JGD

Yep. This is precisely the way I use global layers in InDesign. I have one layer for backgrounds, one layer for text frames, one layer for images (in those rare cases when they aren't linked to anchors, of course), one layer for static graphic elements, etc. I find it really helps a lot in keeping things tidy and protecting objects even when editing master pages.

Just a quick question (and I have a nagging feeling this has been already answered elsewhere, but please bear with me): is this global layer system being made available in Designer as well? It's an absolute must in Publisher, way more than in Designer, but for website interface mockup projects (which are kind of like “interactive/digital DTP files”, if you think about it) on the latter it would be a godsend (in fact, I mentioned as much on an earlier feature request I made for just that feature).

Yes. you're absolutely right. I have nothing but good experiences with and a good impression of Serif. Case in point: I know their decision of eschewing the PPP converter was a very hard one to make, but even that one was made as gracefully as possible considering the circumstances. Regarding the roadmap, my bad. It slipped my mind. Now that you mention it, I believe I've read something to that effect before, yes. That was to be expected anyway; the competition is utterly fierce (have you noticed how Ai CC has ripped off a lot of features from AD? Yeah…), and they've always been as tight-lipped as they can. It's a delicate balance, but I feel they've reached it, and releasing the Publisher beta at all was also a great step. Even if the lack of two or three critical features may have disappointed me and other users, at least it's no longer that elusive software unicorn, that black box of sorts. And let's be fair to the team: hard as those features may be to implement, at least there's only a couple of them missing. Provided they prioritise them and properly reconcile their roadmap and its dependencies with said readjustment, I'm confident it'll take them a few months and not an entire year to get to a palatable (if a bit “road-to-Abilene-ish”) piece of release-quality software. And then I can go back at pestering them about other features which I also desperately want for a lot of my work but which ID also sorely lacked for years (like, say, multiple page spreads, which I'm hoping they'll implement in a more elegant fashion than on InDesign, especially when it comes variable page sizes – an extremely common use case on folded leaflets, which always must have a narrower leaf on the inside, and on book cover spines and flaps) and to which I've always managed to find acceptable workarounds back in the day.

So do I. But it begs the question: depending on how long it will take between v.1.something (.9? .10? Will Affinity point updates be anything like macOS versions and reach double digits?), as in, the final Affinity 1.x version, and Affinity v.2.0, wouldn't it be preferable to just skip Publisher v.1.7 altogether (while still activating the entire Persona situation for further testing, perhaps even between the APub beta and the GM Designer and Photo versions) and deliver a more universally acceptable v.1.8 or v.1.9 instead? It's not like the users interested in it would skip it and just wait for v.2.0 (especially considering that it would pay for itself after just a few months of skipping a CC subscription, with the added bonus that they'd get to keep it forever afterwards ). There is a lot of pent-up demand, and unless Serif is extremely cash-strapped (and it doesn't seem to be the case; finally having the Windows versions out must be going great, and the insanely performant iPad Pro must also be a huge boon to their business), it would make much more sense to keep most of the users as happy as possible. Also, they could un-Osborne themselves by giving us an ETA for v.2.0. Anyway, even without it, and judging by how long Publisher has taken to even reach beta-quality (and while I have no use for it right now, it's certainly more stable and polished than the internal beta, I'll give them that) and by how we've not even seen the branding or mission statement for the much-rumoured and probably business-critical DAM component, I'm guessing it will be a fairly long time (1-2 years at least). Even if v.2.0 came out soon after a near-final and fully functional v.1.x Publisher version, I'd still feel less mad about that than if I paid for an incomplete piece of software, because as at least I'd have something to show for it right away and forever. Also, if I were to pay for a manifestly incomplete version of an app, only to realise that in order to get it to a functional state I'd have to pay again shortly after for a v.2.0 version because further feature updates would cease for v.1, I'd feel doubly duped. As such, if Serif can't dial back their marketing (and I guess they can't do so without devaluing their brand, unless they launched a “Publisher Lite” or something), they'd be better off either delaying v.2 of the entire suite or skipping v.1.x altogether and going straight to Publisher v.2.0. They should really do the math carefully, as any damage to the perception of one component of the suite may affect the entire thing. Anyway, this would predictably always be an issue with Publisher v.1.7/x (and, to a certain extent, with Photo), unless Serif is also planning to release v.2.x of each app in a staggered fashion. I don't know how Personas and file cross-compatibility would factor into that, though, so maybe they will keep Photo and Designer in a bit of a stasis (they already feel a bit like that when it comes to hard features; we've been getting mostly bug fixes and silent enhancements lately, and Designer betas are ever-so-elusive when compared with either Publisher and Photo betas, which is a definite sign of maturity) while they “complete” Publisher. I'm betting more on that scenario, because it would further put them on par with CS/CC (and I'm still referring to CS because Adobe royally duped people, too; they keep releasing major, yearly CS versions in disguise and point updates just as they did before; in fact, Serif's update philosophy is more Adobe-y than even Adobe practices it – if they do so at all, that is); maybe their updates would not be as predictable or regular, but at least their versioning would certainly be as straightforward.

