JGD

Also bumping. This thread must be kept alive, and every time a new Publisher update/beta comes out we should be checking in the release notes whether this feature is finally being put to its paces.

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.

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.
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? 😉

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.

Good call! This can still be a good spot for discussion on all these ideas for the future. I'll be checking it out and giving feedback on the proper forum (if there's something not really working great, or something).
While on the subject of suggestions, I'll just leave something else out here: would it be possible, at some point and if the Variable OpenType spec allowed for it, to have this panel hook into discrete values for these axes, specified by the type designer(s) and coded into the font file itself, include some sort of “snap to discrete values” toggle, and have those values appropriately previewed under the slider instead of the default 20 “steps”/21 ticks?
I know this sounds very counter-intuitive to the spirit of variable fonts, because, yes, they're great because you can fine-tune stuff, we all know that, but that's just one of its advantages. You see, as a type designer specialised in modular and geometric fonts, I work a lot with grids and stackable geometric models, à lá Josef Albers' Kombinationsschrift „3“, and would also very much benefit from distributing a single variable file instead of a bunch of different combinations like in Frutiger's Univers scheme…
This is the kind of stuff I'd love to see being added to the Variable OpenType spec, and being adopted and supported by software purveyors. Having vector UI elements to complement the axes' names would be a nice-to-have, but this would be a functional game-changer, and could even help undecided/beginner designers in other contexts… These “fixed”, traditional values could – if they don't already – also exist in traditional fonts and serve as pointers for traditional weights, and those designers might start out by picking one of them and then fine-tune them afterwards, after some test print runs or gathering user feedback on digital prototypes.
This would effectively make Variable OpenType the default go-to font format, even for fonts designed with separate, non-interpolation-friendly masters… If a piece of software was presented with one such font file, boom, the “snap to discrete values” would be turned on by default and greyed-out. Even old typefaces could be repackaged as “variable” with zero updates and still be more practical and neat to use.
As for my particular use case, and as the spec and its industry support stand, I'll have to produce and distribute instruction manuals with the recommended axis values to ensure fonts snap to their corresponding geometric grids. If the guys at FontFont managed to do that for the über-complex Chartwell and its myriad of OT Stylistic Sets, I guess I can make it, too.

Hi @Affinityconfusesme, @Alfred, @Bobby Henderson, @Bryan Rieger, @kenmcd, @MikeTO, @ronnyb
As you can see I have split these posts about the forthcoming Variable Fonts support made in this thread off into the Beta Members area. The original post by Ash will be repurposed to discuss the implementation of Variable Font support, and the talk here about other implementations (and OT discussion on Colour Fonts) would have got in the way of discussing the actual implementation and any bugs found.
The new build 2.5.0.2415 including this feature will be made available soon, and can discussed here
 

The earlier posts made in this thread before the feature was made available can now be found here

Hi All,
We have just made a new build available of a 2.5.0 beta live - version 2.5.0.2415 - This was created to address improve the new features announced in this post
The fix list for this build is here
There is one very significant change in that Variable Fonts are supported in this beta for the first time
  Ash

I'll reconsider donating to Inkspace in near future, given the rest. Sorry for the delayed response. It is strange that CMYK is still not supported.
Very nice. PSD also.

PDF/X file exporting was just added to Vectorstyler today in the newest update to version 1.2. Might be worth looking into and providing feedback for improvement. Vectorstyler and Affinity Designer work well together; it's easy to copy and paste vectors between the two programs. 

I will never go back to Adobe. The worst-case scenario would be switching to CorelDRAW, the last one-time payment option out there.

note, 26 April 2022

Something tells me you've become all too accustomed to having your suggestions dismissed. (Playfully joking here, not at all meant to be snark)

I'm not against that suggestion, but I think no matter what, something has to change if they ever intend to go after the "big dogs". And that may very well not be their intention if the goal is to target something like Canva's current demographic, which is quite large... and legitimately, there's nothing wrong with this as that is a market that is demanding to be served. It would just be disappointing to a number of people who were hoping to get further away from Adobe's workflow beyond the typical technical, economic, professional reasons, etc. (i.e. creative).. people who were already happy with Adobe will just continue using Adobe.
Theoretically also, Canva can be intending to "buy" the technology to put into the product rather than building it themselves as they seem to be gathering technologies as capital as their habit. Serif's software can be a wrapper for whatever future business aspirations they have down the line for a professional suite... so many possibilities. It doesn't fix preexisting bugs though. Some can say very little will change as far as how Affinity is being developed, but I don't see how that happens the more that I think about it... surely Affinity is worth the $$$ it is because of the possibilities of building atop its foundation. Whether that is good or bad news is subjective to the individual customer.

