JGD

Hi. Right upfront, I'm not sure if this is Affinity's default config, nor do I care, because it should work; I've configured all my Affinity apps to use Option+Left/Right Arrow for the Text > Spacing > Tighten/Loosen commands respectively, to match over 20 years of muscle memory of Adobe apps, and instead I'm getting macOS's default entire word jumps on the text selection cursor. I've tried deleting and re-adding the shortcut both on Designer's settings panel, and also on System Settings > Keyboard > Shortcuts, to no avail. I can reproduce this behaviour in both artistic text strings and text boxes in Designer v.2.4.1, but I can't reproduce it on either text mode, whether on Publisher or Photo v.2.4.1. Also, I suspect I ran into this bug before, which means this is a regression.

Don't even get me started on its glaring lack of RTL support, which basically eschews a gigantic chunk of the international market… I've beaten that horse so much here in the forums it's basically glue by now. 😂

I'm actually putting my money in the European Parliament or the European Commission, at this point… They seem to have an axe to grind with international big tech companies, and while some of their demands are completely brain dead (like forcing Apple to allow users to uninstall the Photos app from their iPhones… Are they for real? Nobody's asking for that! 🤦‍♂️), they may eventually hit some fair targets. And, to wit, there's a growing discourse against AI replacing jobs en masse. Unlike in the US and elsewhere, we do give two effs about maintaining a modicum of social stability.

You could, in theory, put the app behind a blocker like Lulu. However, it might stop working if it can't call home (by which point, heck, might as well go with Creative Cloud, amirite?).

Well, there you have it, you've answered it perfectly. If I knew, with absolute certainty, my software was actually or soon-to-be EOL'ed, I would look for a replacement sooner rather than later and formulate a template, asset and project transition plan (i.e. with new projects for new clients on the new software, a duplication of assets on the new software so that new projects for old clients could be started on the new software, and, on a lower priority level, a conversion of archival projects just in case). And that, right there, is the kind of thing that can very realistically take two years, maybe more (even EOL'ed, as pertually-licensed or maybe even subscription-based software it might still limp on for a bit, or run on a VM, or whatever), which means… those users should be buying Affinity Publisher licenses at any moment now. Of course, they may not be serious professionals, but even prosumers and amateurs can accumulate quite a bit of recurrent jobs and clients, especially on the DTP niche, which, AFAIK, is something AI still hasn't tackled just yet. As for cramming it in Word, oof, let's hope they don't go that route and see the light instead. I'm doing a quasi-InDesign/Affinity Publisher document in LibreOffice.org, which is actually more powerful than Word when it comes to some DTP features, and did do my MA dissertation entirely in Word, and all I can say is: 0/10 do not recommend (either). The only reason why I'm going this route is because manually adding citations and generating bibliographic reference lists, clickable cross references and index entries, etc. in InDesign is a complete PITA. If I could get Zotero to work with InCopy or directly with InDesign, sure, I might just typeset my thesis with those right away, but I'm also not converting an entiiiiiiire working document into InDesign and losing all links and other niceties, nuh-uh. And I don't trust format conversion tools either (or not when I have tight deadlines to meet), they're always a crapshoot.

I've heard of that, but… please define “a couple years”. If it's literally this year or the next, three at most, sure, Canva may see an uptick in sales of Publisher V2. We now know that V2 will – supposedly – have a slightly longer cycle, but longer than three years might be pushing it a bit too far.

