JGD
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Posts posted by JGD
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6 hours ago, William Overington said:
[…]
I have no experience of Adobe products. I notice lots of posts in these forums mention Adobe products.
Why do so many people assume that Canva wants to compete with Adobe?
I remember one famous female country music singer said to other female country music singers that there is enough for all of us.
I am reminded that years ago i bought a book that is a collection of early science fiction stories from the late 1800s to early 1900s. The title is Rivals of H. G. Wells. Why Rivals? If I write a science fiction novel and publish it, I am not a rival of some other science fiction writer, it is just that I wrote a science fiction novel.
[…]
The reason why you notice lots of posts in these forums mentioning Adobe products is… the fact that the 80lb gorilla snuffed out most of the competition (more on it later), which means there's not much in the way of choice. Yes, I know, there is F/OSS, but its technical limitations and sometimes subpar UX (and that is a hill I'm going to die and rot on, sorry… I've now studied enough UX to find and explain faults even in the relatively user-friendly offerings by Serif and those by Adobe, and I completely understand why F/OSS in the creative industries still hasn't taken off, save for Blender and other notable exceptions) pretty much push people either into those nice, prosumer offerings on the Mac App Store, or to Adobe subscriptions, especially if they've worked with the latter in school (as is so often the case, hence Canva's push into that market).
People don't assume anything; Serif's swagger, and straight up copying of the former Adobe Creative Suite Design Standard product matrix (minus the professional PDF editor, sadly), and now the new and aforementioned post-Canva acquisition free licensing for education markets, solidify that position. It's not a perception, it's a fact.
And let's be fair, Affinity gets users maybe 90% of the way there, but it's those 10% of functionality that it doesn't yet cover, that make Adobe a true “jack of all trades”, which make all the difference. Many of the people you see here either need those extra 10% or anticipate they or their students (as is my case) may need them.
About the only thing most agree(d) on (and I say agreed, because we'll soon see an influx of Canva users who may be very content with their subscriptions) was that they wanted to own their own software, full stop. Again, there are very practical reasons for that, it's not just basic daily economics or a matter of principle (which it also is, of course).
While I agree with you on the market being big enough for everyone, there was ZERO competition against the former “Adobe Creative Suite Design Standard” suite/combo as a whole… But there was, and still is, proper competition when it comes to each of its individual components, albeit less integrated. One could feasibly purchase a perpetual Corel Draw Graphics Suite license, plonk down some extra on one for QuarkXPress, and boom, there you have it, a fully professional pipeline, with no subscriptions. A very expensive and less integrated one, for sure, but a very capable one nonetheless. And, indeed, analogous of what we used in the pre-Creative suite days… I was personally trained in Photoshop, Freehand *and* QuarkXPress, and that was the combo I used for the first two years of my bachelor, only to jump ship to Illustrator – which I still don't enjoy using as much as I did using Freehand, to this day – because of the infamous Macromedia acquisition and to InDesign because, yeah, truth be told, it was always miles ahead of Quark in terms of not just platform support – Quark really shot themselves on the foot with their belated transition to what was then called Mac OS X, oof – but also on UX and features.
Did we get greedy with the advent of Affinity…? Perhaps. But you have to appreciate that it's highly frustrating to see it get all the way to 90% there and then… just remain indefinitely “meh” and effectively incomplete for a lot of users, because the powers-that-be had to pay the bills and realised the only way to do so was to invest in new, sexy features for illustrators (which, as I've said before, are well covered by other tools) rather than tick all the unsexy boxes for classic vector design and DTP. Hence all the incessant comparisons! Of course, Adobe is also catering to those digital-first or even digital-only illustrators, even in Illustrator (ha! It's finally rising up to its name), but that's the thing: there are other tools besides Illustrator and Affinity Designer that also do, and likely do an even better job than either, because they're not jacks-of-all-trades.
As for DTP and print production workflows… the only integrated packages now are Adobe's and Serif's, period. They are, effectively, rivals (and now, with Canva's backing, if Affinity is to thrive as a product under its wing, even more so), and while I can also see code and UX as a quasi-artistic endeavour and as much as I appreciate your “Kumbaya” stance regarding software, at the end of the day they are tools (for artists, yes), not artistic creations in and of themselves. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and do I have to remind you that Adobe eats Serif-sized companies for breakfast? And that whenever Adobe does that and just discontinues products, peoples' livelihoods are affected? And that the same happening at the hands of Canva would make zero difference in that outcome?
- Alfred, debraspicher and Seneca
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On 4/19/2024 at 5:58 PM, walt.farrell said:
I would disagree.
