rash

Great – thank you!

Yes, maybe it’s the economy, stupid 😉 I would happily pay a few bucks more to get rid of those annoyances. And your comparison is very sobering too – thank God I have seldomly to handle complex transparencies. At least X4 seems to work pretty well (apart from the sizes). Off topic: I've been curious for a while now, how many of you get those thumbnail-accompanied thread references into your posts. May I ask you how to do that?

Don’t throw the towel too early, since you won’t find a horn of plenty filled with serious alternatives. Publisher is in many ways much more than just an InDesign substitute, so I guess the more expedient strategy is trying to overcome its (few) undeniable weaknesses.

@loukash Let’s assume you’re right. That would suggest the interesting question, why so many companies and developers should be satisfied with a library that inferior. I’m no software developer, but it’s hard to imagine that Adobe is made up only of geniuses that no one else in the world can keep up with. Anyway: What I’ve critisized is not only the problem itself but the lack of communication. If the answer to my two questions would simply be "because we use PDFLib and PDFLib can’t do it better and there is no way we could influence that, sorry", we would have at least a clear statement and could decide individually whether to accept it or not. However, I'm afraid it's not that simple, you just have to search this forum for 'PDF file sizes' to learn that there is mainly speculation with very few dependable explanations, let alone solutions. Absolutely nothing against users who give more or less speculative advice, any attempt to help is honorable, but after so many years I would have expected some clarification by the company with the necessary knowledge. No offense – we stay brave and don't give up hope.

Thanks for your reply @Leigh. Of course I can send you whatever you need – although not to the public of the forum. I could offer the complete package including images, fonts and both mentioned PDFs. I will upload it to my own server and send you a link via PM to download it. If you prefer dropbox, that would be possible too.

Maybe it’s getting a bit boring, but I don’t consider the file sizes of exported PDFs as acceptable. What bores me is the apparent ignorance of an issue known at least since 2019 and broadly discussed in this forum quite a few times. Admittedly, I don’t know if the problem is always the same or if we’re talking about different problems leading to similar results – none of the discussions ended up in clarification by the Serif staff, as far as I remember their participations were limited to ask for an upload of suspicious files to get them checked. We’ve never heard what’s going on, so the discussions mostly stopped without getting solved substantially. A real world example with Publisher 2.4.0 on Mac: Photo booklet, 40 pages, 210 x 297 mm, pages covered largely with pictures, an absolute minimum of accompanying text, two fonts in use. The photos are (linked) 8-bit RGB TIFs (no difference with JPGs), document color space is CMYK. The resulting PDF is around 170 MB with the settings in the left column (screenshot below) and 370 MB with those in the right column. Only difference is the image conversion (red circle) – the print shop prefers the images converted to CMYK, but has an upload size limit on the other hand. Since 2019 I’m waiting for a convincing explanation, why oldschool InDesign is able to export printable PDF files with sizes a fraction of those produced by supermodern Publisher. Second question: How is it possible that the file size gets more than doubled by RGB to CMYK conversion? All in all it’s nothing more than 4 channels instead of 3. Don’t get me wrong: I like working with Publisher (and the other Affinity tools) very much, but issues like the one described above sadly prevent my last farewell to Adobe. PDF sizes might be a minor problem in personal or charity projects, whereas a professional production of 50 to 100 print works each year with many different print shops, specifications and limits, simply leaves no room for dealing with obscurities nobody seems to take care of in 4 or 5 years.

I would like to second the complaints of @oliverb. Although I understand the container argument with artboards and the like, the result is annoying, if you have to deal with an average of several hundred images per project. While I use artboards in Designer practically all the time, there never was the need to do so in Photo. So from my perspective you cannot see an absolutely basic file information in Finder or any DAM, but to compensate this lack you might theoretically enjoy artboards in Photo (in case you own Designer as well). Sorry, but I wouldn’t consider this a very good deal. Als oliverb said: the information is obviously there, so why not writing it to the file metadata? Photo is otherwise an absolutely great product I love to work with, so it’s incomprehensible why one has to struggle with such annoyances.

Thanks for your hint and the instructions. Again: no luck 😭, there is nothing suspicious in my console log (at least for me). It was obviously a serious mistake to buy your apps at these Apple clowns’ store, I should have known better, since it’s pretty long ago that they did any good. So I'll probably stay with my workarounds, the problem is not really critical.

@Dan C, meanwhile I’ve checked the MacBook Air that shows nearly, though not exactly the same beaviour: 'Add system palette' creates a system palette in Designer and Photo here, but each palette’s only available in the app that created it. The only system palette that is offered in other Mac apps (except Designer and Photo) is the one created with Publisher.

@Dan C, thanks for your help. Your explanation sounds logical, so I optimistically did what you told me. Sadly, there is no difference, both apps remain stubborn. I can try it later on my other computer, but at least on the Mac Mini there must be something else going wrong.

Hi @Dan C, no matter, I can workaround the issues. To answer your questions: Restarting Designer/Photo (or even rebooting the mac) doesn’t load the palette. I use a Mac Mini and a MacBook Air, both running MacOs 10.14 (Mojave). Designer and Photo have (unfortunately) been installed from the Mac App Store while Publisher originates from the Affinity Store. (btw: I would like to change all of them to the Affinity store which is not possible as far as I know ...) Hope that helps.

Can’t add a system palette in Designer: 'Add system palette' does nothing, same goes with 'Import as system palette'. System palettes created in Publisher are not shown in Designer and Photo, but in other Mac applications. Behaviour in Photo is the same as in Designer, only in Publisher everything works as expected.