Medical Officer Bones

It is not renting: it is a maintenance plan. You pay for a year of upgrades, and when maintenance runs out, you get to keep the last version as a perpetual license. The pdf-xchange pro version includes office integration which converts TOCs to clickable ones, links, etc. The Editor will also convert Office files if Office is installed. But I do not use MS Office (I am a LibreOffice user which already includes good PDF export by default), so I would suggest downloading the trial to see if it works for you.

If you are on Windows, and have no need for a prepress PDF toolset, then I recommend PDF-Xchange Editor. Great annotation/commenting/revewing tools, form creation, OCR, Scanning, and full PDF editing. The GUI is miles ahead of Acrobat (that horrible form properties dialog in Acrobat...). It also supports (as far as I have tested) all Acrobat Javascript. It even loads and displays 3d models embedded in a page. I found it to be an excellent Acrobat replacement. Only its prepress tools are missing, unfortunately.

The G'MIC filter set includes a Pixel Sort filter. To use it (free), download Krita, and import/copy-paste your image in Krita. https://krita.org/en/ Then apply the pixel sort filter: Filter-->Start G'MIC QT and search for the pixel sort filter. Change the settings to your liking. I wish the Affinity devs would include a version of G'MIC. It's a really nice set of effects.

Check your preferences/Performance View Quality setting: it should be set to "Bilinear (Best Quality)".

Support for interactive fixed layout epub books is still incredibly spotty on Windows, Linux, and Android. These type of epubs only work fine on iBooks for the most part. At this point in time I hesitate to call interactive FXL epub files "cross platform compatible". Animated books also won't work properly on Kindles either. Readium was pretty much the only good alternative on Windows, but Chrome put a stop to that when it deprecated Chrome apps. It is still being developed, but nothing yet. Sad state of affairs. Avoid interactive FXL epub unless your market is limited to iPads. Ref: https://www.boblevine.us/the-fixed-layout-epub-missing-piece-reliable-readers-for-windows-and-android/

Both companies also offer full perpetual licenses, aside from subs. Click on the perpetual links on their pricing pages.

I work with Justinmind and have worked with Axure. Both are professional level tools widely in use, and leave Adobe XD in their dust. I never understood why anyone views XD as a high-level prototyping tool, because it is very limited compared. Axure and Justinmind are off-line desktop tools, btw, and available for Windows and Mac. https://www.justinmind.com/ https://www.axure.com/

Add high pass effect as a live filter, then twirl down the layer live effect in the layer panel, and change the layer blend mode to Overlay. Adjust as needed.

Inking and drawing in Clip Studio is more than excellent. In my opinion nothing beats its pen and drawing 'feel'. Well worth the investment if you're doing comic and illustrative hand-drawn art. I use it almost on a daily basis for inking. PhotoLine works quite well too, in particular in the latest betas which improve the basic drawing engine. Not up to the standard of Krita, or even Photoshop or Affinity Photo, but it is hard to fault its 1bit image mode, and for 1bit inking all you need are basic brushes anyway for the most part (and its stroke smoothing is very good, which comes in handy for this work). It's even possible to work with multiple 1bit layers, and use a couple of blend modes. I use it mainly to composite my Clip Studio inks on top of colour work done in Krita, although depending on the complexity I may just do the colours in Clip. If you're looking for an one-in-all comic drawing/inking/colouring solution, with solid publication and comic page management features, than Clip Studio EX (the pro version) is more than up to the task. My only concern with Clip Studio is the lettering, which is more oriented towards Japanese text setting, and it does feel more limited. I tend to avoid CS for my text setting. I believe the developers are working on improving the text engine for western languages text setting. Clip Studio is also remarkably light on computing resources. It works fine on my 8 year old severely under-powered i5 4gb windows 7 tablet with wacom digitizer. That machine won't even run Affinity, and Photoshop was a trial in sluggish torture and frustration: forget about drawing a single stroke without severe lag. CS, however, provides a completely smooth drawing experience on a 10.000px by 5000 RGB canvas, or A4 @ 1200ppi 1bit. It just works. The on-screen anti-aliasing is also best-of-class, which is something I learned to appreciate after Photoshop and other art apps. Thin lines have a tendency to disappear on a zoomed out canvas in most art apps. Or be rendered badly, if at all. No such issues in CS. As for waiting for Affinity Photo to receive a 1bit mode: I wouldn't hold my breath. The Affinity devs have already stated that their current intention is to never implement it. It is unfortunate, but at least we know where they stand in this. Let's hope Affinity Publisher, at the very least, will properly support these for import and press output rather sooner than later, because it is such a basic and fundamental requirement for a wide variety of print jobs.

Of course you can import line art. The trouble is that for comic printing a high resolution 800-1200ppi 1bit bitmap (tiff) is generally used for line art which is then overprinted on the 300-400ppi colour work. Affinity Photo cannot deal with 1bit bitmaps at all at this point, while Publisher can import these, but during export they are converted to CMYK. Line art should not be greyscale continuous tone, because it just won't print well (actually looks dreadful).

I am going to be honest here. If your publishing targets include epub, apps and the web, this first version of Publisher is just not for you. It may take a while for Affinity Publisher to receive these targets, and I expect it will take at least one or two years based on Affinity's progress as a suite so far. If you are dying to get away from Adobe, and require these publishing targets NOW, QuarkXpress merits a look. More expensive, though (you do get a deal if you own InDesign, btw). And Affinity Photo and Publisher will still be nice replacements for Photoshop and Illy.

As long as you don't need crisp bitmap-based black 800-1200dpi printed line art (inks) for print, and you can work at 300-400dpi for print, you'll be fine with Affinity and comics. If your only output target is web, you'll be fine too.

Stick with Clip Studio for now: Photo does not, and will not ever (according to Andy Somerfield, Photo lead developer), support 1bit bitmaps - perhaps only export. And Publisher is unable to export 1bit bitmaps for high resolution line art, and converts these to CMYK or RGB files. In short, unusable for most comic book printing jobs. At least, Publisher will hopefully be able to support 1bit bitmap PDF export at some point. Photo will never be optimized for comic print workflows, sadly. If the comic art is full colour 'painterly' style without line art, however, Affinity will work just as well as other software. Or possibly create your digital inks using vectors only. Reference:

Yes, InDesign just identifies these files automatically. In both Scribus and PhotoLine setting the high ppi 1bit layer to multiply will work and keeps the original 1bit data in PDF1.4 onwards, with no conversion occurring. QuarkXpress also deals with 1bit obviously. Publisher is the odd duckling out.

The preliminary results are disappointing. I created a document with a 300ppi colour art layer, and imported a 1200ppi 1bit tiff image, set to multiply mode. On-screen it looks fine. When I export the document to a pdf, Publisher insists on converting the 1bit tiff to either an RGB or CMYK version (depending on the document and/or pdf export settings) while retaining the original resolution. That is very problematic: a too-high CMYK/RGB image will be sampled down by printing software / image setters before printing. I tried all sorts of settings, but Publisher simply refuses to maintain that 1bit TIFF during export. Unless I am missing a particular option or setting, Publisher seems incapable of achieving this quite basic task. Also, in this case the Photo link is useless: because Photo does not support 1bit images, it merely displays a downsampled greyscale version at 300ppi. But it does keep the original image data intact: returning to Publisher mode restores the original high resolution version. @Andy Somerfield Is it possible to retain the high resolution 1bit bitmap during PDF export and prevent Publisher from converting the image to a RGB or CMYK version? Am I merely overlooking a setting? This is absolutely essential for comic publishing work.