That thread is specifically for discussing the Variable Font support coming in the 2.5.0 beta, not for general font-related discussions. It should be restricted to its stated purpose, to help the beta run smoothly.
Fair enough. I do expect the discussion to refocus on Variable Font support proper, when it becomes available/exposed in the UI/whatever, because at this point, it's mostly a teaser.
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On 4/19/2024 at 8:41 PM, kenmcd said:
The COLR table was added in OpenType 1.7, in 2015, (for the COLRv0 format).
The COLRv1 format was added in OpenType 1.9, in Dec. 2021 (so that part is newer).
Color fonts using either COLR format can be variable.Color-SVG fonts cannot be variable - so they really do not belong in this discussion.
Proposed changes and updates to the OpenType spec can be followed on GitHub.
Here: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/typography-issuesFuture font technology is also being developed on GitHub, and in an ISO group.
The code development and specs are here:
https://github.com/harfbuzz/boring-expansion-spec?tab=readme-ov-fileThey have been interacting with the ISO for developing the Open Font Format specification.
There is a newsgroup set-up by the ISO where this is discussed.Note: the Open Font Format will actually be open, unlike other ISO "public" standards which must be paid for (people made a lot of noise) so you can download the current version from the ISO "free" standards page.
No patents involved as far as I can tell.
Thanks for the correction. I'm obviously not as well-versed in this as Sérgio.
As for them not being able to be made variable, I wasn't sure of that but half-suspected already, and I don't see why it doesn't belong in this discussion, at least as a starting point, because after variable fonts… it's the next obvious omission to tackle. I kindly invite the mods to split the relevant posts into a new thread if need be, of course.
I would also add that said fact is not guaranteed to always be the case. If both formats take off, there can certainly be ways of making Colour-SVG fonts support variable axes. As a matter of fact, that same philosophy could be applied to the format and turn colours, and maybe even texture and gradients, into editable “axes”, instead of the format relying exclusively on Stylistic Sets as it still does, and those Stylistic Sets might even work as sub-fonts instead of the system, with their own axes, instead of being just presets of sorts.
Regarding that newfangled Open Font Format spec, I like it, though I fear will face a bit of an uphill battle against OpenType. Anyhoo, I'll be watching Behdad Esfahbod's (impressive CV, by the way) stream when I get the time, but I looked at his presentation deck already (he mentioned advantages for the UFO format, which is a good thing, and clearly knows well the history of formats, including arcane stuff such as METAFONT), and the fact that all these bright people are putting their minds to these issues fills me with confidence.
I'll be sure to check out all those resources, thanks!
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On 4/19/2024 at 6:59 PM, fde101 said:
This is almost as bad as RED getting a patent on lossy-compressed RAW encodings that happen to be above a certain resolution. Making it specific to high resolutions suddenly gets past prior art of doing exactly the same thing at lower resolutions, which had been around since before RED existed? Patenting a specific algorithm for doing that - maybe, but stretching it. Patenting it as a concept? Inexcusable.
There is plenty of software which moved (or duplicated) sliders and numeric fields onto the canvas in the form of handles, so creating on-canvas handles for yet another set of sliders is suddenly inventive enough to be patentable? The patent offices may be stupid enough to let something like that slide, but they certainly shouldn't be.
Direct manipulation of just about anything should be an obvious end goal by now, hardly inventive enough to be considered for a patent, even if no one else has tried it yet.
I didn't say it had to be patented, now, did I? Also, I'm discussing it out on the open. I'm not a developer, I'm a type designer and a teacher.
Heck, if I knew this thing was going to make everyone's lives easier and their work more creative, and would otherwise preclude others from implementing somewhat similar ideas, I'd give it away for free. I am with you on the fact that extremely generic ideas shouldn't be patenteable, FWIW.
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4 hours ago, MikeTO said:
Note that the Typography panel can still be opened with Text > Show Typography. Perhaps this command should be removed now that it's in the Window menu?
It pretty much has to be removed, as it no longer opens either the Typography window or the new Typography panel (at least on the Mac).
I would also suggest that the latter should be tucked into Window > Text > Typography, next to Character, Glyph Browser, Paragraph and Text Styles.
And that's me, a typography teacher saying it, but I'm not biased to the point of thinking that what is essentially an advanced version of the Typography section in the Character panel (which you can, indeed, open by clicking the “ellipsis/more…” button on the latter) should be a top-level, uncategorised panel.
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2 hours ago, fde101 said:
What would be really interesting would be to also find a way to represent at least some of the common ones as handles on the letters (when zoomed in far enough!!!) the way that handles are used for rounding rectangles and shaping gears and the like...
