described by @jamesgangcreative. It has been driving me nuts and will force me to rebuild a whole book. Here's what I have learned (with the help of this migrating content documentation). Naming text frames is crucial! Before you place any text into your pages, make sure to build your master pages carefully. For example, if this is a simple book, you might do something like what is illustrated in the screenshot attached. Notice that the verso and recto frames are linked so that text will flow from the left to the right. Notice also that their layers have been clearly and distinctly named as "verso text frame" and "recto text frame". Using these names consistently across multiple masters (if you have them) will help Publisher keep a handle on what text goes where if you later change your masters and migrate the content. Once your masters are set up, only then do you place text into the actual pages. Make sure you are placing the text into these text frames supplied by the masters. If you create any new text frames on the pages, those won't change when the master is changed. Note that @Old Bruce is also correct to call the margins "suggestions." After you edit your margins you will still have to go back to your masters to manually adjust the text frames to the new margins. But at least when you do this, all your pages should adjust automatically.

Walt, I have already done this and reported the results earlier in this thread... in a nutshell, while the RGB document does produce darker text, it still does not print pure black text on my printer (even though other apps produce pure black text on the same printer).

I get that list of paper types too. But it has nothing to do with the fact that, as the subject of this thread states, "Black text is not black." This is a function of the file being generated. I can improve the output slightly with the printer settings, but I should not have to do that! Black should be black. It is a special and common enough case in printing to deserve some special treatment so that it always "just works."

Here you go. Note that my "Media & Quality" is very limited in Affinity Publisher. The thing to look at in the Adobe image above is what shows up below the "Advanced" disclosure button. That is the stuff that cannot be found in Affinity Publisher. And really, this is all beside the point. Nobody should have to hunt through all these settings to get a good basic black print out of a desktop publishing app. The very fact that it is this difficult is something I hope Serif takes seriously and repairs. I would ask for a preference when exporting or printing for "Simplified Blacks" that makes anything that is either RGB 0/0/0 or CYMK 0/0/0/100 a true black for whatever output device the user has chosen. The app should do the work, not the user.

I am a Mac user since 1984 (!) and am very familiar with how Mac software presents printer drivers. I looked at all the options available in Affinity Publisher, including "Range & Scale" and nothing like the "Printer Settings" available in Adobe Reader is present. My memory is far from perfect, but I believe what Adobe is presenting is, in fact, an old version of the Mac print dialog box that most modern software long since moved away from. Clearly, though, this old print dialog still has some neat tricks up its sleeve!

Yes, I always "Show Details" in print dialog boxes. The odd thing is that the details are very different in Adobe Reader than in Affinity Publisher and most other Mac apps. Among other things, the Adobe details include an "Advanced" button that reveals a whole set of printer options that are not available from print dialogs in Affinity Publisher or elsewhere. You can see the comparison attached (Adobe on the left, Affinity on the right, and no, there is not "Print Settings" option in Affinity). My guess is other Mac apps are printing either without color space control or as RGB. Still, even RGB Publisher docs are printing in this odd degraded way, so, yes, I think there is an Affinity problem here. I love your test, Bisonium! Nice summary of the issues. The only thing I would add is that even the "totally black" PDF exported in your test would probably print, on my printer, as some very dark shade of gray. I can play printer tricks to try to achieve a deeper black, but I don't have to play those tricks from other Mac apps.

Thank you v_kyr. That "Thick Paper" setting does, indeed, reduce the problem. The type is still not as crisp and clean as it usually is in other apps, it looks a bit fuzzy around the edges, but it has better coverage. The odd thing was that I had no idea this "Thick Paper" setting existed for my printer because almost all Mac apps do not show the settings panel that includes it! Luckily I found that in Acrobat Reader I could go to Print > Printer > Print Settings > Media Type and find that option. Better yet, there was also an "Advanced" disclosure on that pane that made a whole boatload of other printer options available. I found that "Plain Paper" with "Graphics Quality" set to "Text" (instead of "Graphics") and "Improve Toner Fixing" turned on helped. Not quite as fuzzy as "Think Paper", much better than the samples I had before, but still not as crisp as other apps printing on the same printer. Your suggestion opened up a world of possibilities, thank you! I still do hope Affinity Publisher can be improved to print at least as well on home printers as most other Mac apps. People should not have to go through this much fussing to get decent text from a desktop publishing application.