It depends on the mix and main focus of the apps and their tools, I guess. 🤷‍♂️ On-device AI tools, using your own content and Apple's, Qualcomm's, Intel's or AMD's AI cores? Meh, whatever. I may even dabble with those here and there depending on the client, practical application, etc. Crowd-sourced and server-side stuff, which many a creative will tell you is completely anathema from a philosophical standpoint, with no option to opt-out or as the main focus of the app/workflow or of too many of its tools? Oof, no thanks. I'm taking the same approach to creative work as I am to my writing; or, better put, I may have a more liberal approach, because writing does hold a more sacred place in academia and self-plagiarism is way more of a problem there than in the creative arts. Sure, I may use an LLM to summarise someone else's work just to make my life easier in finding the information I need (I'm still reading the real deal and confirming its relevance before citing a word of it, of course), and I may also use it to produce some outline for a document, because I have a really bad case of ADHD and some trouble in getting work started, but do a clean-room implementation from it, with zero copying and pasting of text (heck, I may even use another Mac logged out of my iCloud account for those prompts, as I have a lot of those lying around and may be wary of its otherwise very helpful Continuity copy-and-paste feature across different devices), of whatever I was aiming to convey. Even if an LLM could, in theory, accurately reproduce my writing style if I fed it all of my academic production and the desired prompt, it would still be a machine doing it, my brain would just wither away, and having to study “my own” work so I could present it and defend it, when I can do that way more easily when it's fresh off the press and fresh in my mind, would sort of defeat the whole purpose anyway. When it comes to the creative arts, I'm still quite conservative, so let's just say that depending on how… artistic and “authorial” I might want a certain work to be, I might use a certain mix of AI tools (or none at all!), but always based on my own input and assets. That's strictly non-negotiable for me. And, sure, no person is an island and I'm obviously not immune to external influence (you know, as they say, Ex nihilo nihil fit), but I'd rather have my natural, water-and-fat-based intelligence do that process for me. I'm okay with seeing the computer as a colleague I bring in to my process, but I'm not okay with bringing other humans into my process – even if they consented to it! – with the computer as a – IMHO, still quite dumb – mediator. Unless, of course, we humans know each other, or have some line of communication, and can team up to try and trick the computer with our inputs, or something, thus gamifying the whole thing (there's something to be said about the importance of play in the creative process). TL;DR: “AI”, as it stands now, is a bit of a cadavre exquis on a massive scale, except it isn't because people don't know each other, don't see the fruits of their labour, and the machine does all the… stitching together, and if there was a way to just revert that massification process and humanise it a bit, artists might be more willing to embrace it and the results might be more interesting. I might actually be on to something there, and using Canva's tools for literal and active collaboration, maybe even between teamed-up strangers, social-network-style, and the machine, could be more interesting than just letting the black-box-of-AI-doom do ALL the work for you. I'm also aware that algorithms were, at least at the outset, human creations, so in a sense we're cooperating not just with the machine but also with its programmers… OTOH, those algos are so far gone, convoluted and themselves machine-generated at this point (they don't call them “black boxes” for no reason) that I can almost put them on the same level as other digital tools I already use, of which I technically know almost nothing and which impact my creative process in ways probably more relevant than many understand or care to admit. You do get that sense of perspective when you get to do proper calligraphy, letterpress, stonecutting, etc. at least once… Then again, that sense of perspective is also what's been nagging me for years to ape many of my colleagues and mod my Parallel Pens and whatnot, but also to go and learn Python, and produce my own add-ons for Glyphs.app. That day will come, even if it's basically useless and I'm retired by then.

Well, it's what is colourfully named in the industry as “enshitification”, combined with an excessive focus on AI tools, etc. Serif might find themselves in a position of having to compete with, yes, the likes of Figma and Canva (at least Affinity Designer would, and Affinity Photo is always facing plenty of competition in that space, with the increasingly niche Affinity Publisher being the only relatively isolated product), and that in some ways it may have been happening for a while now and might actually explain some of their financial woes and the utterly sluggish pace of V2 development (you noticed that, didn't you?). In a way, they “lost” that battle and were bought out (whether they could hold the fort for a bit longer or not, is a moot point, what is done is done), but the case can be made that now that they're no longer competing with Canva, they're better equipped to compete both with Figma – and all other wannabe startups that may emerge – and Adobe. That doesn't change a thing re. subscription-first or subscription-only business models. The math – 175M-ish users versus 3M-ish – certainly looks very dire for us. Hence my insistence on a new alternative, as a backup plan and/or as a competitor that keeps Canva in check. And yes, I'm willing to cooperate with either or even both (except for Adobe, or only insofar as providing them with access/licensing to whatever extensions my colleagues and I may propose to the OpenType spec, and I will find a way to do that because I already have connections at Adobe and Glyphs.app, can easily establish them at FontLab inc., and have a few at ATypI, so it's just a matter of sending the right e-mails and making the right phone calls after all is said and done); I answer to no one but the creative and typography gods.

I'm obviously in the same boat. Despite my misgivings with some, err, choices from the team at Serif, and outright personal beef with a particular employee (who never apologised but at least never insisted on said behaviour, either, so there's also that), I do want them to remain well employed and fed, and catering for all of their customers in a way that suits everyone instead of driving some of them away. Some additions to the team – with proper care not to fall into the “mythical man-month” human resources sinkhole, of course – would be welcome, however. I've put myself up for paid, external consultancy roles, and would (will?) do so again, but at the moment I'm under an exclusivity agreement and have a scholarship for one more year (they both literally terminate in April 1st 2025). I think Serif/Canva/whatchamacallit really need a boost and also some added external input, and not just the usual, crowdsourced stuff here in the forums, but expert panels and scientifically-assembled focus groups. I'm extra biased, duh, but that's genuinely what I believe when it comes to software development in general, not just for products or positions in which I have a vested interest (and this is nothing new; I've expressed said interest before, and have cooperated with Serif closer than many here imagine – yes, even beyond that quaint little e-mail –, albeit in a pro bono role… I'm not, by virtue of my current position and career trajectory, willing to maintain that kind of volunteer role, especially after this entire Canva ordeal and the supposed influx of investment, I'm not naïve). As for our investment here? Heck, when it comes to mine, they just have to have someone from the team read my posts. They sure are verbose, but there is a lot of free knowledge, insight and actual feature suggestions ripe for the taking right there. Or, heck, feed them to an LLM and have it summarise the content for all I care. 😂