The Typography panel would be a logical place for these otherwise, in my way of thinking.
That is an extremely interesting, patent- or OpenType-spec-worthy feature. But, as you may guess, I suspect that would only happen if Serif/Canva brought that idea to the table, perhaps, again, along with another company and set of developers like those at FontLab Inc. or Glyphs GmbH.
You see, the Variable OpenType font format is a bit of free-for-all, anything goes! They are axis-based, and there aren't exactly standards set in stone. As a matter of fact, it is impossible to anticipate everything and anything type designers may come up with. LTR Beowulf by LettError and Chee by OH no Type Company should tell you all you needed to know about just how wildly creative they can be once they become proficient with this technology.
Surely we can band together and crystallise all the historical, most obvious axes (like width/weight, optical size, slant, etc., as defined in the OpenType Design-Variation Axis Tag Registry…), but if we were to stay true to Variable OT's (and, indeed, Gerrit Noordzij's and Catherine Dixon's) infinitely flexible and expandable conceptions of typography, we would have to come up with an equally and inherently flexible “standard-less standard”, which type designers themselves could use as they saw fit and make visible on various software packages' UIs.
I have been mulling over the use of private use area/OpenType-specific and non-Unicode glyphs dedicated to UI elements for axis labelling on Character/Variable Font interface panels (type design apps are, after all, vector editors par excellence, and type designers are obviously expert vector designers, which means the results would be, in general, very decent and compelling). That might mean that conceptually similar axes could have slightly different (and, in some cases and for a while, wildly different) labels across different fonts but, as with all other things, over time some new standards (mirroring what Dixon calls, in her advanced typographic categorisation/taxonomy system, “patterns”) would eventually emerge.
Could we use the same ideas and tech for, say, custom cursors? Toolbar button icons? Direct axis control nodes? Hover labels/interface aids/naming for the latter or even all of them? Could we even take all of these principles and help solve the mess that are currently the heretofore cryptically-numbered OT Stylistic Sets in one fell swoop? Maybe.
Your additional ideas regarding direct manipulation are very intriguing, and if you're willing to cooperate with our Typography research group on a future paper/patent (or, at the very least, provide me with your real name so you can be properly credited for the idea), hit me up. None of this can happen in a vacuum, and requires some degree of cross-disciplinary cooperation (scholars, type designers, and type design and DTP software developers – Serif, once again, I'm also looking squarely at you, and I suspect my exclusivity agreement doesn't preclude from working on or even receiving royalties from IP), followed by some industry-wide agreement.
Ultimately, the arbiters of any proposed extensions will be Microsoft and Adobe themselves, as they're the ones who created OpenType in the first place (I don't fully understand exactly which company actually controls it, but it seems to be Microsoft). If you want to see how things stand right now, take a gander at the OpenType 1.9.1 Alpha spec page. There's a lot of interesting stuff there, including, incidentally, a new “colr” table for colour fonts…
I would also recommend that @Ash and the team keep an eye on these developments, especially if you think waiting for the final spec to be published is a sensible approach to supporting colour OpenType-SVG fonts in a future version of Affinity.
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On 4/16/2024 at 4:39 PM, William Overington said:
As I understand the situation, due to lots of funding becoming available, Affinity can now become developed further and more rapidly than before.
Are there roles where people currently do not use Affinity products because Affinity products do not do what those people need and who might start to use Affinity products if Affinity products were to add some particular facility to what they do?
For example, unless things have changed recently, Affinity products do not have built-in colour font capability. What employment roles need colour font capability? Would adding colour font capability to Affinity products increase sales to an extent to make the cost of adding colour font capability worth spending?
Or is adding colour font capability something that will be added anyway because not having it looks unfortunate?
That is just one example.
No. I am retired, I am not connected to Canva, my only connection to Serif and Affinity is as a customer.
The best thread to discuss font-related functionality would now be the sub-thread related to the upcoming variable font support in v2.5 beta. IMHO, I would say it is a feature worth adding, because it's something that Adobe offers and is becoming trendier, and could be very popular among big sectors of Affinity's and Canva's userbase.
I provided Ash with a recommendation of one of the best experts in colour OpenType-SVG fonts in Europe – and one used to work in the UK, no less –, so the ball is on their court and let's see just how loaded with cash and willing to expand Serif is now, post-acquisition. I take it that they still have to have a bit of restraint in their recruiting process (be it for full-time employees, contractors or consultants), project management and goals, etc., but we should indeed expect speedier development from now on. The ball is on their court, in any case.