Items for our consideration... consider these in relation to the Serif acquisition which was in late March:

(Apr 5th) Canva millionaires made as $US1.6b share sale completes
https://www.afr.com/technology/canva-millionaires-made-share-sale-to-hit-3-6bn-first-1-6bn-done-20240405-p5fhmm

Why the $2.43 billion Canva share sale is an epic moment for Australian tech
https://www.startupdaily.net/topic/business/why-the-2-43-billion-canva-share-sale-is-an-epic-moment-for-australian-tech/

(Apr 18th) Pixels and Pictures: Canva challenges Adobe with Affinity acquisition (33%)
https://kstatecollegian.com/2024/04/18/pixels-and-pictures-canva-challenges-adobe-with-affinity-acquisition/


 
Edit: Post below is older but keeping in because the quote is interesting to me. Unfortunately, I can't change text color of date because I am on mobile atm

Edit2: Hail, desktop.
(Apr 26 2022) Investor drastically slashes value of its Canva shares price
https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/other-industries/canva-takes-hit-to-valuation-after-investor-wipes-33-per-cent-off-share-price/news-story/db5c38dde744b4576d52dd11b0e6ffa9

I'm sure there are other articles floating out there that can adjust the picture a bit, but this was all I could find...

Yes, I enjoyed the historical architectural trivia, too, and was amused by the name’s appropriateness to this discussion.

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.

The reason why you notice lots of posts in these forums mentioning Adobe products is… the fact that the 80lb gorilla snuffed out most of the competition (more on it later), which means there's not much in the way of choice. Yes, I know, there is F/OSS, but its technical limitations and sometimes subpar UX (and that is a hill I'm going to die and rot on, sorry… I've now studied enough UX to find and explain faults even in the relatively user-friendly offerings by Serif and those by Adobe, and I completely understand why F/OSS in the creative industries still hasn't taken off, save for Blender and other notable exceptions) pretty much push people either into those nice, prosumer offerings on the Mac App Store, or to Adobe subscriptions, especially if they've worked with the latter in school (as is so often the case, hence Canva's push into that market).
People don't assume anything; Serif's swagger, and straight up copying of the former Adobe Creative Suite Design Standard product matrix (minus the professional PDF editor, sadly), and now the new and aforementioned post-Canva acquisition free licensing for education markets, solidify that position. It's not a perception, it's a fact.
And let's be fair, Affinity gets users maybe 90% of the way there, but it's those 10% of functionality that it doesn't yet cover, that make Adobe a true “jack of all trades”, which make all the difference. Many of the people you see here either need those extra 10% or anticipate they or their students (as is my case) may need them.
About the only thing most agree(d) on (and I say agreed, because we'll soon see an influx of Canva users who may be very content with their subscriptions) was that they wanted to own their own software, full stop. Again, there are very practical reasons for that, it's not just basic daily economics or a matter of principle (which it also is, of course).
While I agree with you on the market being big enough for everyone, there was ZERO competition against the former “Adobe Creative Suite Design Standard” suite/combo as a whole… But there was, and still is, proper competition when it comes to each of its individual components, albeit less integrated. One could feasibly purchase a perpetual Corel Draw Graphics Suite license, plonk down some extra on one for QuarkXPress, and boom, there you have it, a fully professional pipeline, with no subscriptions. A very expensive and less integrated one, for sure, but a very capable one nonetheless. And, indeed, analogous of what we used in the pre-Creative suite days… I was personally trained in Photoshop, Freehand *and* QuarkXPress, and that was the combo I used for the first two years of my bachelor, only to jump ship to Illustrator – which I still don't enjoy using as much as I did using Freehand, to this day – because of the infamous Macromedia acquisition and to InDesign because, yeah, truth be told, it was always miles ahead of Quark in terms of not just platform support – Quark really shot themselves on the foot with their belated transition to what was then called Mac OS X, oof – but also on UX and features.
Did we get greedy with the advent of Affinity…? Perhaps. But you have to appreciate that it's highly frustrating to see it get all the way to 90% there and then… just remain indefinitely “meh” and effectively incomplete for a lot of users, because the powers-that-be had to pay the bills and realised the only way to do so was to invest in new, sexy features for illustrators (which, as I've said before, are well covered by other tools) rather than tick all the unsexy boxes for classic vector design and DTP. Hence all the incessant comparisons! Of course, Adobe is also catering to those digital-first or even digital-only illustrators, even in Illustrator (ha! It's finally rising up to its name), but that's the thing: there are other tools besides Illustrator and Affinity Designer that also do, and likely do an even better job than either, because they're not jacks-of-all-trades.
As for DTP and print production workflows… the only integrated packages now are Adobe's and Serif's, period. They are, effectively, rivals (and now, with Canva's backing, if Affinity is to thrive as a product under its wing, even more so), and while I can also see code and UX as a quasi-artistic endeavour and as much as I appreciate your “Kumbaya” stance regarding software, at the end of the day they are tools (for artists, yes), not artistic creations in and of themselves. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and do I have to remind you that Adobe eats Serif-sized companies for breakfast? And that whenever Adobe does that and just discontinues products, peoples' livelihoods are affected? And that the same happening at the hands of Canva would make zero difference in that outcome?

