dorkboycomics

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

Now it says “coming soon” instead of “summer” 🙊
Does that mean sooner or later than summer? 🙈

@dorkboycomics You’re right, good catch! Who knows?…
We’ll find out if the summer goes without a release, I suppose 😳🫣

Now it says “coming soon” instead of “summer” 🙊
Does that mean sooner or later than summer? 🙈

PDF Passthrough! Fantastic! Thank you SO much!!!!

Specifically:
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/65038-how-can-i-open-indesign-indd-and-idml-files-in-publisher/&page=2&tab=comments#comment-340357
 

Just found the general area in the thread.
Unfortunately, in a skimmed reading, it looks like it might require having ID, but not needing to actually open it to run the script. But I could be wrong since it's been a while since I've read it or used the script.

I think there is a problem with the importing of the ID master pages, so hopefully that can be sorted out in future betas or the final.
Also, if it's of any help, be aware that there is a script provided that creates IDML files from ID files without the need for ID itself. Can do a single or multiple files, plus it's free. You can find it on the Publisher forum in that looooooooooooong thread on Opening InDesign files (can't remember exactly where it is, but a search should turn it up). Someone provided it and it works fine.

I have only done a quick initial test, and generally things are looking REALLY good!!
Noticing my page numbers do not seem to be showing however, and something happened to one bit of title text that is making it appear very washed out (though the opacity is 100%. Will report more as I test. (on latest 518 build)

I would love to see the dpi for a placed affinity image  (as other images show) in Publisher without needing to double click and open it in another tab.

I would love to see the dpi for a placed affinity image  (as other images show) in Publisher without needing to double click and open it in another tab.

I would love to see the dpi for a placed affinity image  (as other images show) in Publisher without needing to double click and open it in another tab.

For those customers who do not buy from the Affinity store, an offer link should be appearing in the Welcome screen (when we get over the hangovers and get back into the office) probably tomorrow I would say. So Mac App Store and Microsoft Store owners can claim this too.

Affinity Publisher Is Here
 
To see the launch annoucement event go here affin.co/live19 or watch on Vimeo here
On June 19th 2019 Affinity Publisher, our most ambitious app yet, was launched at Affinity Live 2019, streamed live from our HQ. 
We are over the moon to release the first version of Affinity Publisher, we think it will revolutionise desktop publishing. Much in the same way Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer have shaken up professional photo editing and graphic design.
StudioLink Complete integration of Affinity apps
With Affinity Publisher, you can directly link to your other Affinity apps through StudioLink. The first technology of its kind, this revolutionary feature takes the pain out of publishing by allowing you to instantly switch to the advanced photo editing features of Affinity Photo and precise vector tools of Affinity Designer without ever leaving the app. It’s the most fluid workflow ever conceived in a creative suite of applications, and the reason we named our apps Affinity.**
Fluid publishing powerhouse
Bring your vision to life with Affinity Publisher, the next generation of professional publishing software. From magazines, books, brochures, posters, reports and stationery to other creations, this incredibly smooth, intuitive app gives you the power to combine your images, graphics and text to make beautiful layouts ready for publication.
Engineered for advanced technology
Engineered with the same no-compromise vision as our acclaimed photo editing and graphic design apps, thousands of global professionals have contributed to the development of Affinity Publisher to meet the demands of the 21st century designer.
Spectacular layouts
With essentials like master pages, facing page spreads, grids, tables, advanced typography, text flow, full professional print output and other amazing features, Affinity Publisher has everything you need to create the perfect layout – whatever your project.
Double page spreads Live master pages, including nested master pages Image frames with intelligent scaling options Text wrapping with fine padding control Custom shaped text frames Link multiple text frames together across your document Advanced guides, grids and snapping Tables and custom table formats Text to match the power of your words
Free yourself from the constraints of tired, traditional text layouts. Let Affinity Publisher help you visualise your text in creative new ways and flow it seamlessly through your document.
Text styles: Link the style of your text across all pages in your document OpenType support: Open up all stylistic features of the latest OpenType fonts Text decorations: Add lines and borders to elements of your typography Drop caps: Add drop capitals to any paragraph Text on a path: Draw any curve and type along it Artistic text: Gain creative control over titling and other stand out text Flow options: Avoid orphaned or widowed lines, among many other features Baseline grid: Ensure the baseline of your text is aligned across all columns and spreads Perfect graphics
Whatever the brief calls for, you can rely on Affinity Publisher to handle all the standard file types you’d expect, leaving you free to create the most ambitious, content-rich combination designs, pulling in raster or vector assets from multiple sources.
Link or embed images with full resource manager Place PSD, AI, PDF, JPG, TIFF, PNG or Affinity files Pin graphics to float or be placed in line with your text Full colour control
Affinity Publisher can handle RGB, LAB, greyscale and CMYK colour spaces, with advanced control over professional colour requirements for print.
End-to-end CMYK Spot colour support Pantone library included ICC colour profiles More information can be found here and Tech Specs and a full feature lists are here
You can buy Affinity Publisher 1.7 now from the:
Affinity Store: macOS [10.9 or above] & Windows [10 (Anniversary Edition or above), Windows 8.1 & Windows 7 (Service Pack 1)] Mac App Store : macOS [10.7 or above] Microsoft Store: (Windows 10 Anniversary edition or later) If you have questions about Affinity Publisher please use this forum, as this thread is only for responses to the announcement.
** requires other Affinity (ver 1.7) applications to be installed on the same machine to enable the StudioLink feature