On 4/16/2024 at 6:11 PM, William Overington said:Alright, a localizable version of each of the Affinity programs such that the localization of the menus is using an external localization file.
Interesting as this feature may sound, I highly doubt it will ever be available. It's extremely niche, and might result in quality control issues if lower quality, user-made localisation files ended up on the web. Also, with Affinity potentially becoming bigger, hiring more people for their localisation efforts would render said feature redundant for a lot of communities.
And, if I may say so myself as someone from a minority community of one of top languages globally (Portuguese from Portugal, not Brazilian Portuguese), while it saddens me to see the technical design and typography jargon in pt-PT wither away (I do fight against that by recommending technical dictionaries to my students, mind you), I don't see people defaulting to English on technical software as that dire of an issue when it comes to serving a global market (RTL and Indic script support, on the other hand…). These apps' UIs are usually very sparse on text, and YouTube and the web are chock-full of tutorials using the English terminology anyway. My €0,02.
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2 minutes ago, Alfred said:
Support for Indic scripts (most of which are LTR, although there are some RTL variations) would be yet another game changer.
Wait, v2 is still missing that? 😨
How is Canva doing in that regard? It offers full, web-engine-based support as well already, I presume?
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29 minutes ago, Aurea Ratio said:
Serif is working on a modern version of Fonthill Abbey, but if they don't seriously slow down and correct mistakes, architecture, and refactor a lot, I now truly understand how big the problem is after trying the line width tool in the beta of 2.5.
Well, it is a Beta, after all… 😂
Anyway, thanks for the laugh and the historical architecture trivia, I had never heard of Fonthill Abbey (interesting name, by the way, seeing how variable fonts were always the proverbial hill I was going to die on 🙃)…
Looking at its design, it makes me wonder if it served as an inspiration for the design of Sauron's Barad-dûr, and reading the text, all with the tower collapsing twice before finally being made out of stone and surviving and whatnot, it also reminds me a bit too much of Monty Python and the Holy Grail's Swamp Castle and makes me think it might've also been a true source of inspiration for the latter's troubled development legend… After all, Terry Jones was a historian and, despite having specialised in the Middle Ages, he surely would've been no stranger to that kind of cultural reference. 😉
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On 4/18/2024 at 10:40 AM, Aurea Ratio said:
I agree with you completely, more or less. My question was also more to illustrate my despair.
Agreed. From cringe-worthy to embarrassing and back again. And completely bypassing professionalism and visible market shares in the truly interesting segments of the market. I mean visible, measurable, real, where people outside this forum and the marketing know Affinity, and the programs play a role.
I don't believe so, but the hype created by many without a professional background—especially the numerous online 'reviews' claiming these are Adobe killer programs—has turned the hype into a bunch of bullshit that got out of control, which Serif has ridden without trying to regain control. It seems like it eventually ended with empty words and programs that can't live up to it. If Canva continues with Affinity on this track, then it's definitely not a safe ship.
If Canva doesn't start a professional revolution in Nottingham, then I don't believe the products have a future other than being acquired functionality for Canva, which again are completely irrelevant products for the segment of creatives I'm talking about.
So, I really hope Canva protects Affinity as a suite and elevates it after a thorough self-education on what it takes to break the bubble and improve the programs and reach the customers they've mistakenly believed they were communicating with for years. They missed the mark completely.
And I can see that customers I have had something in common with for a decade have tried to awaken Serif and talk sense into them here. A lot of wasted time for a lot of good people, I hope Canva can make it worthwhile anyway. But I doubt it. Miracles are few and far between, but loud market sellers are just a short distance apart.
Getting Variable Typefaces out, as promised, on next week's beta would be a great sign. Getting colour OpenType-SVG by the end of the v2 cycle or at the beginning of the v3 cycle, an added sign of consolidation on that front. Getting RTL support would be a game-changer market-wise and show that Canva is really serious about this.
I know I sound too hung-up on typography, and I'm obviously biased, but, as I've said before, eschewing entire markets and cultures based on technical constraints and… on having bet mostly on certain text/cultural-agnostic professional niches, such as digital illustration, that are pretty much well covered already by competitors (either by Canva itself, which is no longer a competitor, or by other products such as Pixelmator, Procreate, etc.) feels, in hindsight, a bit misguided but arguably still necessary in that earlier context. I didn't personally like it, but I understood that it was necessary for Serif's Affinity's continued survival. 🤷♂️
Yes, Serif was trying to secure a few of those niches as their cash cows (and indeed sort of succeeded at it) while they were, as it turns out, strapped for cash (or at least not rich enough to properly tackle Adobe). Conversely, with Canva's backing, they can now go head to head with the proverbial 80lb gorilla and start chipping away at their legacy feature set and keep introducing novel features, i.e. they can walk and chew gum for a change instead of dragging on with development.