Yep. That's exactly my point of view as well. I use whatever software is good for the task at hand; I've been using Affinity Designer for CMYK and RGB gradients, as they look[ed?] much better than Adobe's shoddy implementation, and have this nifty little test file set up with spot colour gradients and transparencies to periodically check how far along the Serif team is on their support thereof (I am happy to say they are progressing well, though they're not quite just there, yet). Absolutely true. I know Serif developers, like any other, are only human. Maybe it was too soon, or maybe it wasn't. Gmail was in beta for years on end, and nobody complained; many Rev.A Apple products, like the Apple Watch or the original iPhone, revolutionary as they may be, are a bit like “paid hardware betas”, as they miss some critical functionality found elsewhere because the developer decided to focus on, you know, revolutionising things and didn't have enough time to add those features (like, say, copy and paste and, rather more dramatically in the grand scheme of things, third-party apps [!!!]). Affinity Publisher, to me, seems like a proof-of-concept of sorts. It may work for a subset of prosumer users, and make them extremely happy. My only fear is with what kind of PR Serif will get once ruthless reviewers get their teeth into the GM release, because let's not beat around the bush here: Publisher is way behind the competition than Photo or Designer ever were, even in their respective beta stages, for the very simple and unavoidable fact that DTP apps are much more complex than bitmap and vector editors (or much harder to get to a level of functionality that makes most people happy), because they are extremely dependent on workflows and automation, as you've just mentioned. incidentally, a cursory look at the forums reveals that besides master pages, the other two most requested features are GREP-like search (and styles) and anchored objects, and I'd say the absence of any of those features in isolation (especially master pages and anchored objects; GREP is arguably a power-user feature which even those who do have a need for it only do so occasionally) would be damning enough, and their combined absence would be utterly catastrophic from a PR, conventional and word-of-mouth marketing standpoint. I am adamant in my view that Serif is being lulled into a false sense of security by their past experience with Photo and Designer users… Yes, people can make those decisions, and they may also revisit those decisions. But we shouldn't forget that Serif isn't putting out these apps to the world at large in complete isolation, and that first impressions matter, especially when it comes to impulse purchases and to the distinct possibility that there may be current Photo and Designer users who might not be paying attention to the forums or review sites, only to the Mac and iOS App Stores, and might end up sorely disappointed. It's already bad enough that many (if not most) Page Plus users are a bit mad at the fact that they will likely never get a first-party conversion tool for their old files; making CC switchers feel defrauded as well would basically alienate or otherwise irk the rest (and, by all accounts, the majority) of their potential future user base. If the guys at Serif can cut their losses, they should absolutely wait to get these two/three features right. And while I can appreciate that dependencies may be an issue… maybe they'll just have to live with it and rethink their roadmap accordingly. And yes, if they have to drop other less crucial features from the v.1.x roadmap, so be it. Interesting angle. It's certainly one way to work around the issue. As for me, seeing how I work mostly in graphic and editorial design, that's really not an option. I frequently have to reopen old stuff and repurpose it… I am, however, very adept at redoing layouts. It's a bit of a PITA but, as long as the rest of the work is fairly automated, I'm good. Which is decidedly not Publisher's case. Otherwise, I'd already have repurposed some of my old layouts, “just in case” [my next commission(s) arrived in time of v.1.7.0 GM]. I guess maybe next year…? Two years from now? Who knows, really, because their roadmap is still not entirely clear. What I do know is that if I were to include the extra hours to get the same job done in Publisher, they would come out as more expensive as the CC subscription, and I'd probably have to redo them anyway once the final, proper functionality was in place; seeing how I can just use ID CS5 instead of either option, why would I even bother with any of that? What also personally irks me is the fact that from the moment Serif releases Publisher in a grossly incomplete form (if that does indeed come to pass, and I'm seriously hoping it doesn't), I'll be, for the first time in years, “out of the loop” so to speak. I feel like I am a valuable member of this community, and would've liked to have given more useful feedback much, much sooner (in fact, I was given a rare, privileged chance to do so and wasn't up to the challenge for personal reasons), but I just can't bring myself up to be a paying guinea pig. Not even my slow-as-molasses Apple Watch Series 0 is as frustrating a piece of tech than… having to take 10x longer to do basic work tasks, even just in a strictly QA scenario as a beta-tester. Do you now see where I'm coming from? I feel a bit duped by Serif, honestly, because Photo and Designer raised my expectations through the roof (as I've said here on the forums before, ironically enough, Serif's past success is also their biggest enemy, and the reasons are two-fold; it may induce hubris on their part and, as it just so happened with me, raise their users' expectations unrealistically), and the whole extended wait certainly didn't help. Now that we know the bigger picture, well… I'm no longer nervously and eagerly anticipating it; just sorely disappointed. I'm just asking the Serif team not to compound that with the added insult to injury of making me choose between paying for useless tech or being left even further out of the loop. I'd basically have to constantly peruse the forums, or run trial after trial on a guest account/virtual machine or some other stupid shenanigans just to check if the bare essentials were there and if it was finally worth the money, instead of just outright buying a useful app on day one, make use of it and update it in frequently to check if any more “nice-to-have” bells and whistles were added.

+1 for colour separation preview here too. And since there's a lot of code shared across Affinity apps, please make it available in Affinity Designer as well (maybe also even in Photo? Can you do duotone/indexed colour documents in Photo already? If so, separation preview might make some sense there as well)… While it's not as critical an omission, it can still be very useful in some projects and shouldn't add too much bloat. Also, it might allow us to no longer depend on Acrobat Pro; in fact, if we could just reimport printing press .PDF rips in Publisher without doing any colour conversion shenanigans and just check them in there, that would be golden.

Well, I'm not saying that you can't do decent-looking booklets in your own laser or inkjet printer without having read 10 different typography manuals and/or completed a BFA in design. What I am saying, and you can't exactly counter that, is that Serif is indeed marketing Affinity squarely towards professionals. Not towards prosumers, and most certainly not towards amateurs. As per Affinity's “About” page: ( https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/about/ ) So, I am not just dreaming this up, now, am I? And, last time I checked, 16 bit CMYK, along with PANTONE spot colour support, etc., are precisely the kind of features which set their apps apart from “amateurish”/utopian packages with sometimes extremely dubious UX design like the F/OSS Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus, etc., and supposedly put them squarely on par with Adobe CC (yes, with some features missing, but mostly the bloat and cruft added over the years and not the bare essentials). If they want that claim to be mostly an inspirational thing, fill their software front and centre with user-friendly tools (not necessarily wizards) which cater mostly to prosumers and reap massive financial rewards in the process, more power to them. But that shouldn't – nay, cannot, lest they just end up doing false advertisement, which is a big no-no in the UK – preclude them from staying true to their claim, by either adding those advanced tools in a more covert fashion (those multi-level partially expandable/collapsible palettes in Adobe CS/CC are a good example, and it seems those collapsible sub-sections, like the ones found in the Character and Paragraph Studio panels, are serving a similar purpose to a certain extent), or by outright splitting their apps between a Pro and an “Elements/Express” variant. I certainly wouldn't mind paying between 50% and 100% more for Publisher if that meant that I got something along the “barely usable” to “near feature-parity with InDesign/QXP” spectrum; as it stands, right now, I can't even envision buying v.1.7.0 at all, because I will have no good use for it, and that was decidedly not the case when it came to even the earliest (and buggiest!) Designer and Photo betas. Yes, they were missing some very useful functionality, but I could still quickly whip up a logo or retouch a photo with them instead of having to launch my crusty ol' Ai or PS if I really wanted (and, in fact, I even used either the betas or some very early versions – as in pre-v.1.4.x, which, IIRC, was a pretty big overhaul – for production work, namely to make .PDF and .JPG assets to place into InDesign documents). And, as I've said many times here before, I'm not some exotic editorial designer; I do mostly rather mundane stuff like event programmes, really (do check my LinkedIn page to get a sense of it; simple as it may look, it would still be a pain to do in Publisher, as it has loads of narrow text columns, text decoration, floating linked elements, etc.). Just my €0,02…