As others have been saying, there may be a race to the bottom happening, and a certain set of Canva users who don't need collaboration features might jump ship after learning how to use Affinity apps. The optimist in me obviously wants to see Canva preserving Affinity instead of butchering it for IP, like Adobe did with Macromedia, because the overlap in user base and features is, indeed, not excessive… My biggest concerns are with the lack of competition in the “cross-platform, integrated suite, perpetual license-only, low-cost” space, and how that might lead Canva to move to a subscription-only model while just undercutting Adobe by a bit, or by that magical amount that wouldn't push users to Creative Cloud over the lack of certain features… If you think about it, makes a lot of business sense, and I have no qualms in saying it in public; both Serif's and Canva's executives obviously thought about that, and while those at Serif were either truly idealistic or just feigning idealism because they painted themselves into the perpetual license-only corner, the big-wigs at Canva, with their 175-million-user-strong clientele may just take the L and go for it (and nab some less idealistic but still price-conscious Creative Cloud users in the process). There are, as I've said, really good up-and-coming and historical alternatives which might keep both Canva and Adobe in check, but… VectorStyler stands alone, Pixelmator is Mac-only, and QuarkXPress is so obscenely expensive that it doesn't stand a chance to ever regain its place at the top (it's almost as if they're content with that stupid technical documentation niche, which is just sad). Corel's now once again cross-platform offering is also still lacking a DTP packaging and is on par, pricing-wise, with Quark's, and… well, it's Corel. And the whole FOSS landscape is almost as bad as it was 11 years ago when I sent that infamous e-mail to Serif (yes, even Inkscape, with nominal Apple Silicon support, is buggy and ugly as sin, having been surpassed, UX-wise, by none other than Scribus, yikes!). By the way, I'm attaching said e-mail here, slightly edited for typos, clarity and added context, so you can appreciate it in its full glory and get a bit more appreciation for my business and technological acumen (down to sheer prescience, as Affinity would only be announced a year later! In fact, I had registered an account in Serif's old forums and got a lot of advertisement in my inbox for the Plus suite, which I only realised now when looking for this e-mail, heh 😆), before this thread is inevitably shut down: Suffice to say, now that I'm 38 instead of 28, I'm way less of an optimist and more of a realist, if not outright cynical. I still want to be wowed, but I know better. Also, I'm preparing a similar message to the folks at Pixelmator Team and Numeric Path (from VectorStyler). Not because I want Affinity to falter, but because I want it and Canva as a whole to have competition, as a check and balance and added market segment coverage. Well, it seems I already have my work cut out for me; I just have to take this template, update the dates and actors and replace that Churchill quote with one from Mannerheim, I guess. 😂

Nah, it should stay open until the heat death of the universe or for as long as the forums themselves are open (whichever comes first). You see, we speculated a lot, and there will be a lot of told-yo-so's to be said (which side will be doing so remains to be seen). And not just final, definitive ones (hopefully not, because the only definitive ones would be about worst-case scenarios), but at every crucial juncture.

I mean, yeah, that article’s title makes even more sense now, considering how regulators would see an acquisition of Canva by Adobe as even more of a problem… Overall, from what I’ve read today, I am a bit less concerned about Canva’s future in that regard. The jury is, sadly, still out on Affinity’s future inside of the “Canva family”, as they like to call it, but Flourish’s apparently preserved identity does seem to be a positive indicator (I actually had some colleague suggest it as a tool during one of our PhD seminars and I didn’t even suspect it was owned by Canva, so there’s that). It does seem to be cloud- and subscription-based, on a freemium model, and maybe it already was before, which would mean they already had extra synergies with Canva as a company. The latter suddenly having perpetual licenses and offline apps in their portfolio would indeed represent a pivot, or a diversification, on their business model, and if they stick to it and respect us all in the process, and further shield themselves from hostile takeovers, hey, more power to them, I guess. 🤷‍♂️

They could, however, have reasons to kill products that compete with Canva. Though it’s patently obvious that they target slightly different segments of the market, and that they’re adjacent enough for Affinity to be a bit of an upsell/upgrade, which might give Canva an edge over Figma or whatever lower-priced clone – offered under an equally lower-priced subscription tier, of course – Adobe may create or acquire at some point. As I’ve said: this all comes down to how greedy, complacent and/or shortsighted Canva’s executives may be in the future. Yes, they may see the cheap perpetual licenses with no extensive on-line sync and collaboration features as a gateway for more profitable – or at least more consistent as far as revenue is concerned – subscriptions, but the case for them being able to milk us all due to an independent option like Affinity – especially Affinity Publisher, even in its incomplete, RTL- and multiline-composer-less form! – no longer being available can also be made. For Affinity’s perpetual licenses to be completely safe, the folks over at VectorStyler and those at Pixelmator would have to partner up and somehow concoct a PageDesigner (sorry, FOSS peepz, Inkscape+Gimp+Scribus just don’t cut it on a technical level, because they’re frankly horrible in different ways and aren’t integrated in any meaningful way like LibreOffice is, so they don’t even have that redeeming quality going for them) and start eating away at both Adobe’s and Canva’s user base with the perpetual licenses they also based their business model on, because that’s how healthy markets work, with proper checks and balances, and not as duopolies. And I’m not even joking about this; with one company based in Salo, Finland, and the other in Vilnius, Lithuania, they’re practically neighbours when compared to the Canva-Serif pairing, and almost on the same longitude, let alone the same time zone. Heck, if either team was up to learning the other’s exceptionally weird native language, they might even properly merge and still be able to visit their loved ones every now and then after a short flight or 11-hour drive (or shorter, after that newfangled Finland-Estonia tunnel under the Baltic Sea is finished, of course, and let’s not forget the high-speed train corridor that’s being built over there as well). And, to wit and from a geopolitical/economical/regulatory standpoint, because I did mention the US’s and someone else mentioned the Aussie context as well, it would neatly split all actors between the behemoth that is the US, the historical Commonwealth (yes, we can see how synergies across it are easier, that’s not being called into question) and the EU (especially the Baltics and the Finns, which might very well stick together or at least forge powerful alliances even in a post-EU scenario, for reasons I’m pretty sure I won’t have to elaborate on here), thus keeping things a bit more cohesive and compartmentalized, i.e. safer from acquisitions across those “borders”. It would be a huge win for us all as consumers. 🤷‍♂️