Again, I know fully well of the Mythical Man-Month fallacy, but it did feel as if Serif was biting more than they could chew, and I do believe that instead of having a tiny team spreading itself thin over three apps on three platforms, having a separate typography team, a separate vector design team, a separate pixel manipulation team, while keeping them tightly-knit – also unlike whatever the hell is going on at Adobe, with their sprawling thousands-strong team and dizzyingly comprehensive family of apps – is not only feasible, but the best way of going about developing a suite like this.
That's the optimistic view, which I know many – including myself – don't 100% subscribe to, but we have to at least consider it as a possible scenario. Does it assuage our fears or preclude us from pursuing asset and portfolio migration plans? Sadly, no. Does it at least provide us with a glimmer of hope that we will not only end up in a better place than we are in right now as DTP suite customers, but also better than we were even back when Macromedia MX was still a thing (i.e. not eleven, but twenty years ago)? Maybe…
By the way, and while on the subject of Macromedia and competition with Adobe in general, Flash and Dreamweaver, which were the main drivers behind the infamous acquisition (remember GoLive? Yeah, me neither 😂), are now relics of the past, but way before all that went down they did try to go head-to-head with Adobe also on the digital photography editing side of things with their Macromedia xRes product, and failed miserably and promptly threw in the towel by their very first and last attempt, v3 (because, mind you, they didn't even develop it in-house, instead having acquired it from Fauve Software, the true pioneers of layers before even Adobe)… Serif, on the other hand, managed to not only stay afloat for all those years with their Plus suite and then produce something competitive with freaking Photoshop v16 (the 25th anniversary, CC 2015 edition, which had been, by then, an actual verb-worthy product for around two decades and a half, and now for around 35 years), and stuck to it; they have to be commended for that.
- SallijaneG and Alfred
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On 4/5/2024 at 6:09 PM, R C-R said:
From a very quick perusal of the Canva site, it would seem they support many different RTL languages, so it is possible this will help with adding RTL support to Affinity.
I guess time will tell ....
Judging by @Patrick Connor's good-humoured reaction to my quip and positive reaction to your insightful comment, one would hope that, if Affinity is to endure as a standalone product or at the very least as an integral, offline and fully professional counterpart to Canva (hey, it wouldn't even bother me if they renamed the apps to Canva Designer, Canva Photo and Canva Publisher at some point, as long as they were still offered in a perpetual license), it should target the same markets as Canva does already.
It makes sense from a financial, but also from a customer relations standpoint, because once many of Canva's current and future users get accustomed to what it is to them vital RTL support, they will naturally expect it from Affinity/the professional branch of Canva as well and might be severely disappointed if it just wasn't there. As such, I fully expect it to become a thing by at least v3, by which point it will be heavily marketed towards current Canva users as having basic feature parity and then some.
On 4/5/2024 at 7:12 PM, debraspicher said:Utilizing in-browser support for its native text support is very different than implementing an entire text engine into software...
Bingo! In the early beginnings, with Affinity being a Mac-only application and having a very modern look and feel to it, it seemed as if Serif was just using macOS's own text rendering stack; it quickly dawned on us all that Affinity had, in fact, an inherently portable engine, which meant it must've been using its own text renderer from the very beginning.
I find it a bit concerning that RTL wasn't considered from the very beginning, as it is absolutely necessary for full Unicode compliance. At this point, almost eleven years in, I would expect Affinity to also offer vertical RTL support for CJK scripts and an equivalent to Adobe's Multiline Composer… I know that is a bit of a lofty ask, but hey, maybe for v3.5? 😉
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4 hours ago, fde101 said:
An important step, but don't discount that color font support is also important.
If not in parallel to variable fonts, please make sure these are not neglected either!
Word. @Ash, if you want me to try and patch Sérgio Martins (former type design engineer at Adobe who worked on the colour SVG version of Carol Twombly's Trajan Pro – incidentally, Adobe's very first colour font) through, hit me up.
Both my PhD supervisor and I have worked with him as co-tutors before, so he's just a phone call away, and if anyone is well-versed in the colour OpenType-SVG font spec, that would be him. Last time I've checked, he's currently freelancing as a type design engineer and only giving the occasional lecture at Reading, so… short of poaching employees straight from Adobe, that's the next best thing. 😉
Just a heads-up: he will most likely charge fees for consultancy, but such is the cost of doing business with experts living in the über-expensive Lisbon metro area, I guess. 🙃
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1 hour ago, 4dimage said:
Variable fonts are a useful addition also with regard to use in web designs.