Bingo! Even across different countries (hence me mentioning pt-PT vs. pt-BR) technical jargon can vary, and you'd need at least one expert consultant and one translator (or, ideally, someone who can do both) for each language…
Regarding automatic translation, I've seen such stupidity on apps distributed by large companies that I suspect many didn't get the memo yet, but I hope they will after getting enough user feedback. Just yesterday I fired a string of five or six support tickets to Leroy Merlin (it's like a big French hardware store chain with locations across all of Europe), because their Enki home automation control app is full of bugs, and one of the last ones, pertaining to their deplorable translation efforts (complete with entire paragraphs in English on the very support ticket submission webform), was focused on this pearl: the usage of the Portuguese word “Perto”, which means “close” as in “nearby”, for the “Close” button, instead of the correct and standard verb “Fechar” in the infinitive. Interestingly, the app was, I suspect, done by French coders, but they must've standardised in English, because “Fermer”, the unambiguous conjugation of the same verb in French, would never translate into “Perto”… But that just goes to show how you just can't rely exclusive in “AI” (it's not true AGI, it's just LLMs, and LLMs are just mass plagiarising machines with some PR and advertising lipstick on them).

Fair enough. I do expect the discussion to refocus on Variable Font support proper, when it becomes available/exposed in the UI/whatever, because at this point, it's mostly a teaser.

Bingo! Even across different countries (hence me mentioning pt-PT vs. pt-BR) technical jargon can vary, and you'd need at least one expert consultant and one translator (or, ideally, someone who can do both) for each language…
Regarding automatic translation, I've seen such stupidity on apps distributed by large companies that I suspect many didn't get the memo yet, but I hope they will after getting enough user feedback. Just yesterday I fired a string of five or six support tickets to Leroy Merlin (it's like a big French hardware store chain with locations across all of Europe), because their Enki home automation control app is full of bugs, and one of the last ones, pertaining to their deplorable translation efforts (complete with entire paragraphs in English on the very support ticket submission webform), was focused on this pearl: the usage of the Portuguese word “Perto”, which means “close” as in “nearby”, for the “Close” button, instead of the correct and standard verb “Fechar” in the infinitive. Interestingly, the app was, I suspect, done by French coders, but they must've standardised in English, because “Fermer”, the unambiguous conjugation of the same verb in French, would never translate into “Perto”… But that just goes to show how you just can't rely exclusive in “AI” (it's not true AGI, it's just LLMs, and LLMs are just mass plagiarising machines with some PR and advertising lipstick on them).