I'm happy to know about it (and to believe I may have had a bit of a hand in that, too). Let's wait and see… I know many here will hate me for saying this, but I'd rather experience another little or even not-so-little delay and see them get it right at v.1.7.0 GM and avoid a fallout with pedants like myself. I know that from my posts I may come across as a perverse, Schadenfreude-filled Nostradamus-like figure, but I really, really want these guys to succeed no matter what. It's not that I hate CC or love Affinity per se, but I've been royally pissed at Adobe ever since they've bought Macromedia and killed off Freehand, it's only gotten worse throughout the years, I also like the idea of owning my work, and I know for a fact that there are a lot of people who share that sentiment (and while some of them don't, that's just because they weren't exposed to the alternatives yet, because true Adobe fanboys are rare; once they find out about it, they'll love the idea). Doing it in modern, multi-dimensionally cross-platform apps (let's not forget about the iPad! Maybe we'll get Publisher for iOS too, one day?) is just the icing on the cake. Interesting. I never worked with QXP to the point that I had to import text from clients and deal with different text standards. I stopped working with it before finishing my BFA, as InDesign became all the rage meanwhile, and now I have to deal with MS Word files because my tech-illiterate clients just can't be arsed to use something better; their formatting is as good as useless and I basically have to reformat everything myself, thus wasting time and risking further typos. From a cursory look at Quark's documentation, it kind of looks like John Gruber's Markdown language… By the way, while we're talking about that, what can you say about TeX and LaTeX editors and formats? From what little I know, those are supposedly used as an end-to-end alternative to WYSIWYG DTP apps and the scourge of MS Word, but surely there must be advantages to combining those with our DTP packages, especially for more graphically complex layouts which also involve science-y stuff, no?

Yep. I am a very hardcore shortcut user, and when I'm a few months without picking up InDesign I'll also forget some basic stuff. Line-, frame- and page-breaking hidden characters being another family of shortcuts I consistently forget about. Maybe I'm just getting old. Still, that doesn't excuse those idiots at Adobe from not showing the corresponding keyboard shortcuts on the Type > Insert Break Character menu; it's almost as if they were purposefully trying to make their software harder to use, thus forcing me to google something that should be two mouse clicks away as per Apple's HIG. It boggles the mind!

The important thing to get right is where does text/content come from and where does it go to. QuarkXPress has (had? I stopped using it at v.6) these “to” and “from” source and destination linking boxes in the corners of master pages, which are the epitome of doing things “by hand”, so to speak. Back when I started using it, InDesign surprised me in the way it handles it automagically. You only have to link frames across your spread, and the text otherwise automatically flows from the last column in the spread to the first column in the next page, regardless of it being a different master, a manually set up page, or whatever; the same goes for spreads with mixed masters, IIRC. And when you apply a different master to a page already populated with content, the content is also preserved but reflows into that master, if I'm not mistaken. Conceptually, it messes a bit with my way of doing things, but much like Smart Guides (before which I'd just create a crapload of guidelines and make my vector work in Freehand and Illustrator extremely hard to navigate), in practice it works extremely well. I honestly never did any layout with two different tracks of text (as in, say, a fully bilingual layout), so I'm not entirely sure how you'd do one in either InDesign or Quark. But I'm sure they already solved that issue, and it's one of those things where Serif devs must have the humility of taking a page from their book (ha! ) if they got it right and did it elegantly enough. No matter how you slice it, if Publisher is to be taken seriously by professionals, it must be usable in those scenarios, and by “usable” I mean quick and functional. Of course I could redo most, if not all, of my past work in Publisher and have it print beautifully. It's just that I'd want to gouge my own eyeballs out and bite my own hands off in the end of the process.

Yes, they are, indeed. But if you can't use them for content holders (i.e. frames), they are next to useless when it comes to [controlled] automation (which Publisher seems to want to do it in its own alternative and limited way by automatically creating text frames outside of the masters). That's the entire point of my rant(s). The fact that you can have your guidelines in your master pages only automates half of the process. If you still have to create your text frames by hand, because you can't flow stuff into the frames you created inside of your master pages, naïvely thinking you could use them, and do it more than 600 times because your layout is too complex for automatic frame creation, suddenly you're better off paying for a CC subscription. Being able to place content into master page objects is so, so, so extremely basic that not having it is a non-starter. Maybe it's hard to get the entire ancillary stuff (like how and where to allow users to manually override objects, like I've mentioned) right and in an elegant fashion, but that should be Serif's #1 priority right now. Period. It's better to have an app that works 100% in manual mode, than an app that tries to do the work for you but doesn't allow you to do things manually at all. Especially an app marketed to CC switchers. Prosumers, i.e. aspirational users, should be an extra, even if they make up the biggest swath of the market; if actual professionals, the influencers in the equation, eschew it, Affinity will just devolve into Corel Graphics Suite v2 or Serif Plus v2 all over again (as in, that versatile but niche thing – mostly at the low end of the market – Adobe users frown upon), instead of becoming Macromedia MX v2 (what we all want it to be, I'm guessing; a serious and beloved contender that will fill the void left by Adobe's monopolistic practices). Affinity is just doing a balancing act right now, and it can go both ways. A grossly incomplete Publisher and the scathing reviews that will ensue may just tip it over to the wrong side.

