Zoot

Yes, after years now I do not use Publisher (and by association the other Affinity products) for any serious work because of this. Yeah, you can use only the best and most expensive well-kerned fonts after extensively validating that they will work for you, but that often isn't cost effective and eliminates the vast majority of fonts that exist in the world today, because everyone just omits the work of properly kerning a font because "InDesign will just do it for them lol!" Please, for the love of dog, give us modern rocket-science AI automatic "optical" kerning. It's the ONLY thing that stops a lot of people from using your products. I just want to set beautiful type. Today type looks like rubbish much of the time simply because of this. Charge me another $100 for it, I don't care. I would be happy to pay.

I think that's the last possible thing it will be. That market is completely saturated including the free version of Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve. The package that nobody has yet to dethrone from the top of its niche is Adobe After Effects, and lots of people would LOVE to get a good replacement for that, but it feels kind of out of scope for Affinity and also a much smaller niche than the current suite. 3D is pretty much out too because nobody in their right mind wants to get into that market at this point. What else is left?

I'm looking for the best way to bring preformatted computer source code into Publisher that has color syntax highlighting. If I paste directly into Publisher I get no color from Jupyter Notebooks or from VS Code, but I can copy from VS Code, paste into Word, copy from Word, and paste into Publisher and I get color and fonts (yay!) but this is a bit of a pain. Anyone have best-practices for this sort of thing?

Is there going to be training material available for Publisher? The 16 little intro videos were awesome, but they're now out of date and the statement there never really came to fruition...

It works for me in WIndows with beta 371, but not with 376. Sorry, didn't see this was the Mac thread when I replied originally (darn forum-inspecific search)

With Publisher beta 371 (Windows) installed, I installed the release versions of Photo and Designer and then uninstalled their betas, started up Publisher and the Photo and Designer personas started working! I spent a happy half hour editing photos in Publisher in Photo mode and adding vector elements to layouts in Designer mode. It's super cool! Then I installed the latest Publisher beta 376 and it quit working again. Boo. Uninstalled 376, installed 371 again and it works. Yay!

Wow, Personas actually work today with the release 1.7 versions of Photo and Designer installed (and this is with the previous Publisher beta even).

I noticed (still on build 209 here) that if I have a rectangular selection resulting in the "marching ants" selection border animation, that my GPU utilization (Intel integrated graphics) according to Task Manager sits at 26%, even with Photo minimized. This seems excessive for something I can't even see

I think the beta versions expire after a month or two.

I'd be happy with an "Are you sure you want to reset the defaults for the entire document?" confirmation dialog if you click that button with nothing selected. It's not like this is something you should be doing frequently.

Just wanted to say that I really like the .139 feature (at least I think it's new?) that when you start typing text in a text frame that the frame itself disappears as soon as you start typing, and comes back if you move the mouse etc. I was going to ask for something like this since the frame border often conflicts with the type and makes it less pleasant to enter/edit text in place. This and the new Preview mode are great!

Here's a quick idea... Holding a modifier key when you click to display the font list could show only fonts (or families?) used in the current document. So shift-click to show the font selection list say, and you're limited to things you're already using in this document. And a preference option to swap the sense of the modifier maybe (so you could only see document fonts by default and use shift-click or whatever to see everything). Just a thought and probably easy to implement.

There's this discussion:

Python will just be bundled into the applications and loaded as a library. As mentioned above, virtually every other content creation package as well as virtually all other commercial applications that want to offer scripting are using Python these days (LUA is the other one you see occasionally). AppleScript is not portable, VBA is not portable, Javascript is honestly a terrible application scripting language (though you get a little bit of synergy from how ubiquitous it is in the web design world) and requires at least as much infrastructure if not more than Python to include in your software. I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that the Affinity scripting language is going to be Python. As far as learning another language goes, Python is so ubiquitous these days that learning a little python will pay back dividends over and over for you in the future. Also when you're using it as a scripting tool you don't need to know much of the language as you can get a long way (farther than Javascript in my opinion) by just copying and modifying example code.

Or just good old Python like every other piece of software in the world that isn't InDesign, lol.

For me publishing is all about typography and setting beautiful text, whether that's artistic display type or vast amounts of body text. Here are some things I'd like to see Publisher get at some point (but maybe it's just me so I'm interested in people's comments): 1. Font info: In the Font selector show as much information about each font as practical (ideally let the user configure which attributes are shown), and provide a "get info" function to display all available details. Attributes of interest would include licensing flags (embeddable, etc.) existence of Kerning pairs, OpenType features of interest, western language support, CJKV support, etc. 2. Basic Font management: I'd like to be able to organize fonts into groups (potentially having one font in multiple groups). I'd like to be able to attach some notes text to a font that would be viewable as a tooltip say, or an attribute in the font info described above. 3. Optical Kerning support: I've always been a fan of Optical Kerning in InDesign as it eliminates a significant problem when exploring for interesting and special purpose fonts, and the ability to leverage the insane number of free fonts (of wildly varying quantity of course) that exist today, some/many/most/virtually all of which do not include kerning pairs. I suspect many font designers take the attitude that "kerning is a pain in the butt and people can just turn on optical kerning in InDesign so really there's no problem if you don't do the work to create them". In playing with Publisher I've been disappointed to find out just how many fonts I like will be problematic in Publisher due to lack of kerning support. The Affinity response so far is: "We provide kerning based on tables in the font file. As these are pretty well supported by fonts, doing anything more isn't a priority at the moment." ( https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/65653-tooltip-fix-and-optical-margin-align/&tab=comments#comment-342380 ) which is disappointing. I hope they'll consider it in the future.

Things like Book Antiqua, Bookman Old Style, Californian FB, Century Gothic, Century Schoolbook, etc., etc. I mean, how am I expected to survive if I can't auto-kern all my Comic Sans MS!

Just wanted to point out since I didn't see it in this thread that if you open the Help (F1), expand Introduction, Click "Key Features" and scroll down to "Import/Export", the first supported import/export format listed is "Adobe® Indesign (INDD, INDT)", so this is clearly a "when" question, not an "if" question, and it sounds like it will be in before the product is released for sale.

The comments on the video point out the things he missed. It's unfortunate that this is the top YouTube hit for Affinity Designer last I checked. Hoping for some more official tutorial videos, the first 16 were very nice.

It seems that the "Auto" kerning option is simply "Use font metrics" and there's no fancy optical kerning engine at the moment which is disappointing. They say: "We provide kerning based on tables in the font file. As these are pretty well supported by fonts, doing anything more isn't a priority at the moment." ( https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/65653-tooltip-fix-and-optical-margin-align/&tab=comments#comment-342380 ) Which would be great if most of the crappy Windows base fonts weren't missing kerning tables. Not that I'm planning to use any of those but it was disappointing to see things like "A VID" in most of the random fonts I picked on a Windows machine not set up for DTP. It just means more people are going to produce more ugly typography as usual. Oh well.