Krustysimplex

I've used that on a few jobs. Word recognition has been 100%, but it changes apostrophes to primes and dashes to hyphens and formats each line of text as a separate paragraph. It's fine for small amounts of text (which is what it's designed for), but I'd hate to try using it on a big job.

Aaaah Virtuoso. Remember when Altsys and Aldus jacked up the Freehand nameplate and rolled in a complete new Virtuoso engine around about V.3 or 4?

Back in the day, InDesign's optical character spacing (and Quark managers' inability to comprehend why anyone could possibly want such a thing) was one of ID's bigger selling points for many of us and a significant contributor to ID taking over the world. Thing is, even ye spendy professional founts only define a relatively limited number of character pairs, leaving the rest for the ordinary sidebearing values to sort out. Unfortunately, these don't work out at all well for some character combinations. Going through and fixing any significant size of document by hand is quite impractical and AP will need something if it's ever to get anywhere for high-end work. If optical spacing is in the too-hard basket, Quark's system of calling separate look-up tables to supplement a fount's built-in spacing when used within the app should be simpler to implement. After all, Quark were able to implement their system at least as far back as V.2 (I can't remember if it was in V.1) in the late 1980s, when computers and software were a lot more basic than they are today.

I tend to agree. But I find using a mouse on a crowded train a little bit awkward.

Problem is, he would first have to find a workaround to make the current user-hostile Designer tabs vaguely usable.

I certainly hope so. Affinity Designer's inadequacy here is probably the biggest issue that keeps me using Illustrator for most work.

What JET said (again).

Yes! Yes! Yes! Everything JET just said!!!!!!!!

You clearly haven't tried to do anything serious with the current AD implementation of tabs. Rumour has it that the Geneva War Crimes Tribunal is considering banning it as cruel and unnatural punishment.

Yeah. What ahornero and createsean said.

It's good, though.

Sounds extremely sexy to me....

One of the things that keeps me using Photoshop is IPTC metadata entry and editing.

Add me to those wanting DXF/DWG import/export. I regularly receive DXF/DWG files to use as base art for magazine/brochure artwork. Illustrator handles them fine, pity about Designer.

Focus stacking apps tend to have trouble distinguishing between low-contrast, in-focus renderings in one layer and and higher-contrast, out-of-focus renderings in other layers. That's why the depth retouching tools in Zerene Stacker and the professional version of Helicon Focus are so useful. I almost always have to use this function to fix specular highlights in photographs of metallic objects.