Yep. Regarding master page object overrides, I've always thought that InDesign was extremely convenient, yes, but completely unintuitive at the same time… That entire voodoo of pressing a weird key combination to override a specific object (there seriously should be the option to just right-click the damn things and unlock them, just like in Apple Keynote), then not really knowing from which point will they become completely unlinked – if ever –, and finally having duplicate objects when reapplying master pages has always left me a bit confused. Even to this day, I sometimes get confused at the results, yes, and I have 10+ years of experience with it. Surely there must be a more elegant way of doing things. However, that still doesn't change the fact that the “master page” convention exists and that Serif tried to implement it. From the moment they did so, they should at least keep it fairly consistent with and as useful as in competing programs. Master pages aren't just used for adding a background veneer of decoration, which seems to be the only thing they're good for in Publisher as of now; they actually serve an extremely important purpose when it comes to layout design and content management, which Publisher is trying to fulfil elsewhere, altogether sidelining master pages. I completely understand where they are trying to get, and which users they are targeting (people who really don't get how master pages work but may not even need them to the full extent of their functionality). And that is completely fine; you can allow for many different workflows with no ill effects on UX design. But a professional app, right now, Publisher is not because it is lacking a core feature (I cannot stress this enough, so I'll say it again: proper master page support in a DTP editor is as essential as layer support in a pixel editor). And I'm not saying that Serif's implementation has to mimic Adobe's to a tee, absolutely not. But the equivalent functionality must be there, because comparisons will be made, whether we like it or not. As for the whole layer vs. artboard conundrum in Affinity Designer, which Serif brought upon themselves, that itself warranted (and still warrants) an entire thread. There should be at least the option to have document-level layers and not have them be always artboard-dependent, and also allow for certain (or all?) objects to transcend artboards and be fully visible outside them. The fact that you can't choose which model to use, or have them both, boxes you into Serif's philosophy. Maybe their way of thinking is best for illustrators, but I can assure you that for UX design (a very big market for them right now), it's absolutely terrible. I used Designer to do a website mock-up, and that entire layer situation frustrated me to no end…

My bad, it completely skipped my mind. I could and maybe will link to the relevant topics, but I can give you a quick rundown of its shortcomings: • Lack of in-line and anchored objects (having to reposition hundreds of objects by hand just because they won't reflow along with the text would be, to put it mildly, an infuriating chore); • Lack of master page object/content override (especially for placing text), which is downright insane (yes, I know you can use your layout to automatically populate new pages with new text frames; but do you really have any fine control over them after the fact at the master page level? I think not… Comparatively speaking, it's almost as if Serif was shipping Affinity Photo v.1.0 without support for layers); • Lack of multiline composer (but this one I was already expecting, as the Serif team was completely upfront about it since the whole suite was announced; it is kind of sad that we may have to wait several years until Serif comes up with anything similar, but that wouldn't preclude us from doing technical manuals and ragged-right justified compositions, which are extremely popular anyway). Affinity apps still have some shortcomings when it comes to spot colour transparency and gradients (they have a tendency to convert them into CMYK), too, but according to my latest tests with the Designer betas they are on the right track, which makes me happy and optimistic about the future. I'd also love to see them fully conform to the PostScript spec and allow for seamless copying and pasting between Designer and digital type design editors like FontLab or Glyphs, but I'm not holding my breath, as I know that's a niche within a niche within a niche. However, I'll test that use case every now and then and ask for improvements if need be; if they came to pass, I'd no longer be dependent upon Illustrator for almost anything when it comes to vector editing and Ai/PDF-to-.glyphs/OTF conversion, but my long-term plan is to convert my type designer partner(s) and students to a generic vector editor-free and end-to-end digital type design editor workflow anyway, so no biggie there. I can, then, basically use Ai CS5 to convert old modular fonts my partner and I have lying around and perform the odd auto-trace (which Affinity Designer still lacks and probably will for a few years anyway), so I'm already covered. Great response, thanks! Well, I fully concur. I don't want another “InDesign 2.0”… But there are some basic conventions that are best left untouched. For simpler projects and less demanding users, sure, I'm all for options and for having your software work for you from the get-go, but I – and most pros – absolutely need to have finer control over my layouts at the master page level and have those changes reflect upon the entire document. The workflows currently suggested are, for lack of a nicer term, completely broken in my view. If they are good enough for you, great, more power to you. I just know for a fact that I couldn't reproduce most of my older projects in Publisher in its current form without it taking me 10 times longer, even excluding the time it would take me to redo the masters. And seeing how time is money… it'd still be cheaper to pay for a CC subscription, I'm afraid. Just my €0,2.

Oh, I am not doubting that in the least. As an InDesign user I can tell t's… an apparently easier to use InDesign. It sure looks nice, and for someone coming from Photo or Designer – and I'm guessing many PP users are already transitioning from Photo Plus and Draw Plus to them, so leaving PP to its shiny new successor is the logical next step –, it will have a softer learning curve than going to, say, InDesign or QuarkXPress. As for the latter, i.e. hardcore DTP users, I hope I am wrong enough that Serif doesn't take a huge hit, but right enough that they take notice. And to that I have to add that… there's a lot of user feedback in specific threads voicing the exact same complaints and demands as I am. And the reason there's not even more of that in the forums is the fact that many potential users never gave the Affinity suite a real shot because they never heard of it, don't trust it enough just yet, or are waiting for the full suite to be complete to even bother, and the ones who did are not professional enough to actually detect its shortcomings. I've said it before and I'll say it again: once the suite is finally “complete”, specialty sites and YouTube will be chock-full with reviews. And most of the professionals, many of which already tried the rest of the suite and were impressed with it so far, will pile on Publisher instead when it comes to the “cons” section. They will specifically say that it is unsuitable for long-form, complex work, because it is. This is a case of sheer, brutal honesty; I love Serif's intentions here, but people lavishing them with compliments, however sincere, truthful and heartfelt as they may be, are not doing them any favours, because they paint an incomplete picture of the market. I'm treating Serif like I treat my friends (and how they treat me): by telling them not what they necessarily want to hear, but what is true and may actually have a material impact. Just because the numbers and the feedback added up until now, DTP apps are an entirely different beast and their users have a vastly different set of priorities.