But there is something strange i found when using the "new" Roboto Condensed from fonts.google.com. I guess this is not a bug, it also appears in the current v2.4.2.
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto+Condensed
For compatibility reasons with current web projects i installed the 18 "static" font styles, not the single variable font itself (RobotoCondensed-VariableFont_wght.ttf).
Here is the test file:
2024-04-19-variable-fonts-roboto-artefacts_1-1.afpub
As soon as a drop shadow or other effects are applied to the text frame, visible artifacts occur depending on the letter.
This doesn't seem to be an affinity bug, but rather due to the way certain letters in variable fonts are constructed. Instead of the usual compound paths, the letters consist of individual shapes that only visually merge into an overall shape through overlapping. Your can see this in the wireframe view even without converting the text frame to pathes.
The problem now seems to be that for certain letters, especially the bottom and top edges, the effects are applied to the internal individual shapes instead of to the entire letter (composite shape). Depending on the font size, this results in “bumpy” outlines.
This doesn't just seem to be a display problem in the editor only. Some of the artifacts are retained even when exporting for the web (PNG, JPEG).
Did the developers also experience such artifacts during the integration of the real variable fonts? Or is this a special case that occurs when a variable font is broken down into individual font styles ("static") for compatibility reasons. Like Google did with the Roboto Condensed variable font.
If the nodes on the outlines have the same coordinates (and in digital typography, especially from quality purveyors like Google, that is usually the case, as current font formats do not support floating point coordinates and, thus, type designers have a habit of zooming in and snapping everything correctly, working with coordinate labels on nodes toggled on to be able to check them at a glance, etc.), it should actually be a bug in Affinity's rasterizer, I'm afraid.
If you don't have access to a font editor like FontLab Studio, you can always convert those into curves and check if their coordinates match. I suppose a workaround could be for you to then add all the resulting shapes into a single one, but it's still a pretty basic bug that shouldn't happen.
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9 minutes ago, EricP said:
Thanks for this feature, it's going to be great
Found an issue when expanding strokes
Oooooh, looks like something straight out of FontLab Studio 5.x…
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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.
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1 hour ago, Bit Disappointed said:
There's so much more than you mention that's missing in Affinity. I haven't been conservative. I've just been unable to use anything but Designer. Like, at all.
The lack of valid accessibility in PDFs alone is a total deal-breaker. Here we're talking about legislation and beyond legislation, basic education and respect for everyone. And the accessibility within Affinity itself is also terrible.
No, there's a long way up to Adobe. It's not just the small against the big story. There are many who have to choose something else due to professional requirements, and others not being able to identify or understand these requirements doesn't change reality.
We're talking about a deficient ecosystem from company to product to output. Not just individual flaws and lacks. There are simply people out there with different needs and expectations for professional software than what people here understand and can comprehend, and until this is recognized and respected by the members of the forum, the full truth about why Affinity didn't "bizarrely" take large market shares won't be known, and so the story about conservatism and Adobe can continue. It's as if many here including Serif don't grasp the world a few steps away from their own desk.
Overall, the manic focus on Adobe annoys me. There are other big companies, and their products also exude professionalism whether you like them or not. They have delivered and gained insight into the customers' needs and workflows due to real contact with them.
Conservatism is also about clinging to the same narrative of victimhood.
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. 😂
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1 hour ago, R C-R said:
I suppose so, but even if Affinity abandoned whatever plans Ash hinted about being developed for the apps back in B.C. (Before Canva) times & Canva suddenly ceased to exist, continued aggressive development of AI tools of the type widely considered to be a threat to professionals of all types will not stop.
So I think the best we can hope for is some sort of legislation being enacted in the UK, US, Australia, & so on to put limits on how those tools can be used.
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.
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11 hours ago, wiredfractal said:
So no priority for privacy of your users? Knowing Canva, they like tracking what every user does on their platform.
I still remember when you removed the google tracker on the welcome banner page on the app because it has no value for the users. I guess that's going back and much much worst.
I am still not sold out with this pledge. Once you place any trackers on any of your app, I'm completely out of this platform.
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?).
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31 minutes ago, pixelstuff said:
Two years. Microsoft said they will discontinue support for MS Publisher in October 2026 and no longer include the app in their Microsoft 365 suite.
It is possible the only users of MS Publisher won't bother or try to cram the work into Word, but who knows. Some might start looking for a low cost replacement.
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.