It pretty much has to be removed, as it no longer opens either the Typography window or the new Typography panel (at least on the Mac).
I would also suggest that the latter should be tucked into Window > Text > Typography, next to Character, Glyph Browser, Paragraph and Text Styles.
And that's me, a typography teacher saying it, but I'm not biased to the point of thinking that what is essentially an advanced version of the Typography section in the Character panel (which you can, indeed, open by clicking the “ellipsis/more…” button on the latter) should be a top-level, uncategorised panel.

Thanks for the correction. I'm obviously not as well-versed in this as Sérgio.
As for them not being able to be made variable, I wasn't sure of that but half-suspected already, and I don't see why it doesn't belong in this discussion, at least as a starting point, because after variable fonts… it's the next obvious omission to tackle. I kindly invite the mods to split the relevant posts into a new thread if need be, of course.
I would also add that said fact is not guaranteed to always be the case. If both formats take off, there can certainly be ways of making Colour-SVG fonts support variable axes. As a matter of fact, that same philosophy could be applied to the format and turn colours, and maybe even texture and gradients, into editable “axes”, instead of the format relying exclusively on Stylistic Sets as it still does, and those Stylistic Sets might even work as sub-fonts instead of the system, with their own axes, instead of being just presets of sorts.
Regarding that newfangled Open Font Format spec, I like it, though I fear will face a bit of an uphill battle against OpenType. Anyhoo, I'll be watching Behdad Esfahbod's (impressive CV, by the way) stream when I get the time, but I looked at his presentation deck already (he mentioned advantages for the UFO format, which is a good thing, and clearly knows well the history of formats, including arcane stuff such as METAFONT), and the fact that all these bright people are putting their minds to these issues fills me with confidence.
I'll be sure to check out all those resources, thanks!

Bingo! Even across different countries (hence me mentioning pt-PT vs. pt-BR) technical jargon can vary, and you'd need at least one expert consultant and one translator (or, ideally, someone who can do both) for each language…
Regarding automatic translation, I've seen such stupidity on apps distributed by large companies that I suspect many didn't get the memo yet, but I hope they will after getting enough user feedback. Just yesterday I fired a string of five or six support tickets to Leroy Merlin (it's like a big French hardware store chain with locations across all of Europe), because their Enki home automation control app is full of bugs, and one of the last ones, pertaining to their deplorable translation efforts (complete with entire paragraphs in English on the very support ticket submission webform), was focused on this pearl: the usage of the Portuguese word “Perto”, which means “close” as in “nearby”, for the “Close” button, instead of the correct and standard verb “Fechar” in the infinitive. Interestingly, the app was, I suspect, done by French coders, but they must've standardised in English, because “Fermer”, the unambiguous conjugation of the same verb in French, would never translate into “Perto”… But that just goes to show how you just can't rely exclusive in “AI” (it's not true AGI, it's just LLMs, and LLMs are just mass plagiarising machines with some PR and advertising lipstick on them).