@PaulEC did well in apologizing, and I won’t pile up on your colleagues with basic assumptions, either. But you do know that both things can be true, right? Having dedicated themselves honestly to the products and the company, and still having gotten a golden parachute of sorts and leaving said company in the hands of another whose licensing model – which, let’s face it, was at least half of the reason many of your current customers picked your products in the first place – is completely antithetical to that of Serif, I mean. Which, no matter which way you slice it, is what effectively happened here. If anything happens to Affinity, it will completely and irreversibly tarnish their legacy, I’m afraid, and you also know that, and you also know we’ll be here in the forums to remind you of it before the bosses at Canva turn off the lights. Anyway, I won’t dwell too much on that, and just add another €0,02; this just made me realise that Serif would have actually done better in having offered a hybrid subscription/perpetual model from the get-go, perhaps with faster releases. It would’ve either prevented this mess in the first place, or make us believe that Canva would at least have a great working example of a hybrid model to learn from and accept into its portfolio. But nah, the optics of this are definitely not as rosy as your pledges paint it. We will only barely trust Canva – and, by extension, Serif employees and Serif as a subsidiary, because that’s the new hierarchy now – and be at ease after a few hybrid releases, with proper reassurances that we won’t ever lose access to our apps and our files in at least some capacity (again, Typeface.app’s licensing model comes to mind, and it would be great if Canva actually opened up about their future plans and pledged on whatever model they have coming). Yeah, it’s a terrible position to be in, and I don’t envy you, but if you’ve ever been through a breakup, an infidelity episode, or whatever, surely you know how these things work. It’s hard to regain trust once it’s broken, and the company they picked, the naïveté of thinking that such a set of pledges wouldn’t be necessary at all on day 1 but then also thinking they would be enough moving forward, etc., doesn’t bode well at all for the future. Only time and the actual goods will fix it, and I’m not just talking about v2.5 and v2.x, but also v3 and beyond. We will trust those pledges when we see them being delivered upon and when we can finally say “ah, Canva changed its ways, its target market and business model, and became more flexible and welcoming towards us, just like Serif was”. It would have to be a bit like the Apple+NeXT “merger”, with Serif sort of taking over or at least heavily influencing the culture of the combined corporate entity, and being such a smaller team on a different continent, and being blatantly called just “the last piece of the puzzle” (what “puzzle”? World domination? I know I wouldn’t want to be reduced to that, especially if the products I was responsible for were supposedly the higher tier ones, oof), nah, mate, it ain’t happenin’. Oh, but there’s more! No matter how any of this plays out, Canva itself, and by extension everything contained therein, also has to survive the inevitable IPO (ahh, see, there’s your “world domination”), that its cash-lusting VC backers will inevitably push for. Which may obviously include an acquisition by Adobe itself during a monopoly-friendly US administration, something we all know is always around the corner. Do you also want to deny that plain, painful and obvious truth behind this entire charade? 🤔 We trusted you, at Serif, to not to sell out to Adobe, on account of it being a longstanding competitor, like Quark or Corel, and especially on being small and having survived all these years to an onslaught of acquisition attempts which we’re sure you were a target of… I suspect we’ll never trust Canva as much, even after an extra decade of bold and exciting Affinity versions and perpetual licenses, because… you’ve guessed it, Macromedia and spineless shareholders. We’ve seen this exact scenario play out before, and there’s nothing you, or Canva, or anyone else for that matter can ever do to make us forget it, it will always be on the back of our minds. 🤷‍♂️ And yep, I know this is a 180° turn over an earlier comment of mine, sorry, but I hadn’t heard about the whole VC and investment fund situation, nor that Canva’s founders and owners were such zillionaires already… I really thought their product, while certainly big, was not that popular and pervasive, but now I do and I’m still in a bit of a shock. Moving back to CC does seem almost like a sensible move, IMHO, because opportunity costs and investment in new tools are absolutely part of any such equation (you know that, and I’ve always held Serif employees to account regarding this factor even when discussing product features themselves, let alone momentous business decisions like this one). And you also know I’m a teacher who’s been warning my students of all those sorts of caveats regarding Affinity, and now I have an extra big one to add to the top of the list. We’ll obviously be installing your software on our machines and providing them with access to it because, yes, you may become the next “Macromedia” and the alternative industry standard, but also warning them about seriously learning how to use CC because it’s still the standard in the corporate world and… you may indeed become the next “Macromedia” and be gobbled up. What a mess, yikes! 😬

I mean… They may look at Adobe and the fact that there’s nobody else with a complete DTP package (never was, in fact… Macromedia only had FreeHand, Flash and Dreamweaver), do their math and realize they’re willing to leave on the table one or two out of the three million of perpetual licenses that Serif sold, because maybe they convert at least a third of them to a more expensive subscription and finance the app with the proceeds from their main Canva customer base. The math doesn’t work in our favour, I’m afraid.