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4 minutes ago, pixelstuff said:
With any luck Affinity might pick up a few new customers in a couple years when Microsoft discontinues their MS Publisher application.
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.
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10 hours ago, R C-R said:
So then is it fair to say that to you "the bottom" has something to do with too much focus on AI tools? If so, then if Affinity adds few if any AI tools would you consider it out of this race to the bottom, so to speak?
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.
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9 hours ago, R C-R said:
What can you point to that is any substantive evidence that Affinity is or will somehow be ensnared in a race to the bottom, & what specifically do you mean by "the bottom"?
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.
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20 minutes ago, debraspicher said:
Same. I'm an optimist in many ways in my own living, but as far as software and the ways of the world, I save my energy for productive things and try to lead life with common sense. Common sense is that change is the only constant. I believe generally in my own capabilities at this point and whatever happens, I will adapt.
That said, I really hope that the team that does remain, whether they stay or go, find some meaningful way to take the critical energies we spent here and put them to some good use. That's the most I ever expected, tbqh.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. 😂
- debraspicher and Patrick Connor
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On 3/31/2024 at 6:38 PM, R C-R said:
In what way do you see any Canva product competing with any of the Affinity apps?
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:
QuoteDate: 20th June 2013, 19:45 (UTC+0)
To: pr@serif.com
Subject: Serif vs. Adobe
Greetings!
I am a young freelancer designer from Portugal, and currently an Adobe CS5 Design Standard user, who was actually mulling over an upgrade to CS6.
However, the May 6th [2013] announcement by Adobe of the EOL status for Creative Suite products and its perpetual licences made me seriously reconsider my plans, both regarding that CS6 acquisition and beyond, and start looking at alternatives.
I began by investigating open-source offerings (namely Gimp, Inkscape and Scribus), but none of them fit my needs; Gimp can't handle large and 16-bit files like Photoshop does and doesn't even have full CMYK support, Inkscape runs under XQuartz (an X11 environment, which constitutes a serious usability hindrance) and doesn't support Pantone CMS due to licensing issues, and Scribus, while partially native, features the most hideous interface done in Qt (if that wasn't bad enough, it's useless down to the keyboard shortcuts, omitting essential time-savers like InDesign's Command/Ctrl+arrow kerning and tracking adjustment shortcuts) and doesn't support even the most basic OpenType features.
Compounded, these factors are enough to make these applications an absolute no-go, but even if those basic features were supported, the interface inconsistencies among them alone make open-source a terrible choice, money savings notwithstanding.
For replacing InDesign, QuarkXPress seemed at first to be, technically speaking, the best choice for me, as I already had some experience with it a few years ago while studying design at my faculty; however, I didn't own a version then, as it was way too expensive (and still is) [2024 edit: and still is, 11 years on!], so I can't benefit from their special (and limited) universal upgrade offer.
As for the rest of the suite, Corel also seemed to be the most obvious choice; however, not only Corel Graphics Suite doesn't include a dedicated DTP component akin to InDesign or QuarkXPress, it only runs on Windows (though there was a half-decent Mac port of Corel Graphics Suite 11 available in 2003) and is not that much more affordable.
Eventually, I came across your website, which looks very nicely done indeed (with your own tools, I'd venture to guess), and was positively impressed by your feature comparison charts. While I'm sure there would be some features I'd miss, it looks like a serious and, most importantly, cohesive and complete contender, at a killer price. Alas, it suffers from the same flaw, by default, as Corel's: lack of native Mac OS X support.
Oh, while on that subject, I should point this out: PagePlus is also missing baseline grids (and, apparently, “align by prioritary object” and “distribute” functions); this has been mentioned more than once in feature request lists, and is a blatant (and easily fixed, I'm guessing) flaw – yes, it's more of a bug than a simple omission, as any serious designer or finisher would tell you – that absolutely (and I can't stress this enough) must be fixed in order for it to be taken seriously in the professional marketplace. I'm deeply sorry in advance for being cheeky and/or patronising about it but, on that regard, you should either hire a few professional designers as consultants or, in the very least, buy a copy of Müller Brockmann's Grid Systems or even John Kane's Type Primer. Fortunately, it seems you don't need to get Robert Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style anymore, as you've already nailed styles and OpenType support.