YES, Thank you and the team SO MUCH for the amazing work on this!! I am so excited for the release, and waffling on whether I want the app store version or a better discount which clearly speaks to the value of your software that both are invaluable regardless of the beta appreciation discount.
Additionally, as a long time self publisher that may not be your typical "Pro User" that is pumping out daily publications I sincerely want to thank you for the work here. The "consumer" desktop pub apps out there are not really viable for much beyond brochures, etc, and my reliance on InDesign was sorely in need of a feasible non subscription replacement. You responded very quickly to early concerns around margins, bleed, etc etc at the beginning of the beta, making Affinity Publisher suitable for my needs quite some time ago...and now it has evolved to be an even bigger powerhouse of functionality over the course of the beta.
The great work you and your team have done is nothing short of amazing. I will be buying this day one on the app store or pre-ordering through the affinity store once I can quit being indecisive. Really looking forward to the launch, as well as the continued future of Publisher in terms of updates and an iPad app!
thank you again!!
-damian

YES, Thank you and the team SO MUCH for the amazing work on this!! I am so excited for the release, and waffling on whether I want the app store version or a better discount which clearly speaks to the value of your software that both are invaluable regardless of the beta appreciation discount.
Additionally, as a long time self publisher that may not be your typical "Pro User" that is pumping out daily publications I sincerely want to thank you for the work here. The "consumer" desktop pub apps out there are not really viable for much beyond brochures, etc, and my reliance on InDesign was sorely in need of a feasible non subscription replacement. You responded very quickly to early concerns around margins, bleed, etc etc at the beginning of the beta, making Affinity Publisher suitable for my needs quite some time ago...and now it has evolved to be an even bigger powerhouse of functionality over the course of the beta.
The great work you and your team have done is nothing short of amazing. I will be buying this day one on the app store or pre-ordering through the affinity store once I can quit being indecisive. Really looking forward to the launch, as well as the continued future of Publisher in terms of updates and an iPad app!
thank you again!!
-damian

YES, Thank you and the team SO MUCH for the amazing work on this!! I am so excited for the release, and waffling on whether I want the app store version or a better discount which clearly speaks to the value of your software that both are invaluable regardless of the beta appreciation discount.
Additionally, as a long time self publisher that may not be your typical "Pro User" that is pumping out daily publications I sincerely want to thank you for the work here. The "consumer" desktop pub apps out there are not really viable for much beyond brochures, etc, and my reliance on InDesign was sorely in need of a feasible non subscription replacement. You responded very quickly to early concerns around margins, bleed, etc etc at the beginning of the beta, making Affinity Publisher suitable for my needs quite some time ago...and now it has evolved to be an even bigger powerhouse of functionality over the course of the beta.
The great work you and your team have done is nothing short of amazing. I will be buying this day one on the app store or pre-ordering through the affinity store once I can quit being indecisive. Really looking forward to the launch, as well as the continued future of Publisher in terms of updates and an iPad app!
thank you again!!
-damian

