iMatt

As a subscriber to Print Week, guess what I saw within its pages! An article on Serif and how they're taking on Adobe with their Affinity range. What is very interesting is the talk of an Affinity asset manager to manage Serif files and that Affinity Publisher should be on sale proper early next year.
https://www.printweek.com/print-week/feature/1166103/britain-would-be-poorer-sans-serif
(Sorry if this is the wrong forum to announce this)

Each of the apps is really cheap already...

2021...."Serif is pleased to announce...the Affinity  Creative Suite''
2027...."Serif is pleased to announce...the Affinity Creative Cloud''
Wakes up in a cold sweat!

There are (at least) two distinct markets for InDesign. The large volume publisher/printer who can account for the expense of a Creative Cloud subscription at marginal cost to their clients, and the small margin pro/sumer market where the expense is hard to manage. Many of these, including myself, have stuck with InDesign (and Photoshop, etc.) CS6 because they cannot afford the ongoing cost of CC. The first group will have little if any incentive to move to another publishing suite. For the rest of us, for whom CC is out of reach, Affinity Publisher will have great appeal, even with possible conversion issues. Taken together with Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer it may easily supplant Adobe in this secondary market. Not that Adobe will mind as they have ceased to care about entry level users.
There was a time when you could get Adobe programs with a student discount and continue to use them until you established yourself professionally and needed an upgrade. Now, when you are no longer a student, you are stuck with the full cost of a CC subscription immediately, whether you can afford it or not. Adobe no doubt sees this as a way to hold on to customers; their customers may see it as an incentive to find an alternative to Adobe as soon as possible. That would seem to be a perfect niche for Affinity. The ex-student will have a modest investment in Adobe centered assets; migrating to Affinity will be relatively easy and certainly far less expensive. As far as I know, the Affinity suite is the only substantial alternative to Adobe's publishing and design programs. To replace Dreamweaver there are innumerable web design apps, including the ever more popular WordPress; for audio and video there are powerful programs from Apple that can compete with Premier, et al. This won't help those using Windows PCs, but they probably have alternatives of which I am unaware.
It is my humble hope that Serif will help break up the Adobe monopoly among creative amateurs and professionals alike. May the force be with them.

Given that Serif will not (at least in the foreseeable future) produce a web app, I guess I'm not stepping on anyone's toes by saying I would strongly recommend WYSIWYG Web Builder. I have no affiliation with the program other than being a long-ish time user.
Works very well with Affinity Designer and Photo. If you can use either of these, then the basics of WWB will be very straightforward.
Check it out here: http://www.wysiwygwebbuilder.com/
P.S. WWB is Windows only. They do have a website app for the Mac though:http://www.quickandeasywebbuilder.com/

My experience with Affinity Publisher has been positive so far.  In essence, it appears to be Affinity Designer with a far more robust text capability and multiple pages. A little simplistic, I know. But as Adobe incorporated Illustrator's graphics engine into InDesign, so Serif have done the same with Designer and Publisher. And I think they've probably done a better job given my experiences with Adobe CS in the past.

As some suspected,  Aff Pub does indeed have vector and photo personas which seem to link to Aff Des and Aff Photo. However, I get the message ''A compatible version of Affinity Designer/Photo is required''. Perhaps this means Des and Photo need updating to the same 1.7 version as Pub.

You will have to create PDF file and import it into Publisher. This import feature is really fantastic!!!

Nothing sad about this at all.  The developers have already responded to our many requests about picas and have announced (see above) that this measurement option will be included in the next public Publisher beta.   In my book they are CHAMPIONS at responding to input from potential users.  I cannot think of any other entity (business, professions, government) that has been this genuinely attuned to its target population as the Affinity developers.  Nor, I might add, as courteous and as helpful.  As for me, I am not a potential user.  I am lined up and ready to be first in line to purchase this addition to their Affinity group, if humanly possible.  

Just about one bit in your post:
If anyone is still using Win98, or anything earlier than Win7 for that matter, I hope you consider the issue of your workstation being vulnerable to a host of security issues which not only affect you, but in some instances, everyone else your machine can connect to directly or indirectly.
It's a matter of security; and when a previous version of an OS or even an application is dropped from being supported (as all Windows prior to 7 have been), it means no one is monitoring whether it is vulnerable to being hacked and used in hundreds of nefarious ways.
Please, if you are using unsupported offerings, please update or replace.
Thanks.

PSD support is available in many other graphic apps, so it is a natural exchange format. IDML support is not available anywhere, (unless you buy an expensive add on). Layout apps are de facto much more locked in their own formats and while of course it is great if Affinity can break into those formats it is not so easily done technically.

The solution for any clients is to send a PDF to the contractor. Of course that is an extra step that many choose not to use. But printing a PDF on a laser printer in house is a good way to proof your color and other critical settings. If it works on the in-house (color) laser, chances are excellent it will print OK at the service bureau.