While I get your fears, I do trust the Aussies and the Brits to indeed take on Adobe instead of selling out. It’s the kind of hugely monopolistic transaction that would certainly raise all sorts of antitrust alarms, as did the Figma one before it. Heck, it would be even worse because Affinity, if it is to remain in Canva’s line up as-is or even in remotely similar form, is the only credible, cross-platform, commercial alternative to three of Adobe’s most important CC apps. That the Macromedia acquisition was ever allowed in the first place is what truly boggles the mind…

P.S.: Where’s the equivalent video from Canva, where its bosses show their faces and undersign their part of the pledge? Where are their user accounts in their forums to interact with us directly like you all did? I don’t think it might undermine your authority, quite the contrary, and it would go a long way to show they’re serious about professional design tools, not just hellbent in acquiring IP.

A couple of observations on the recent news, as a very special tester and the guy who suggested Serif bet the farm on Affinity at a time they were seemingly already doing it in secret (yes, remember that e-mail you got back in 2014, where I even quoted Churchill? That was me): • The video that was posted on the news page was not very reassuring, and any PR specialist will tell you that. • The pledge is all well and good, but it is not legally binding and, I take it, was not posted right away upon the announcement of the acquisition; and while the negotiations were done in two months and that does seem to be a very short time when it comes to these things, was it that difficult to have said pledge ready to go on day one? Another PR disaster, IMHO. • Canva doesn’t have the best reputation overall, as a tool, among professional designers; however, they do seem to be loaded with cash, and their explanation that there is not much of an overlap in functionality, but perhaps in target market (i.e., some Canva users may want and actually be able to graduate from it to Affinity, or use it as a more advanced editing tool for objects even if they stay largely within the confines of Canva, kind of like you can already do across Affinity apps, and Affinity users may benefit from collaborative tools, for sure), does make sense, and sure, there may be some synergies, and Canva might be able to undercut Adobe both in subscription price – because we all know a subscription is coming, let’s not fool ourselves – and flexibility – if it makes financial sense and they don’t get too greedy, yes, them offering perpetual or semi-perpetual (à la Typeface.app) licenses, for which Affinity is famous for, may remain a thing. And yes, we can’t be hypocrites and complain about Canva not valuing design as a professional pathway if they do indeed make good on their promises and start promoting their newly acquired serious tools and tutorials, which may lead people into making decent amateur design or even studying it at some level, and to Canva not just being part of the problem but also providing the solution. Heck, the files produced in Canva may even become better on a technical level if they move towards Serif tech at some point. • Canva also has bad reputation when it comes to AI, and while we don’t expect them to drop it, we may give it the benefit of the doubt out of necessity. Expect, however, thorough sifting of EULAs, and maybe even lawsuits if user creations are ever mined for content. • We’ve been burned in the past, and none of this is very surprising, only sad. In hindsight, it’s patently obvious that Serif was lacking the resources to keep up with Adobe after their seemingly vertiginous pace during the early years. • The promises of missing features being added to V2 are all well and good, but in a sense, they are a bit too good; some of us suspect the team is just trying to wrap it up, and that indeed V3 is shaping up to be a very boring cash-grab, or mostly Canva-focused (because that integration will surely take time and can only really start now, if it does become a thing), and us losing access one day to V2 activations is also a concerning prospect (the indefinite maintenance of activation servers for as long as Canva exists as a corporate entity, and maybe even some properly laid out exit strategy in case it goes belly up, should be part of the pledge itself, spelled out in writing or even added to the very EULAs, and become legally binding, between Canva and us, the customers). • Until all these fears are well and properly assuaged, I – and, I suspect, many others – won’t even bother with giving suggestions for my pet features on the betas, the topmost – variable font support – having been the first one mentioned in said video and on the pledge. Why should I, if Adobe already offers it in such stable form, and me having to switch back to CC may become a reality? Not until V3 rolls around as a truly groundbreaking, perpetually-licensed set of apps, and especially not now when Affinity devs are loaded with cash and could and should hire proper testers and pay for proper focus groups, instead of relying on community efforts. You see, you had a tacit, unwritten agreement with your testers, in that we knew you were, staying with the Churchillian metaphor, the strapped-for-cash underdogs that were fighting the good fight, and with this acquisition you obviously lost a lot of that goodwill and the tiny bit that remains is now on probation, if not on thin ice. With Canva being just the lesser and more affordable and flexible of two evils – at least for the time being –, we’re now just your customers, not your fighting buddies, sorry. That is not to say that you won’t keep fighting, but you’ll also have to do so to get at least our basic confidence back (not just to get new switchers from Adobe, which I still hope you do as long as you’re not trapping them into a technological dead end), and you won’t get unbridled word-of-mouth from us anymore because obviously we will warn our colleagues, students, etc. of all the corporate shenanigan and technical caveats (i.e. Affinity, in its free educational/non-profit version, is nice to learn just in case it turns into an alternative standard, but not safe enough to bet an entire portfolio on it lest it’s canned or something, and definitely even less of a safe option in its commercial incarnation for the same reason, and I hope Canva realizes this and doesn’t nix perpetual licenses based on understandably skewed sales numbers). V2.x, and especially V3 and beyond will be crucial in that regard. TL;DR: nice as all of you at Serif may be as people, unless Canva allows you to interact with the community as you always did, and treats the community according to its very special ethos and idiosyncrasies, you likely lost us all for good, and will see at best a cooling down period until we see you all make good on your pledges. It’s not vindictiveness, it’s just basic human behaviour; why would we, as old Macromedia users, old Creative Suite users, old Plus users, etc., keep blindly investing our time and mental energy in the development and improvement of this piece of software after having been so thoroughly burned, time and time again, by greedy corporate entities and technology transitions? My €0,02.

