JGD
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Posts posted by JGD
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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.
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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. 😂
- wiredfractal, debraspicher and iuli
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2 hours ago, henryanthony said:
This thread has gone off topic. Can it be it has run its course?
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.
- henryanthony and Alfred
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On 3/30/2024 at 1:29 AM, SrPx said:
I'm curious... One of our Australian forum members, MikeV, discards this possibility, due to Canva's HQ happening to be in Sydney, Australia, and how Australian regulators are tending to deal with this sort of thing there :
" Adobe takeover
One of the concerns raised in this thread is the potential for Adobe to buy Canva – given the mood and direction of Australian competition regulators I think this is so unlikely that it does not figure in my calculations. "
After what has happened with Figma (Adobe tried to acquire it recently), apparently this is not such an automatic thing to expect, these days. There are some articles about it :
https://www.afr.com/technology/no-one-can-buy-canva-now-other-start-ups-beware-20231220-p5esr8Edit: Ouch, sorry. It seems that article is partially behind a paywall... I could read it completely, but it seems for some reason it only shows up full when searching some stuff in Google, not accessing it directly... (I am not familiar with that site, BTW). But one of the key points of it is that Australian companies have it pretty hard to do such operation now, due to regulation (what MikeV described).
What I am finding more in Google goes more in the lines of several sources expecting more of a competition from Canva against Adobe, grabbing more market from Adobe in the low, to low-mid end. Obviously Adobe will keep non challenged in the very high end, not just as its apps are immensely more advanced and professional, but -almost more important- because many industries (not only the game and film industries) have their pipelines, workflows, custom solutions, trained teams, tightly tied to Adobe. But a huge pie of the market is the low end (175 millions of users in Canva is no small thing) and part of a bit higher tier.
Even more the case when our skills are less and less needed (and I can't understand why people don't realize that this is the biggest danger for artists, designers, photographers, etc, but not just from Canva, but any apps with full AI art and design generation, like MidJourney , Dall-E, etc), so, the low end users can finally do a lot of work without our services (in Canva, and similar solutions), and then, the "pie" that canva can grab is significantly bigger than what it was the potential Canva's user base before. WAY more the case if they start implementing Affinity's tech inside Canva solutions (to an extent... I don't see a lot of their user base getting super technical! It's not that profile), and also keeping the branch of Affinity's standalone suite. As in, I think it aspires to way more than the social media graphics and fast stuff for marketing people and small business owners saving bucks on designers and artists that it was its market till now. This challenges a large chunk of Adobe's user base. And from what I am digging out there, it seems I was not the only one suspecting that Canva's thing is not to be bought, but to compete with the giant, as at this point, well, it's a giant itself and it has a lot to win.I am not saying this to challenge your opinion. I am genuinely curious about all this matter, and I might be wrong, as I'm just barely reading about these things now, pretty ignorant in finances stuff, and English is not my first language, but seems to be there quite a bunch of articles supporting this theory and right now I am not finding anything suggesting the possibility of an Adobe--> Canva buyout. But who knows.
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. 🤷♂️
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On 3/30/2024 at 2:40 AM, R C-R said:
OK, but how realistic is to compare what Adobe did to Freehand to what people fear Canva will do to Affinity? Canva has no reason to kill Affinity because unlike Adobe they do not have any products that compete with Affinity.
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. 🤷♂️
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On 3/28/2024 at 11:38 AM, Patrick Connor said:
I cannot allow this to stand. Gary Bates and Jim Bryce were both very long term employees in Sales and Development for well over 20 years long before they took on Director roles. They dedicated their careers to both the Serif Legacy range and the Affinity range. Please stop this
@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! 😬
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On 3/28/2024 at 11:43 AM, Amontillado said:
I hope there's a hidden message in all this from Canva. Despite the extreme negativity, this forum continues public visibility. I hope that means Canva is willing to give customer complaints due attention.
If Canva hasn't gotten the word about how subscriptions would impact their market, they are completely hopeless.
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.
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7 minutes ago, jonnyblasticles said:
Nicely said. Affinity presented itself not just as another design suite but as an answer to Adobes corporate ethos and monopoly. Knowing Canva, I don't think that its too much of a stretch to imagine Adobe simply acquiring them after just to shut down the competition or merging Affinity's features into its own products or Canva into something like XD or Figma
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…
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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.
- Alfred, grix and Mithferion
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in Affinity on Desktop Questions (macOS and Windows)
Posted
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.
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.