Unless some critical missing features are implemented in time for the GM release, it won't sell to serious pros, yours truly included (and I'm a staunch Affinity advocate otherwise, but I do feel the team has probably enough financing, so I am deciding on voting negatively with my wallet this time around). I completely get where you're coming from, but that “geek” term you're using is completely specious when it comes to DTP specifically, by the way. From a purely logical and philosophical perspective, designing huge documents is not a straightforward and strictly WYSIWYG exercise in the sense that you have to – or even can – be ultra-efficient immediately, like when you design an isolated poster or retouch a photo. In order for your computer to do your work for you and deal with massive amounts of data and elements, it will more often than not force you to do some extra ancillary investment upfront, and it may not look all too intuitive for the novice user. Especially if you're supposed to be able to do adjustments on the fly and after the fact. And do you know what? Publisher does not have to be easy or geared for the novice user at all. That's what Designer and Photo should be there for; once you've mastered them both and want to combine your creations into big-ass publications, you're half-ready to tackle the harder specific aspects of DTP because you already know the way around Affinity's toolset. #sorrynotsorry If you want a good comparison, take regular ol' automation. Whipping up an app on XCode, an AppleScript on Script Editor, a workflow on Automator or a Siri Shortcut on iOS Shortcuts are all ways of automating tasks and saving oneself's a lot of time in the long run, in varying forms of complexity and difficulty when it comes to the underlying technology and language used, but they are all, in and of themselves, fairly complex projects which require some investment on the user's part before they can even begin to tackle the actual task at hand. Desktop Publishing (much like digital type design, by the way), whether you like it and/or understand it or not, follows the exact same principle to a tee. I always tell my type design students who already know the inner-workings of DTP apps that, not unlike when using the latter, a lot of the seemingly boring tasks I'm teaching them to do in the early stages are intended to make their life easier and their work quicker later on in the process (which, in very complex DTP projects is, duh, absolutely critical when you have to deal with stupid clients/associates who drag their feet and fast-approaching deadlines). The issue being that printed and bound publications do not conform to this generation's obsession with instant gratification for any and all things. They stand on top of a more than 500-year-long tradition (in fact, if you compare incunabula – i.e. all books printed between the invention of the printing press and AD 1500, and I've personally handled a few and studied quite a lot about them – with modern books, you'll see they mostly look very similar and are built up almost the same way) which, yes, brought about a revolution in speed, but still has quite a lot of gritty complexity to it. Good quality print publishing, especially when it is meant to be sent to an actual 4-colour/spot colour offset printing press and bound into books, stitched, cut, etc., is not easy, and it will never be easy. Quicker? yes. Easier, yes; easy? No. You don't just have to know how to use a computer; you also have to understand 1000+ rules (take Robert Bringhurst's, John Kane's, Stanley Morison's, Willi Kunz's or Joost Hochuli's works as small sample) in order to produce decent, “professional-looking” work before you even launch the DTP app of your choice, let alone fiddle with it. Exponentially so for big and complex documents; they are more akin to buildings or other complex systems than they are to single works of art. This is the thing many people here don't seem to understand. In a sense, print publications are kind of like UI/UX or Web design projects (it's no accident that the very concept of stylesheets, as implemented in CSS, originated conceptually in style manuals and DTP apps), and I feel Designer, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, etc. are all kind of lacking in that regard, because people are using what are basically WYSWYG vector and bitmap editors mainly designed for print in a different way than originally intended (Serif's “Personas” may be a step in the right direction, though, so let's see where that leads us). In a similar but more egregious vein (because whereas the phenomenon I've just described just adds some overhead and makes those tasks slightly more difficult, in this case the software is dumbed down and turns otherwise simple, automated tasks into mind-numbing manual chores), Serif devs seem to expect that a glorified Affinity Designer on very paltry steroids will suffice for serious DTP; it will not. Pardon my possibly pedantic stance, but in order for Publisher to be on par with Photo, Designer and the whole of Adobe CC (because the latter two already are), it must be suitable not just for your local church newsletter, but also for mundane and boring stuff like +300-page user manuals, or high-budget projects like event programmes, product catalogues, magazines, etc. I fully expected it to be simpler than the competition, because they are starting out from a blank slate and that means that they get to make it more friendly but also have a lot of catching up to do; I didn't think, however, they would be oversimplifying it to the point of uselessness and/or be so much behind. Print may be on the wane, but it won't die any time soon, and there will be a market for that kind of work for quite a while… And Serif will still be missing out on it for a while, I'm afraid. Many, if not most former PP users will be ecstatic about Affinity Publisher v.1.7.x, I'm sure. Most current InDesign and QuarkXPress, however, will rather unfortunately give it a pass. The expected synergies of having AD+APhoto+APub just won't pan out (or won't be enough for all kinds projects, and thus force them to keep paying for a CC subscription, buy a QuarkXPress licence or frequently deal with a stupid VM and an old version of InDesign CS like I'll probably do), which also detracts greatly from its value proposition. :\

Just so you know, the icons are changing yet again. Now they have a 3D-ish sort of treatment. I mean, I'm all for improvements, and all, but don't the guys at Serif know a thing or two about brand equity? I know, I know, this was a case of harmonising the Mac and Windows app icons with those of the iOS versions, but I seriously hope they freeze their branding until the end of the 1.x branch… The same goes for the splash screens; once there's an Affinity v.2.x out, having them stay consistent across point updates is a good way of distinguishing each major version.

Judging from the description other users made here (I still haven't had time to fully test that, sorry), that appears to be the case in Publisher, too. And the column manager, plus the shaded column guides, really do seem to match InDesign. But that comes down to philosophy; it makes Publisher work too much for you in bad ways (as in work for you in the creative phase of the process, and not in the boring, later parts). As a professional app, it should allow you extremely fine control, even if it means a bit more work on your part. I know this sounds paradoxical and in contradiction of what I said before, but if you look at Designer and Photo, they also share that philosophy with their Adobe counterparts; both easy/intuitive and advanced/hard precisely where they should. Publisher, on the other hand, seems to be shaping up to become the new [Microsoft] Publisher. Ohhh boy…