[2024 edit: I'm no longer really sorry, as I'm now a PhD student and MA teacher, and would expect nothing less from the purveyors of the software I and my colleagues and students rely upon than I expect from my actual, 21-year-old students in their Typography exercises, essays and tests, and this is still an ongoing thing because not only did it take more than SIX YEARS and an acquisition by Canva for a serious commitment to basic typography features such as Variable Font support – those are two different threads that could and should've been merged, mind you, and we're still waiting on a word on the also basic RTL support, essential on a global market that a company HQed at the head of the Commonwealth, a country with such a strong tradition in non-Latin script type design at the venerable University of Reading, should absolutely be catering to 10 years in –, we now offer UX/Interaction Design MA degrees and I suspect those students would also have identified and fixed many of my longstanding gripes with the container-based artboards/layers/objects model. But hey, Serif did get OpenType support right even by V1, so… have yourselves a cookie and a pat on the back, I guess? Sadly, I'm never forgetting nor forgiving the indefensible feature segmentation entailed by the omission of baseline grids on any professional application where there's a text box/frame tool, which is still a thing to this day, or the nonchalant and at times outright disrespectful way such a view was treated here in the forums; I did mention our “Gridnik Bible” – in bold, above – 11 years ago and that was, is, and forever will be the hill I'm willing to rot on.]
I am, in this time of uncertainty regarding my professional tools (and future!), genuinely sad to see that you, the purveyors of such a generally fine range of creative software, do not even acknowledge the scores of disgruntled and potentially soon-to-be-ex-CS users, both from the Windows PC and Mac camp alike, nor the Mac OS X platform in your FAQ or anywhere else on your website, and seem to be a bit out of touch with the deepest needs of serious professionals; may I remind you that cross-platform compatibility and attention to detail mostly explain Adobe's dominance (excluding their monopolistic practice of buying out competitors, evidently)?
As such, on behalf of them and myself, I endorse you a plea for support, and a personal commitment; I'll buy any necessary components for my trade (PagePlus, DrawPlus and PhotoPlus) in a heartbeat (I should point out, while on the subject of price, that I plunked down roughly €300 for an Education version of CS5, so paying €277 for a full, professional licence – even if I had to invest in some advanced .PDF conversion tool by Nuance or any other developer so as to replace Adobe Acrobat Pro – seems perfectly reasonable), as soon as you have a Mac version available and baseline grid customization and alignment support. Heck, I'd even run it temporarily under Windows in a virtualization environment if you committed upfront to port it!
I am sure I'm not alone in this sentiment; there are now more than 33.000 subscribers to a petition against the Creative Cloud subscription (see https://www.change.org/petitions/adobe-systems-incorporated-eliminate-the-mandatory-creative-cloud-subscription-model for details), many of them from the UK and the rest of Europe (where Adobe's price-gouging is especially blatant), and an increasingly number of which are Mac users. I do realize how big of a financial investment doing a Mac port would represent for you, but I suggest you invest seriously in a marketing effort targeted at CS users and conduct a poll of your own, a crowdfunding initiative, you name it, so you may assess its feasibility.
The market is ripe for any move that breaks Adobe's monopolistic stranglehold on it; now is your time to shine. As a young professional on the verge of chucking 10 years of self-training out of the window, I'd take this occasion to quote Churchill: “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty”… I consider myself an optimist and, as such, I'm now faced with the opportunity to switch from an abusive software provider to a hopefully more endearing one; you, on the other hand, have the opportunity to win over a loyal customer (plus some of the other 33.000+ of them, ripe for the taking), as difficult an undertaking as that might be.
Sincerely,
João GomesSuffice 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. 😂
- debraspicher, wiredfractal and iuli
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A localizable version of each of the Affinity programs such that the localization of the menus is using an external localization file
in Feedback for the Affinity V2 Suite of Products
Posted
Bingo! Even across different countries (hence me mentioning pt-PT vs. pt-BR) technical jargon can vary, and you'd need at least one expert consultant and one translator (or, ideally, someone who can do both) for each language…
Regarding automatic translation, I've seen such stupidity on apps distributed by large companies that I suspect many didn't get the memo yet, but I hope they will after getting enough user feedback. Just yesterday I fired a string of five or six support tickets to Leroy Merlin (it's like a big French hardware store chain with locations across all of Europe), because their Enki home automation control app is full of bugs, and one of the last ones, pertaining to their deplorable translation efforts (complete with entire paragraphs in English on the very support ticket submission webform), was focused on this pearl: the usage of the Portuguese word “Perto”, which means “close” as in “nearby”, for the “Close” button, instead of the correct and standard verb “Fechar” in the infinitive. Interestingly, the app was, I suspect, done by French coders, but they must've standardised in English, because “Fermer”, the unambiguous conjugation of the same verb in French, would never translate into “Perto”… But that just goes to show how you just can't rely exclusive in “AI” (it's not true AGI, it's just LLMs, and LLMs are just mass plagiarising machines with some PR and advertising lipstick on them).