Thank you for that, BofG! Unfortunately, even though I am printing your PDF with Acrobat Reader using the advanced settings you suggest, the pure black text still comes out the same as the other samples. I imagine you are correct and there is some poor interaction between my laser printer and Affinity Publisher's PDFs. My printer has no settings (really, none, at least on the Mac) to change, it is a cheap under $100 Brother HL-L2340D. I am still puzzled as to why every other app on my Mac prints just fine. I wonder what Publisher is doing differently. It makes me wish Publisher had a "no color management" mode or something to print simple black and white on home printers.

BofG, thanks for your recommendation. I tried to do exactly what you recommended. A new CMYK document with CMYK text set to 0/0/0/100. Since there is no "pdf x1" export preset I chose "PDF/X-1a:2003" which seemed closest to what you suggested. However, this preset would not let me uncheck "Embed profiles" (it was greyed out, checked). I went ahead anyway. I even downloaded Adobe Acrobat Reader to print from (even though I usually avoid that program in favor of Apple's built in Preview). No dice, I had exactly the same result as in my first sample above. I then tried exporting with the "PDF (for print)" preset, which did allow me to uncheck the "Embed profiles". Same exact result. I tried printing both documents from Preview and they look exactly like they look coming out of Acrobat Reader.

Ah! I had not noticed that little "more" button. Image of the settings attached. One thing I notice here is that the "color space" is still set to CMYK, even though at this point the document settings show RGB. I'll try tweaking that. (I did try, no difference.)

I just want to lay to rest any doubts about the "eco mode" point that Pšenda has raised twice. I have attached a picture of the printer settings page that show that no eco mode is turned on. I have also attached a second sample test printed directly from Affinity Publisher. Before printing this sample I changed the document settings to use the RGB/8 color space and sRGB IEC61966-2.1 color profile. Then I selected the text "this is a test" and selected its fill color from the "Character" studio tab. Even though the color had been set to C0 Mo Y0 K100, the RGB color now showed as R35 G31 B32. I dragged the sliders to R0 G0 B0 and added the text "RGB" at the end of the line. Interestingly, if you look closely at this sample, the word "Hello" (which still uses the CMYK black) looks noticeably more degraded than the rest of the text (which uses RGB black). However, the RGB black is still noticeably worse than the sample Courier text in the other image which came straight out of the same printer and also worse than the Pages sample in a previous message. I think it is clear that Publisher is doing something that degrades text printed from at least my Brother HL-L2340D laser printer, which makes it of dubious value for desktop publishing in my office. Walt, thanks for noticing that Publisher embedded a TrueType "CID" font while Pages embedded a plain TrueType font. This is interesting, and I know nothing about CID fonts, but it appears that this has to do with the number of characters that can be encoded in a font and not really to do with its rendering. Does anyone from Affinity ever check in on these forums? I'd love to know, definitively, if this is what they expect as output from Publisher. I've spent days preparing a book and have already paid for this app from the App Store, before I spend much more time it would be nice to know if this is a "bug" that will be fixed or something Affinity is proud of and expects to work this way.

Actually, I tried making a PDF, but the PDF prints the same way. Pšenda, you have said the same thing twice now and this is NOT AN ECO PRINT PROBLEM. The printer is not set to any eco mode and all other apps print text just fine. This is something that PUBLISHER is doing to both the page printed and the page exported. I am not sure which PDF export settings you mean. This document is a DEFAULT document, as I described. Do you mean the settings in the Export window when I choose to export a PDF? There I am using the "PDF (press ready)" preset which is 300 DPI (and says nothing will be rasterized), includes the bleed, previews the export when complete, and exports the whole document. If you mean another set of PDF export settings, please let me know where to find them.

Thanks for the suggestion, Pšenda, but I do not think this is eco mode. Note that the text printed by Pages on the same printer is properly black in the photo. You could help me test that theory by downloading the two PDF's and comparing printouts of each on your own printer. If this is eco mode on the printer, then why is Affinity Publisher invoking it and where would I find a setting to tell Affinity Publisher not to do that?