That “best ‘for now’” you speak about is just not good enough. Sorry. If I were on the Serif team, on a management position, I'd drop everything else for the moment (save, perhaps, stability work; Publisher just crashed on me right now) and focus on that one feature for now (assuming, on a worst case scenario, that the devs can only focus on one issue at a time; I do believe they have a more complete team and can walk and chew gum at the same time, and tackle more than one feature at once). It might be limited in other ways at v.1.7.0, sure, but at least it would work as a proper DTP app from the get-go. Trust me, DTP pros and reviewers will completely eviscerate the Serif devs otherwise. :\ Also, another problem with not getting it right from the very beginning is the fact that you start training your users in using workarounds (sort of like little “vices”)… What if you need to change the interaction model later on? Yeah, you introduce changes which may confuse your users. Not an ideal situation either, if you ask me…

Ok, I'll give it a look, then. Maybe it already works for really basic stuff. If so, I'll stand corrected. That still probably doesn't change the fact that the philosophy for editing those after the fact (including parameters like, say, baseline grids, styles, etc) is a bit contrary to all other DTP apps (basically, if you want to change your document, you edit your master pages and styles, and boom, there you go; if your content exists outside master page objects, are you supposed to just change system-wide document settings and pray for that not to screw up your document in certain pages? That may be a recipe for disaster, because it doesn't allow for finer control on a per-master basis). I get it, it probably removes an extra step, but it doesn't adhere to conventions and may make your work even harder in more complex documents. I'm all for challenging preconceived notions, but there are some sacred tenets in raster/vector/DTP apps that would be better left untouched. And the devs at Serif have a history of reinventing the wheel in some pretty debatable ways, like… that crazy artboard/layer implementation on AD, about which I've been complaining for months now. [Edit: yeah, I just tested what you suggested. Great, if I set up my text columns on a regular page, outside of the master page, it works… but I still can't change them after the fact and have the text reflow accordingly, I'd still have to delete all pages after the first, redo my layout, and repeat that command. Sorry, but that doesn't pass muster…]

And therein lies the only major, absurd, unacceptable limitation of Affinity Publisher. You can't place text into text frames from master pages, period. What are those good for, then, pray tell? Dividers? Box backgrounds? Page numbers? Give me a break… If you can't create a master column/box/grid layout and fill it out with pre-written text en masse, and just create some pretty page decorations instead and have to do all the typesetting work by hand, that's not a DTP app; it is, as I said, a glorified vector editor. Conversely, if you can just place your text in empty pages and then have to manually apply masters to them, it's yet another extra step you shouldn't have to take; again, that feels like you're fighting against Publisher, instead of having it work for you. For the record, Adobe Illustrator also allows you to flow content between different text frames, so… might as well create the small leaflets/booklets Publisher is only good for in Ai instead, and keep using InDesign for serious DTP work (not that I wouldn't do all of that work in InDesign anyway… Ai is still pretty dismal when it comes to typesetting and performance after having only a few linked files).

Not at all, I'm afraid. If you have to typeset a 300-page book, with a single column on each facing page, but still have to manually create and link 300 text frames instead of just creating two of them and link them on your master page, how is that a good user experience? In InDesign, QuarkXPress or even, I'm guessing, older stuff like Aldus PageMaker, all you had to do was create your boxes on your master pages, drop/place your text file on a single document page with said master applied, and boom!, you'd instantly get hundreds of new pages with the correct boxes and links, filled with all of your content, and ready for style testing, adjustment, etc. The fact that the Serif devs didn't nail this very simple concept right from the very first public beta (bizarrely, you can only place images, not text files, even on the latest beta…???), thus exposing themselves to criticism (if not to outright ridicule), just boggles the mind. For a DTP app, this is almost as bad as not having baseline grids, or styles, or even basic typography settings. It's just that baffling. I mean, that whole lack of inline/anchored objects is a bit of a bummer and would preclude you to typeset complex, graphics-heavy layouts and manuals with Publisher v.1.x but, as you so eloquently (but, alas, mistakenly) put it, at least you could still use it for plain text books from the get-go if it behaved as a normal DTP app (which it doesn't; it may be a glorified, multi-page vector editor with baseline grid support, but a DTP app… it is not). I, for one, will not be purchasing v.1.7 in this state, even if the rest of it is polished to a sheen, as I have no good use for it (and neither will any self-respecting professional with a deadline to meet). And yes, I know I am repeating myself, but this is way too serious for me to just let it go. The closer we get to the final v.1.7 MAS release, the more vocal I'll be each time we get yet another beta without this functionality sorted out. I know perfectly well that I'm a nitpicker about such esoteric issues like “poor keyboard support”, but that's just noise and a bit besides the point; this issue here should be priority #-n, not even #1. It's way overdue, because in this state I can't even bring myself to beta-test this thing properly in a semi-realistic scenario. I will say it again: if you can't realistically launch v.1.7 with proper master page support, wait until v.1.8 or later of the rest of the suite. And if you can't get this functionality ready for v.1.x at all, you'd do well in skipping v.1 altogether and wait for it to be ready to put it up for sale. Selling manifestly incomplete software (even if it suits, say, 50% of your user base, which is just pent-up demand anyway and can wait a bit more regardless), means risking alienating a sizeable chunk of would-be customers, and/or tarnishing your reputation. If you can afford it, keep it as a free beta for as long as you need; it's not like your users can complain about Publisher taking ages to surface anymore.