@Patrick Connor I am very happy to see positive feedback on my penultimate post, by the way. As for the other right above this one, where I mentioned writing papers and giving the industry as a whole a proper jolt, I really meant it. As a typography user, creator and educator, I am not too happy about the current lacking – nay, half-assed, if I may be so blunt – implementation of variable OTF fonts in software packages; sure, it… works, and we need it also in Affinity regardless of its current state, but we can and should do better as a collective. Very conveniently, as part of my PhD, I still have to publish a second paper until the end of next year, and even after that, we – sadly, or thankfully, I guess I'll figure out in due time if I can handle the pressure – in our research centre have to fill a certain biennial quota of publications, so… we might as well make truly useful ones. Patents seem to be highly valued over there as well, and my supervisor has some experience with those (you know, with his calligraphy app for the iPad and whatnot) and I wouldn't mind joining him in that club, so… if you're interested in taking the reins and really setting trends, hit me up. We're actually both part of a team of ten researchers, all working on this kind of stuff, but I'd say we're the ones more technologically-minded of the bunch, and it also bears reminding that Prof. Brandão has always been a strong advocate of Affinity and other tech underdogs (Glyphs.app, with whose developers we keep close contact and whose support we consistently get for our teaching endeavours, also comes to mind). If you want to check us and our work out, you can find us at https://typo.fa.ulisboa.pt/en/about/ .

This one takes the cake… Even the completely discombobulated Microsoft, which has a great typography department but still fails to support something as basic as OpenType ligatures across the entirety of the Office Suite (hey, if I want ligatures in my Excel spreadsheets, I want them, g*dammit… 😂 Now, in all seriousness, it irks me to no end having to use legacy fi and fl Unicode characters in PowerPoint, which I sometimes use for presentations in typography events), seems to be progressing in the right direction… I will also add that if Serif isn't in contact with other developers, or at the very least with specialized academics and type designers, with developing standards in mind, they should. Variable typefaces are a veritable UX conundrum, and I completely feel the developers' pain in trying to support something as… anarchic as the variable OTF format, not just at the technical, behind-the-scenes level, but especially at the user-facing one. Yes, all those text-based parameters and sliders make OpenType features, with its predetermined names grounded in tradition, seem user-friendly by comparison, I know. If you want my €0,02? Type designers being, err, experts in vector design, perhaps a future variable OTF version/spec should let them add specialized glyphs as visual labels/aids for their custom variable axes' end-, mid- and even custom points, which would then be used automatically by graphic design software packages. Hey, maybe I will even write a paper on that… Any of you peepz in?