I recently noticed that none of the "black" text in my document was actually printing on my laser printer as black. I created the attached simple Affinity Publisher document to demonstrate the problem. This document accepts all the default settings for a new "Press Ready" letter sized document, which includes the CMYK/8 color format and U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2 color profile. I changed nothing, added a single line of text, and printed the document. The text on the printed document is noticeably dithered. I tried exporting a PDF (also attached) and find that when I try to print it, the text is exactly the same, dithered a bit. I have confirmed that the document has (by default) chosen the proper C0 M0 Y0 K100 color of black for the body text. Note that I can use the same laser printer to print a similar simple test from Apple's Pages software and the text appears crisp and fully black. What am I doing wrong with Affinity Publisher? How can I be sure that when I export my PDF for the printer, it will export with proper black text when I cannot confirm this myself before sending it off? I'd like to be able to print decent proofs in my office, it is extremely frustrating that everything I print comes out looking pixellated (see the photograph, Affinity Publisher sample on top, Pages sample below). test-black.afpub test-black.pdf pages-black.pdf

I would like a way to apply master pages and start new sections based on the text style. (This forum post has an extensive discussion of some of the problems chapter book creators are having with Affinity Publisher without this feature: Right now it is a bit crazy making that any time I change my choices about line spacing, header fonts, hyphenation, or make minor text changes, I run the risk of changing the text flow enough to bump text onto a new page, and once that happens all the following section breaks and master page assignments are mis-aligned. It would be great if one of the options when editing a text style would be to have that style "Apply Master Page" and/or "Start New Section". In the case of "Apply Master Page", if there is more than one style on the page with this option set, the first style on the page with this option set wins the day. In the case of "Start New Section", if there is more than one style on the page with this option set, the text and page continuation settings of the first style on the page wins the day (and only one new section can be created on any single page). With options like this assigned to the text styles, then sections and master pages could be applied by styles instead of only to pages. If there is too much of a chance that this interferes with the page-based settings, then Affinity Publisher could add a "Apply Masters Based on Styles". Similarly, and "Define Sections from Styles" could be another global option if the page-based and style-based are hard to make play nice together. I would then choose to Apply Masters Based on Styles and Define Sections from Styles in my document. I would create a Body style that applies a plain body master page. I would define a Chapter Header style that applies a chapter header master page and also defines a new section with continuous page numbering. On the first page of any new chapter, I would see the chapter header master design because the header was first on the page before the body. On successive pages the body text style would be first to appear and thus the play body master page would be enforced.

No, macOS allows programs to add panes to the print dialog and Affinity Publisher does this to provide the "Document Layout" option which includes this "Book" feature. This is an Affinity Publisher feature, not a feature of the operating system. It does not appear in the print dialog of other software.

Yes, of course. But the current "Book" feature in "Document Layouts" is itself also useless from a pre-print point of view. This is not the point of the current feature or of my request. I am asking for this because in my own workflow I would like to produce in-house something as close to the final book as possible. I will print, cut and assemble the book just to see what problems I notice from holding the object in my hand. The current feature is meant to allow the user to produce something close to the final product as a means of output. It is a PRINTING feature, not a PDF to the printer feature. I'd just like it to be a slightly more capable printing feature.

Currently using the "Book" option in the "Document Layout" function of the Affinity Publisher print dialog box only results in "signatures" of a single sheet. But this is very uncommon in publishing. Usually signatures are gathered of more than one sheet, often 2, 3, or 4 sheets (or more, in some cases). It would be wonderful if the "Book" option for Affinity Publisher included a "number of sheets per signature" option which offered options from 1-8 sheets. Then I could print a book from Affinity Publisher and properly sew and glue it myself. It is frustrating that currently Affinity Publisher requires third party tools to accomplish this, and many of those tools are not very polished. I have seen, for example, Bookbinder's Collator on the Mac App Store, but it is pretty odd in its UI. Affinity could do much better with a single selection for signature sheet options. If anyone has other suggestions of third party tools to accomplish this while waiting for a feature like this, please share!