The reason why you notice lots of posts in these forums mentioning Adobe products is… the fact that the 80lb gorilla snuffed out most of the competition (more on it later), which means there's not much in the way of choice. Yes, I know, there is F/OSS, but its technical limitations and sometimes subpar UX (and that is a hill I'm going to die and rot on, sorry… I've now studied enough UX to find and explain faults even in the relatively user-friendly offerings by Serif and those by Adobe, and I completely understand why F/OSS in the creative industries still hasn't taken off, save for Blender and other notable exceptions) pretty much push people either into those nice, prosumer offerings on the Mac App Store, or to Adobe subscriptions, especially if they've worked with the latter in school (as is so often the case, hence Canva's push into that market).
People don't assume anything; Serif's swagger, and straight up copying of the former Adobe Creative Suite Design Standard product matrix (minus the professional PDF editor, sadly), and now the new and aforementioned post-Canva acquisition free licensing for education markets, solidify that position. It's not a perception, it's a fact.
And let's be fair, Affinity gets users maybe 90% of the way there, but it's those 10% of functionality that it doesn't yet cover, that make Adobe a true “jack of all trades”, which make all the difference. Many of the people you see here either need those extra 10% or anticipate they or their students (as is my case) may need them.
About the only thing most agree(d) on (and I say agreed, because we'll soon see an influx of Canva users who may be very content with their subscriptions) was that they wanted to own their own software, full stop. Again, there are very practical reasons for that, it's not just basic daily economics or a matter of principle (which it also is, of course).
While I agree with you on the market being big enough for everyone, there was ZERO competition against the former “Adobe Creative Suite Design Standard” suite/combo as a whole… But there was, and still is, proper competition when it comes to each of its individual components, albeit less integrated. One could feasibly purchase a perpetual Corel Draw Graphics Suite license, plonk down some extra on one for QuarkXPress, and boom, there you have it, a fully professional pipeline, with no subscriptions. A very expensive and less integrated one, for sure, but a very capable one nonetheless. And, indeed, analogous of what we used in the pre-Creative suite days… I was personally trained in Photoshop, Freehand *and* QuarkXPress, and that was the combo I used for the first two years of my bachelor, only to jump ship to Illustrator – which I still don't enjoy using as much as I did using Freehand, to this day – because of the infamous Macromedia acquisition and to InDesign because, yeah, truth be told, it was always miles ahead of Quark in terms of not just platform support – Quark really shot themselves on the foot with their belated transition to what was then called Mac OS X, oof – but also on UX and features.
Did we get greedy with the advent of Affinity…? Perhaps. But you have to appreciate that it's highly frustrating to see it get all the way to 90% there and then… just remain indefinitely “meh” and effectively incomplete for a lot of users, because the powers-that-be had to pay the bills and realised the only way to do so was to invest in new, sexy features for illustrators (which, as I've said before, are well covered by other tools) rather than tick all the unsexy boxes for classic vector design and DTP. Hence all the incessant comparisons! Of course, Adobe is also catering to those digital-first or even digital-only illustrators, even in Illustrator (ha! It's finally rising up to its name), but that's the thing: there are other tools besides Illustrator and Affinity Designer that also do, and likely do an even better job than either, because they're not jacks-of-all-trades.
As for DTP and print production workflows… the only integrated packages now are Adobe's and Serif's, period. They are, effectively, rivals (and now, with Canva's backing, if Affinity is to thrive as a product under its wing, even more so), and while I can also see code and UX as a quasi-artistic endeavour and as much as I appreciate your “Kumbaya” stance regarding software, at the end of the day they are tools (for artists, yes), not artistic creations in and of themselves. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and do I have to remind you that Adobe eats Serif-sized companies for breakfast? And that whenever Adobe does that and just discontinues products, peoples' livelihoods are affected? And that the same happening at the hands of Canva would make zero difference in that outcome?

How it currently works: "Strings" + "Unicode UTF-16":

For what purpose / advantage?  Not only the interface layout requires adjustments to make "hundreds of languages" fit without cropping or other issues, also the Help and all tutorials, static or video, various websites (incl. store and forum) would need an according translation to make sense of "hundreds of languages" for the app interface.
Apart from the required effort to complete your vague and superficial "idea" its sense gets reduced if you consider who could in fact benefit from this work. It is not the users of "hundreds of languages" who might not even be able to purchase soft- or hardware but this would also require understanding of all the localised terms: For example, while you can translate "Leading Override" or "Curve Adjustment" into any language, it might not have the meaning used in DTP.
So, without additional education of users + translation of related documents, an app interface in "hundreds of languages" isn't useful but simply redundant – while with education also one of the existing interface languages got learned quite likely and thus an interface in "hundreds of languages" is redundant, too.
(Not to mention the "idea" that automatic translation will become carried out by AI in more and more areas, without a need for extra manpower or feature requests)

Yes, (amongst other subjects) I studied French and I studied Chemistry, yet alas there was nothing about even basic chemistry in my learning of French.
William
PS When i refer to "my learning of French" I mean my learning of just some French at a general education level.