YES, Thank you and the team SO MUCH for the amazing work on this!! I am so excited for the release, and waffling on whether I want the app store version or a better discount which clearly speaks to the value of your software that both are invaluable regardless of the beta appreciation discount.
Additionally, as a long time self publisher that may not be your typical "Pro User" that is pumping out daily publications I sincerely want to thank you for the work here. The "consumer" desktop pub apps out there are not really viable for much beyond brochures, etc, and my reliance on InDesign was sorely in need of a feasible non subscription replacement. You responded very quickly to early concerns around margins, bleed, etc etc at the beginning of the beta, making Affinity Publisher suitable for my needs quite some time ago...and now it has evolved to be an even bigger powerhouse of functionality over the course of the beta.
The great work you and your team have done is nothing short of amazing. I will be buying this day one on the app store or pre-ordering through the affinity store once I can quit being indecisive. Really looking forward to the launch, as well as the continued future of Publisher in terms of updates and an iPad app!
thank you again!!
-damian

YES, Thank you and the team SO MUCH for the amazing work on this!! I am so excited for the release, and waffling on whether I want the app store version or a better discount which clearly speaks to the value of your software that both are invaluable regardless of the beta appreciation discount.
Additionally, as a long time self publisher that may not be your typical "Pro User" that is pumping out daily publications I sincerely want to thank you for the work here. The "consumer" desktop pub apps out there are not really viable for much beyond brochures, etc, and my reliance on InDesign was sorely in need of a feasible non subscription replacement. You responded very quickly to early concerns around margins, bleed, etc etc at the beginning of the beta, making Affinity Publisher suitable for my needs quite some time ago...and now it has evolved to be an even bigger powerhouse of functionality over the course of the beta.
The great work you and your team have done is nothing short of amazing. I will be buying this day one on the app store or pre-ordering through the affinity store once I can quit being indecisive. Really looking forward to the launch, as well as the continued future of Publisher in terms of updates and an iPad app!
thank you again!!
-damian

YES, Thank you and the team SO MUCH for the amazing work on this!! I am so excited for the release, and waffling on whether I want the app store version or a better discount which clearly speaks to the value of your software that both are invaluable regardless of the beta appreciation discount.
Additionally, as a long time self publisher that may not be your typical "Pro User" that is pumping out daily publications I sincerely want to thank you for the work here. The "consumer" desktop pub apps out there are not really viable for much beyond brochures, etc, and my reliance on InDesign was sorely in need of a feasible non subscription replacement. You responded very quickly to early concerns around margins, bleed, etc etc at the beginning of the beta, making Affinity Publisher suitable for my needs quite some time ago...and now it has evolved to be an even bigger powerhouse of functionality over the course of the beta.
The great work you and your team have done is nothing short of amazing. I will be buying this day one on the app store or pre-ordering through the affinity store once I can quit being indecisive. Really looking forward to the launch, as well as the continued future of Publisher in terms of updates and an iPad app!
thank you again!!
-damian

@dorkboycomics I'm struggling to replicate this crash. Any chance you can attach the crash report and a screen recording of this in action?

Hi damian - could you see if it is more stable if you turn off 'hardware compute' in the Preferences and restart the app? Thanks!