Indeed, I sometimes don't use thad function on more complex pieces of software… We still live mostly on a WIMP world, especially on the Mac. However, I rarely use the mouse to trigger confirmation buttons on most dialog boxes and prompts. In fact, I sometimes even press Tab followed by Space instead of pressing Return and triggering the default option, thus adding an extra step, to give me a split second to thing if I really want to save changes, print something, etc. Interestingly, you really need to have the “All controls” option selected for such a basic option, because otherwise you can only press Escape or Return (and those don't really cover all the options on many prompts. In my case, it's not a matter of difficulty; sometimes I just want to speed up workflows that aren't slow enough to justify using action/macro-based automation, but boring enough to, you know, justify me not wanting to use the mouse for them. I'm also a heavy keyboard shortcut user, something that came, as I said, from my Windows days, but also became further ingrained after working at a Mac lab. I was responsible for 16 Macs in one room, and 10 more in another, so imagine what it would be like to turn them off at the end of the day without my faithful Ctrl+Opt+Cmd+Eject shortcut, or updating them without full keyboard access (again, those numbers and the high network speeds we had didn't justify using imaging techniques, but doing it without resorting to the keyboard would be a damn chore). In my experience, that inconsistency, or overzealous UI coverage (that's precisely the point, in fact), is far outweighed by the advantages. It's just too bad that some apps which I already paid for and to which I desperately want to switch seem to be fighting me at every corner; Adobe's apps are also cumbersome in other regards, but seeing how I would always need them for certain projects and would, thus, have to use them on occasion (even if that entails running my trusty CS5 Design Standard on a crusty VM, or on Bootcamp, or whatever), the value proposition of Affinity apps comes out severely damaged from any and all defects that actually hinder the jobs I could indeed do with them right now. As it stands, I only use Affinity apps for stuff which is manifestly better on them. Which means, guess what: mostly gradients. https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/photoshops_gradient_editor_needs_an_overhaul And only of the RGB or CMYK kind, because Affinity's support for spot colours is, I'm afraid, pretty substandard, especially when it comes to, ironically enough, gradients (and, alas, transparencies, which is a great – and seemingly simple to implement, one would guess? – use case for them); those are precisely the kinds of projects which would always force me to use Ai, the others being type design (Affinity Designer's support for sending standard PostScript-compliant objects to the clipboard, on the MAS 1.6 version, at least, is, alas, dismal and completely incompatible with digital type design apps such as Glyphs or FontLab). [Edit: regarding gradients, I am very happy to see that the latest Affinity Designer 1.7 Beta finally supports spot colour transparencies/tints and gradients without converting them to CMYK but, when it comes to the latter, only to white (not even to a 0% tint of the same spot colour, which is a complete head scratcher because on Corel Draw 7 the reverse was true, and on Ai I believe both work just fine)… It is also indeed possible to make cross-spot colour gradients, but it entails setting an entire spot colour to be a global overprint colour (I sincerely hope you can have multiple swatches of the same colour, one in overprint, and one in normal mode, otherwise having to add an extra white object behind each object with a spot colour fill will be a pain), and overlaying the topmost colour over the other; the thing is, it only works for print, because on the regular display mode on normal PDF readers, only the topmost gradient to white will be visible… Overall, it's an extremely cumbersome workaround for something which Affinity will – or should –, hopefully, support soon] [Edit #2: Upon further testing, I am also happy to report that the “Multiply” blending mode works effectively as an always visible overprint on the final PDF file and on a per-object basis, even for spot colours, which is great and maybe explains why the developers didn't even bother to implement overprints in any way other than on a global basis… On one hand, that makes my workaround easier and more visible, while also avoiding the side effect of undesired overprints on all other objects of the same colour, but on the other hand, it still doesn't excuse them for not implementing cross-colour gradients; it is technically feasible, it's just a matter of implementing it, so there's no reason why they should be converted into CMYK by default. I will likely update my original post accordingly, with new PDF and .afdesign file demos]

Since I've already expanded a lot on the subject on my last post, I'll keep it short and to the point: Affinity apps almost completely disregard the macOS system-wide option “Full Keyboard Access: In windows and dialogues, press Tab to move keyboard focus between: All controls”, in the Keyboard prefpane. In fact, they don't even honour the alternative and default “Text boxes and lists only” on all places, which would include the very useful input fields on many different palettes. There are issues on important dialog boxes such as “New Document”, and the only palettes where fields are properly addressable via tabbing are, AFAIK, the Transform palette, and only partially so. Some allow for tabbing between one or two items, and all of them, regardless of the number of fields, drop the user into the “Tab to hide the Studio” behaviour, instead of cycling back to the first field like in Adobe CC. This behaviour is, for lack of a nicer term, undesirable and unintuitive, and I could also reproduce it in the Windows beta of Publisher; seeing how I can also reproduce it in the MAS versions of Photo and Designer, I'm willing to bet that it's also reproducible in the release-quality Windows versions of those as well. I also noticed input field and UI control ordering inconsistencies between the Mac and the Windows versions of Publisher. I am aware that fixing this would require an overhaul (or at least an internal review process) of six different codebases across two different OSes (though the fact that some palettes and dialogues are rather similar across apps, so there should at least be some economies of scale at work there), and introduce further overhead in your development process from now on (because it does indeed require a change in philosophy, as tabbing has up until now been added just as an afterthought and only in the places where we specifically asked for it, instead of everywhere, organically and by default, following a predictable scheme and behaviour), but this is yet another thing which I believe you also must do in order to be taken seriously by design professionals who actually use your apps for UI and UX work; you must lead by example, because many of your users will know a lot about that very subject. For the same reason, Adobe was the butt of all jokes for the better part of a decade on account of their lack of polish and consistency (there's even a Tumblr page called “Adobe Gripes” [formerly “Adobe UI Gripes”] dedicated to their misgivings: https://adobegripes.tumblr.com ), but even they got their act somewhat together as of late (there are still inconsistencies between different apps of their suite, but at least most of these nitty-gritty UX issues are pretty much solved by now). Seeing how you're still in the beginning of your expansion in the market, and only have 3 apps in two platforms to contend with, please take the opportunity to polish all of them before the arguably momentous 1.7 release, which will mark the completeness of the originally announced Affinity 1.x suite. All eyes will be, then and once more, on you, and some reviewers will possibly go through all those details (maybe even making brand-new reviews of the original first two apps), and call them all unpolished or unfinished. I know I would, because that's the way they feel, at least on this major point in particular.