How viable Publisher may be is certainly up to debate. And for some it may never be suitable. For many others, who are tired, or cannot afford it in the first place, of paying for Adobe subscriptions, Publisher will be an attractive alternative. It's not a zero sum game. InDesign may continue to prosper while Publisher grabs it's own share of the market. However, the price differential is dramatic. Those who cannot afford InDesign CC will scoop it up. Unfortunately, InDesign CS6 is not a 64 bit app (unlike Photoshop CS6) so it will eventually become unusable—on the Mac, at least, when macOS 10.15 comes out late next year. Of course there's no law saying you have to upgrade your OS. Apple will continue to support High Sierra for another year past that and Mojave for two more years. So if you are concerned about security, you can still use InDesign CS6 through 2021. If, as is the case with many, you don't pay that much attention to security in your (Mac) OS, the horizon is effectively unlimited.
Which means you can retain InDesign CS6, if you are using it, while migrating to Publisher to avoid both the obsolescence of CS6 and the cost of InDesign CC.
As far as I know, there is no published deadline for 32 bit apps on Windows, so CS6 will remain usable indefinitely (correct me if I'm wrong).
Still, CS6 is no longer growing, while InDesign CC and Publisher are. If your workflow is settled, this may not matter. But if you are a dynamic designer, you will need to keep up with the Jones's, so to speak, so Quark Xpress, Indesign CC or Publisher will be your primary choices going forward.
Unless Adobe lowers the price of InDesign to an attractive level, as it has done with Photoshop and Lightroom, I will be migrating to Publisher. By the way, the latest beta, while it contains may fixes and improvements, does not yet include InDesign compatibility, let alone Quark. Hopefully this will come before the final release of Publisher, or that event will be overshadowed by its absence.

One of the things I remember about using Acrobat was the ability to restrict printing, saving and exporting. This helped me on a couple of occasions when I wanted to stop someone saving a sensitive document. I wanted them to view only. CorelDraw has this feature built into its PDF export options too. Unless I am missing something, Affinity Designer (and Publisher) lacks such security features. Any chance of including them at some point?

I keep running into this situation where it would be really helpful to convert artistic text to frame text. I know Adobe Illustrator has this capability. Any chance?

Hi all, I am slowly switching to Designer after years of using CorelDRAW and I am thus finding all these great features in CDR that I would love to have in Affinity suite that speed up workflow. I may add more but here's one. In CDR, if I am using a tool such as a the Text tool (or any other) the tool pick is 'sticky' so, if I click and type a word then click somewhere else I can type another word (it doesn't act as a one off tool, if you see what I mean, so I can type as many text elements/draw as many boxes etc as I want. On the other hand, pressing Ctrl+space takes me directly to the select (pick) tool so I can move things about. Hitting Ctrl+space again takes me back to the last used tool. This is incredibly useful for moving between a tool and the pick tool at speed. Could this be incorporated?
The other one I love in CDR is this. If I left click on a swatch it will fill the selected item. If I right click on a swatch it will apply the color as an outline. This too is genius! Could we maybe have that too? 
Affinity is so much faster and smoother than CDR and I want to use it for everything so I want to slowly make you make it like CDR! 
Anyway, let me know what you think.
Phil

I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Richard, but Serif aren’t planning to add a web design app to the Affinity suite. In any case, none of the Affinity apps can read the native files from the old ‘Plus’ series.

I have a lot of files created in Adobe Illustrator and InDesign. I brought them over to CorelDraw. Illustrator AI files being pretty effortless, the InDesign files were saved as PDF's. The corelDraw files I created were also saved as PDF's as well as native CDR files. Now converting them to Affinity Designer files as Designer makesa very good job in converting PDF's. Will also use Affinity Publisher in due course. So perhaps the moral is to save as a universal PDF allowing forward transition.

I have said this in another posting. As an American bookbinder, I prefer metric over inch-based measurements for more accuracy and less effort when constructing book structures. But as a typographer, points+picas is a must. Picas are not exclusively an American requirement. Didot, a French type designer in the 1700s invented the points/pica measurement as a typographic standard. Didot designed stunning and classic font families still used today. This is not about what countries use what measurements in publishing but to what purpose the measurements are used for accuracy and expediency. There are 12 points to 1 pica, 6 picas to an inch or 72 points to an inch - or going by Didot's 1pica measure = 4.512 mm. To deal with accurate typographic control with the least effort, PICAs are an absolute must whether in the US or Europe. And yes there are 3 different point/pica measure systems and Postscript tries to compensate in the digital world.

(...) Before the end of August...Truly. )))
Congrats and thanks !
PS. W/out ind/idml import/export I won't risk doing serious tasks on a beta though...but suppose its still ahead, good luck !

@Patrick Connor
Thanks! I've ditched Photoshop for Affinity Photo recently and I couldn't be happier with it. You guys did a great job and I believe you will do the same with Publisher

Nottingham breathes a sigh of relief - just as the Sheriff was about to read the riot act to tens of thousands of protesters gathered in the Market Square bearing placards saying "LOREM IPSUM" the crowd suddenly dispersed. Thanks guys :)

Bye Adobe. Was nice knowing you...

Yeah, a good bit of advice for us all there I think: Save all of your finished work as a PDF, just in case.

I was using professionally Photoshop for about 2 decades but I switched to Affinity Photo without major issues. Its lighter, it works great, it is handling vectors much better then PS and I don't have to pay for it every month. Also Affinity Photo isn't bloated with some nonsense like movie editing, 3D (which I love but I have Substance Painter for it not PS) and some more. Sure, I would love to see improvements in some areas but I can see Affinity team working constantly on making Photo and Designer better every day. Strongly recommended to check it out.