I have made the RC crash several times, but not starting a new thread due to lack of consistent reproducible steps (I'll keep trying).
It tends to be when I draw/make marks too quickly with a brush that tapers with pressure, and at some point I get the beachball and have to force quit.
I use the "report" option after it restarts, but not sure that is the best method - how best to send you crash info? I've crashed it 4 or 5 times today (edit: just did it again, haha), and once late friday I think it was.
Looking fwd to ALL the 1.7 Releases - including Pub btw   
thanks,
-damian

Status: Public Beta
Purpose: Stability and General Testing
Requirements: Mac OS 10.9 or above
Hi,
We are pleased to announce that Affinity Publisher build 312 is now available as a manual download from the link above. To be notified when there is a new beta please press follow on this announcement thread.
As this is a beta it is considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity where you may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents. 
We hope you enjoy the product, and as always, if you've got any problems installing or running up, please don't hesitate to post in this thread. 
Any problems actually using this version please make a new topic in this forum and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Please feel free to leave general suggestions and comments in the Discussion Forum. 
Many thanks for your continued feedback.
---
Fixes and Improvements 
Menus / Studio
Stock Page improvements
(Mac) Removed default Convert to Curves shortcut to prevent accidental conversion while typing
(Win) Added 'Create Style' to the Edit Menu
(Win) Removed Create New from Clipboard shortcut
Loading / Saving
Fixed failure to save document after arrowheads applied and reset to 'None'
Import / Export
Fix for PDF Import crash when selecting 'Favour editable text over fidelity'
Added support for TIFFs with old-style JPEG compression
RAW files can now be placed using File > Place. To fall in line with the other apps
Prevent multiple spurious warnings when placing several files at once
(Mac) Fix for setting of 'Scale with Object' affecting Print output
DocX
Fixed crashes importing bogus DocX files
Added Drag Drop of DocX to populate Text Frames
Fixed / added DocX import features including:
- Formatting Fixes, leading fixes
- Negative right indent
- Basic group support
- Linked text frames
- Paragraph attribute priority fixes
- Incorrect object alignment
- Gradient fixes 
- Table borders, vertical cell alignment
- Documents without styles (created by PDF converter)
Images / Resources
Added per axis DPI and Scale controls on the Image Context bar DPI / Scale dropdown
Fixed and renamed the '1:1' button to reset the aspect ratio and scale to original size
Cropped Image conversion to Picture Frame handled better
Fix for undo of Set K-Only
(Win) Improved locate procedure for missing linked images
(Win) Fix for auto-update of linked documents not working
Text
Fixed crash pasting text with the Move tool active
Fixed OpenType lookup rules which resulting in features not being found dependent on 'Typography Script' etc
Hyperlink attributes are now always stripped when creating document text defaults
Improvements to Autoflow when overset text is involved
Improvements to Autoflow when shaped frames are involved
Pinning Panel - 'Advance' has been renamed 'Offset'
Pinning Panel - Added Top and Bottom borders for objects pinned inline
Scaled pinned nodes now remember their original scale and restore it when unpinned or unscaled
Fix for unwanted text scaling when text objects were pinned
Can now only pin one node at a time, fixes crash attempting to pin multiple
Allow direct selection of pinned objects that are the children of stories in master page frames
Fixed crash pasting text with pinned text objects (with pinned text objects)
Fixed crash pasting index mark into Find and Replace. Currently unsupported in Find and Replace
(Mac, Pre-Mojave) Pinning Panel - Fixed white background
(Win) Fix for inoperative Text Context bar controls with selections including pinned images
(Win) Fixed Scale capping in Pinning panel
Tables
Resizing a table causes the headers to become mismatched
Indexes
Improved index sorting for topics that don't start with alphabetic characters
(Mac) Fixed Index Panel Separator field drop arrow menu
---
Earlier Release Notes Beta 305

And once the public release has happened, everyone will know if it is on the 1.x roadmap.
I've got my own list of "must-have" features and a whole bunch of "I really want this added" features. Some of the this (these) features will maybe make an X.x release and some that likely never will. And some of my "must-have" features probably won't make a future version much less be on a someday feature list.
As Patrick said, purchase a license on current capabilities or not. Maybe purchase a license based upon a roadmap list...but do so knowing the wait may be a long one. An application either has current value or not. It's a simple decision.