Adobe seems to support them just fine. Of course, they are both the creators and main implementers of the PDF format, and creators, distributors and heavy promoters of variable OTF fonts, seeing how it's just a development of their old Multiple Master format (seriously, the other day I was playing around with a really old version of Illustrator, running on System 7.6 on top of Basilisk II, and I was absolutely shocked at just how similar the interface for manipulating Type I MM fonts was to their current implementation), so they obviously have their work cut out for them. Unless Adobe, Corel et al. have some sort of weird patents, it should be just a case of opening their files and reverse-engineer them. Voilá, presto! Anyway, and AFAIK from my own look into it way back when, Adobe's apps just take whatever interpolated values you picked and export the end result as bespoke, automatically-generated and embedded fonts for the relevant text strings (yes, a separate one for each combination of variables), so there's no need for converting stuff to curves, losing the ability to select text or ballooning file sizes, the works. Of course, when reimporting, you absolutely must have also an embedded Illustrator file stream, otherwise you're completely screwed. Perhaps you could look into making your own implementation of PDF files with embedded .afdesign or .SVG streams, or just metadata for the relevant text strings to save on file size, so that one could in theory reconstitute those multiple resulting fonts into their parent variable OTF fonts/styles? As others have said, variable OTF fonts are just not going away; not this time, and especially not with the might of Adobe TypeKit and Google Fonts behind them. Heck, even I wrote a paper on those; you can check it out in my ORCiD page in my bio if you want. And, as I've said before, my students are really using them in earnest (… as attested in said paper), which means that when they leave the Uni and enter the workforce, they'll either keep using Adobe CC, or switch to something else altogether, like Sketch. I know you don't like to hear this, and please don't shoot the messenger, but… I did warn Serif (a company called, of all names… SERIF!) years in advance of just how relevant and pervasive they would become. 🤷‍♂️ I cannot stress this enough, and to all the people rightly clamouring for RTL support: variable OTF font support should be included in a splashy v.2.x update (not a v.2.x.x one, but a full-blown point update, and maybe even a jump to v.2.5 for good measure), and RTL could very well wait for v.3… Allow me to explain: the RTL market is not even considering Affinity apps at the moment, at all, so they're not exactly invested in them, whereas a lot of designers, be they young and aspiring or established veterans, may have bought Affinity 1.x (let alone 2.x, because this thread and all related discussions date back to the v.1 days, if I may remind you all), with the expectation of it being a professional package somewhat approaching feature-parity with its peers (in their Latin-centric bubble, for sure, but it is undeniable that the vast majority of the design market in the West indeed doesn't need RTL; and full disclaimer: I'm a type designer with two finished but as of yet not commercially available fonts which support Arabic, so I fully understand what's at stake and feel RTL users' pain). And variable fonts being an external development, long in the making and over which Serif does not have much control, they are something third-party developers must adapt to and properly support, ASAP, and not the other way around. As I've said, the penalty can actually be people switching back to whatever software package they were using before, or to a different alternative to the proverbial 800lb gorilla in the middle of the room, just so they can stay up-to-date and competitive. The best way Serif can ensure people stay in the Affinity bandwagon for v.3 is to give them the bare essentials, and typography being the basis of design (think about it; other media and visual resources such as, say, photography or illustration can exist in standalone form, but not typography, or not to the same extent), yep, supporting the most popular formats available is as essential as being able to import and export in all popular vector and bitmap formats. Would you like being limited in what camera, or drawing tablet, or brush packs, or whatever you could buy for your creative endeavours because your supposedly very much up-to-date software package of choice refused to support them? Now extend the same exercise to something as basic as typefaces…

I will say this: my MA students, future designers, ARE using variable fonts as we speak. I have been warning Serif developers all this time, and they won't listen. They have several high-value users and testers connected to the industry and academia at the highest level, following – nay, setting – the trends (guess what I'm about to do when I finish my PhD in… typography education? 🙄), and yet… here we are. Let's just ignore the 500lb pink gorilla in the middle of the room that is Adobe (they created the format, after all, and had already come up with Multiple Master fonts before it – I tried those on an ancient version of Ai running on a Basilisk II System 7 VM, and it's shockingly similar to the current implementation, down to the generic parameter sliders, so I'm guessing it just failed due to lack of support from type design applications, third party vector and photo editing and DTP apps, etc.), and look at one of Serif's actual competitors on the Mac, Sketch: https://www.sketch.com/blog/variable-fonts-improved-opentype-support-and-a-new-data-plugin-whats-new-in-sketch/ Sketch v.59, from 20-freaking-19, from four years ago, back when Affinity v.2 was just a blip on the radar (likely an internal Alpha, or a set of notes on a whiteboard, or something), supported variable fonts. Sure, Sketch is very much geared towards web and UX design, but there had been already such a request here in the forums the year before, as was already requested 2016 and heavily commented by yours truly the next year onwards! And I'm commenting here because a musician friend of mine (a musician who works in banking, not one of my design students, so you can see just how mainstream these can and will become), who uses a Mac, wants do do his own design work and variable fonts came up in conversation; I recommended him either Affinity or Sketch, but I'm guessing that if he enjoys playing with those, you won't get his patronage, and through no fault other than your own. 🤷‍♂️ Seven years, guys. Seven years. And at least six years of me warning you that it would eventually become a serious omission. There are now people, both here in the forums and out of them, literally skipping on the v.2 upgrade (or on Affinity altogether) because of this. This can't be a v.3 feature, it *has* to be added to v.2 at some point. No ifs, no buts.

Great! In related news, I managed to iron out the latest kinks on that machine (apparently you shouldn't be cheap when it comes to buying small-size, SuperDrive, to full-size, hard drive/SSD SATA III adapters, as they have a tendency to trigger all sorts of R/W errors – that wasn't the issue behind my woes with Affinity, but it made me seriously rethink my strategy, and is now fortunately fixed for good), and have it updated to all the latest versions of macOS and my apps, including Affinity v.2.1.0 GM. What's more, it even runs great on a 2009 Unibody MacBook, unlike the latest versions of CC. There's a reason why I keep using those old Macs around and kind of expect Affinity to run on them, because I'm just spoiled; it boggles the mind that it actually runs so well on hardware of such vintage, but it is what it is. In any case, I know what I'm potentially getting myself into, and have budgeted for getting a new 13'' or maybe one of those upcoming 15'' MacBook Airs on a moment's notice, just in case. All in all, it's a win-win situation, as the longer I postpone that purchase, the better the machine I can get by then, and as I'm just writing a PhD thesis and not doing much design work these days, it's not like I really need a very powerful laptop at this point (and if I do, that's what the Mac Studio is here on my desk for). 🙃