Well, let me put it this way: I know it is a bit hit or miss, but consider the following: 1. Apple does it right; 2. Adobe does it right; 3. It's something that when activated on macOS, makes it behave a little more like Windows (something that would please a user like @walt.farrell, for instance, and which makes the Mac so much better and quick to use for me); 4. Seeing how both Adobe *and* Serif offer cross-platform apps (in fact, Serif started out as a Windows-only shop), and that tabbing is a pretty natural behaviour in Windows, it stands to reason that Affinity should behave well with keyboards and tabbing in particular. Is my reasoning a bit of a stretch? You see, it's also not the first time I find weird tabbing behaviours in Affinity apps, the earlier one being, IIRC, a completely inconsistent tabbing order in the Transform palette, which made inputting values extremely cumbersome and unintuitive. Oh, news flash: I just checked, and I realised that it's still not completely fixed (at least the ordering on those four fields is now correct, I'll give them that). You see, when tabbing from the “link chain” constrain proportions button, you can't get to the next field, Rotate, and instead hide the Studio right away. This behaviour goes completely against this system-wide setting, too. You should be able to not only tab between all fields and buttons in each palette, but also to the palette separators and even between other palettes from the same group… Not even Adobe does that (when you select a field and start tabbing, you get stuck in an endless loop between the fields available in that panel, even with said system-wide “All controls” setting activated, but at least Tab doesn't hide the Workspace), but hey, there you have another golden opportunity to one-up them at something. Also, while I'm at it (and even though I will probably create a new thread, or just bump one which I started on the same subject and which has been lying around dead somewhere in the forums for 2 or 3 years now, I still feel this other bug is completely relevant to the topic), I should add that the Separated mode still doesn't work properly; I'd love to be able to use it in Affinity Photo (in fact, I still use it in Photoshop), but Serif never got around to fix it and allow for docking the toolbar and toolbox, and/or at least prevent windows from going full-screen at all, zooming or even being dragged behind them, something which Adobe, Macromedia, FontLab, Microsoft, etc. etc. etc. got right more than 30 years ago (if that happens, you either have to toggle full-screen from the menu, or switch to a different app just to be able to access the window chrome)… Serif isn't adhering to the best practices from even the Macintosh 128K era! It's in these little things that their former Windows-centric background really shows, but please, oh please, if you're answering user requests (and said Separated mode was probably born out of one of those), at least polish them to… I won't even say perfection, but just basic usability. Actually take the time to learn how the Mac's original “floating window + toolbars + palettes” UX concept works, *and especially the zoom button*, and get the details right (if you have to fire up a bootleg Snow Leopard VM and install FreeHand 12, or Office 2001:mac, or FontLab 5, so be it… Oh, wait, never mind all that hassle; you just have to fire up Photoshop CC 2019, turn off the very prominent “Application Frame” on the Window menu, dock your stuff and you're all set, boom!, with a fully functional Separated mode for comparison's sake and reverse-engineering… and do try the zoom button while you're at it, please! Because having it duplicate a sort of “maximize” function is just useless, we might as well just use the regular full-window or fullscreen mode!), because some people, and some apps/workflows, really do benefit from that model (especially Affinity Photo, for obvious reasons; in fact, we'd be better off if Serif just killed Separated mode in the rest of the suite and concentrated just on getting Photo right). The same goes for keyboard support, I guess, and here I speak as a former PC user who actually values the competition's effort in keeping the software as close between platforms as possible… IMveryHO, your (@Old Bruce's) way to go about OS-level features and Beta testing is completely lenient and backwards… I know I border on the obsessive and sometimes even on the aggressive with my nitpicking, but surely we should expect developers, especially self-proclaimed user-friendly ones and to whom we already gave our hard-earned money (maybe it's not your case, but it's certainly mine), to adhere as strictly as possible to Apple's HIG, am I right? Why make excuses for something which shouldn't be that hard to code correctly? This is not a full-blown new tool, or something that messes with the graphics engine and dependencies or whatever, and it's not some obscure accessibility setting either; it's actually just plain adhering to a top-level OS-wide setting which affects a default input method that makes a Mac or a PC, well… a Mac or a PC. In fact, I'd go even further and say that this is the kind of thing that should also be available on the iPad versions of Affinity apps or the upcoming Photoshop for iOS… I don't even know if you can tab between interface elements on iPad apps, but since there are first-party Smart Connector keyboards and built-in first-party and third-party Bluetooth keyboard support, complete with support for some system-wide keyboard shortcuts (yes, with a Command key, just like on a real Mac), you definitely should. Face it: keyboards may be archaic as hell, but they aren't going anywhere any time soon. Now, some final considerations on the reasons which may be behind these issues… I'd venture a guess and say that it all comes down to the usage of custom interface elements, and a desire to keep the interface as close as possible on both the Mac and Windows sides of things (which, as you'll soon realise, it's not a fully achieved goal by default on Publisher, either; I have yet to test it on release-quality software, but I'll be sure to run a trial of Photo and Designer on a fresh VM just to check it out), and the usage of not entirely native/first-party frameworks as they were conceived (I'm talking about Interface Builder and default Aqua interface widgets, specifically, and its equivalente Metro counterparts in Windows). Interestingly, when tabbing on the “New Document” dialog on the Windows version, you can't even get to said button, you also get to a phantom field which triggers nothing when pressing space (in a different ordering… but maybe it corresponds to said button, only it doesn't work?), and you can indeed get to the lower fields, too, but never to said middle separators, either… In addition, the ordering on those lower fields is also different, and it makes less sense than on the Mac version; whereas on the Mac, you get from the two Width/Height fields to the “Portrait” checkbox and, only then, to the DPI field with drop-down button, on Windows you get straight from the Width/Height fields to said DPI field and, only then, to the “Portrait” checkbox. You see, consistency across platforms is also key (pun unintended), especially considering how Apple doesn't produce certain devices like the Surface Pro, or easily upgradeable desktop computers, and some creatives may indeed end up working with a mix of both iMacs and Surfaces, MacBooks and PC towers, etc. etc. Those users already have to deal with the nightmare of different shortcut triggers by default, so let's at least spare them the indignity of those inconsistencies, minute as they may seem…

Hi guys, I know I'm probably in the minority here, but as a former longtime Windows PC user, all my Macs get the "tab between all elements” treatment (using the Ctrl+F7 shortcut), and I'm the master nitpicker when it comes to finding inconsistencies in the tabbing implementation because I happen to use the Tab key *a lot* (that's also what having two big screens and losing your mouse cursor a lot on a daily basis, even with El Capitan's “shake cursor to enlarge” function, does to you). This time, I realised two things: 1. When tabbing between fields and interface elements in the “New Document” window, I can never get to the four separators on the bottom half; 2. The little “Presets” button, with the four horizontal lines and the down arrow and to the right-hand side of the “Page Preset” drop-down menu, is never visually highlighted, though it is indeed selectable; also, when pressing the spacebar, the corresponding menu will not open adjacent to said button but underneath wherever the mouse cursor is; furthermore, this behaviour is reproducible in all Beta Affinity apps. So, yep, that's about it. If I can reproduce any of these behaviours elsewhere in Publisher, I'll let you know.