Fair enough. It's in no way comparable with Apple not supporting me booting my Mac or running my user account off of an external drive (especially the latter, something which their default install definitely allows even without reducing security settings). I guess I was still pretty mad about AppleCare giving me the finger over that (my Mac Studio borked itself around the same time after installing a measly point update, macOS 13.3.0, and I had to eschew the second option, which I preferred, in favour of the first one, which after some growing pains and tweaking in Onyx, is finally working for me)… We're good. But hey, APub does work now, so we should be extra good. It just goes to show just how resilient and compatible macOS still is, despite these weird new “holes” or “special needs” Apple keeps introducing in it regardless of ISA, because something something forced obsolescence greenwashing. In any case, I believe I should still send you bug reports and logs from this Mac and a now also unsupported 2015 MacBook Pro (especially that one, considering just how much more recent it is). You can read them, or ignore them, but… as they say, it's free data! Also, there seems to be a precedent of you looking at those despite obviously not supporting it officially, so… you know, precedents and stuff. Kind of like, hum, your entire legal system works. 🙄 I'm not demanding anything unreasonable, and would never consider your product broken or you as being negligent, and leave any bad reviews or whatever, over any of Affinity's apps borking themselves due to something obviously OCLP/Metal/SSE-related (there's a not-so-recent version of Photoshop, for instance, that is no longer compatible with the 2009 MacBook due to the lack of SSE4.2 extensions on its Penryn processor, for instance, and there's nothing anyone can do in the way of patching – not even Adobe, lest you start referring me to your EULA, like your boss did on the thread I'm linking to below, because I don't hack apps other than sometimes pasting custom icons on their information panel – to make it work, so that machine is defo on its way out). As a rule of thumb, I tend not to waste your time with anything very obviously hack-related and… as they say, “no lowballers, I know what I've got”, and what I've got is a geriatric machine (😂), and never made a secret of that here in the forums (see “precedents” above). It's just that I'm selling the 2017 5K iMac ASAP and, after that, if the mere fact that I'm using what you aptly call an “unsupported configuration” prevents me from asking you to at least look into bugs (if they're unfixable, or completely OCLP/Metal/SSE/whatchamacallit-related, yes, that is that and I don't expect you to bend over backwards to support my exotic configuration in particular, but it may be am obviously generic bug and I MAY be helping other users in reporting it), I guess I won't be able to help you much (with, say, stuff such as smaller glitches on an otherwise perfectly functioning computer – which my machine definitely wasn't the other day, and my bad, that one's on me because, as I said, I was completely on edge and mad beyond belief at Apple and anything Mac-related –, and it feels as if I'm being punished for being, you know, honest – or obvious Serif UI glitches – yes, these sorts of hacks do cause some general macOS UI glitches on occasion, but they are very easy to tell as such and are quickly fixed anyway –, especially considering the old MacBook's built-in display is non-Retina, and I no longer have any of those connected to a newer model such as my very much supported Mac Studio. Now, is there some passive-aggressiveness in my tone? Yes, there is. At least I'm open about it, and on why it is so. 🤷‍♂️ We have a bit of a history here in the forums (not with you personally, I believe, but when I say “we”, I mean “some Serif devs and me”, and “me and Serif as a company”, including binding contracts signed and all), and to quote you, “we've been down this road before”, except over much more serious stuff, such as a very sensible, not at all outrageous idea of mine being called… what was the word? Ah, yes, “stupid”. Once again, a non-snarky, noncommittal, boilerplate response would suffice, methinks. Or maybe an even nicer “we may look into it, but it's not a priority because this is an unsupported configuration, and if we find it's due to that, there won't be much we can do about that” (and you could even be lying and wait for the problem to fix itself, which it might still if it hadn't already by the time you answered 😂). Or, since the problem fixed itself, the even easier and more neutral radio silence. Do I, the communication design major (my qualifications specifically in communication and marketing stopped at the measly BFA level, mind you), seriously have to teach you corporate speak as well? I should start giving out company-wide workshops, sheesh! 🤦‍♂️

Interestingly, the issue solved itself, so maybe it was indeed due to something wrong in my setup… Something was seriously amiss with the macOS 13.3.1 + OCLP 0.6.3 combo, as it was causing all sorts of weird glitches (such as macOS services and QuickLook not being able to access audio files – my alert sound, Sonumi, was being cut short, for instance –, icons and images not being properly rendered, etc., all issues reminiscent of broken SATA cables but, at the end of the day, software-related – and I did check they were, by accessing this Mac's internal SSDs through Target Disk Mode without any issues, other than KP'ing both an Intel iMac and my M1 Mac Studio when using a Thunderbolt 2 cable instead of my trusty FireWire 800 one connected to a string of dongles, which means I've found yet another software/firmware issue squarely on Apple devs' side). At first I reverted only the bootloader (not the post-install root patches) to OCLP 0.6.2's to some effect; most glitches were gone, but APub was still crashing on launch. But it seems the OCLP dev team got wind of these issues and released an updated build yesterday, 0.6.4, which fixed most issues, including APub's. Only Camo Studio seems to be acting up still, and crashing on launch as well, but this Mac has an integrated iSight/FaceTime camera which works fine, so it's not a big deal.