Zoot

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

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

As true as that may be, clearly we are many who find it very useful (including Adobe).
I miss it a lot. But I dislike Adobe even more, so I will remain loyal and hope for the best.

+1,000,000 for optical kerning. Too long overdue.

Agreed, I just tried most of my fonts and almost all of them have catastrophic kerning. It would really be helful to be able to have a more automatic workflow for this.

I love the Affinity concept and made the switch from Adobe a few months ago. I bought all three programs (but have only installed Photo so far... guess I should have waited and bought the 2.0 bundle instead).

The only thing that is a real problem for me is the lack of optical kerning.
It might appear as a small thing to some, but this really makes text designs unnecessarily time consuming. And no, it's not just poor fonts that benefit from this.

I kept going with 1.0 because I wanted to give it an honest chance. Also, I was really hoping that this basic feature would be implemented in 2.0. Unfortunately it apparently wasn't a priority. This is the only reason why I am in doubt about updating - and consider switching back to a company I don't even like. Just because I the current workflow is too slow and uninspiring.

I'm crossing my fingers that this will be included in an update very soon (Photo, Designer and Publisher).

I would love to be able to become a long time Affinity user and supporter.
So many things are great with this company.

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

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 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?

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

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

Let's say you want to create a movie poster, you'll affinity photo to create 1 page and put some images and text on it and export for print.
Let's say you need to create a logo, you use affinity designer to create 1 document and draw the logo there, then you export to png.
Now let's say you want to create a book of 100 pages, you can't just create 100 different documents in photo or designer and copy paste small pieces of text to each one, and what if you change the font size, you need to re-arrange documents again and again. So for these tasks that need Multiple-pages documents, you need desktop publishing/layout software like Affinity publisher or InDesign. They are not designed to create photos or vector art, but to gather and re-arrange them through a lot of pages. They have special automated features like moving text from one page to another, automated page numbering...
Some case scenarios for using a desktop publishing app are books, magazines, reports... You notice they're all composed of a lot of pages.

I dare to say that it will be like this one, a previous edition of the event:
Best regards!

I opened up the Publisher Beta just now and noticed that the other two Personas had activated for me. Not going to spoil it, but you developers are absolute mad lads. No wonder the development took so long. Not regretting pre-ordering this program. Can't wait till the 19th!

Designer is vector based app like Illustrator or CorelDRAW and Publisher is layout app like InDesign or QuarkXPress.

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.

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

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

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 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 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

the new Icons are pleasant to look at and thanks to their clear design, its much more easy to understand what those icons are representing.
comparison how the icons look like when pinned to the Taskbar.

Status: Public Beta
Purpose: Stability and General Testing
Requirements: 64 Bit Win 7 SP1 / Win 8 / Win 10 
Hi, we have a preview of Publisher build 174 now available. It is currently provided as a manual download from the link above.
As this is a beta it is considered to be not suitable for production use. This means that you should not attempt to use it for commercial purposes or for any other activity where you may be adversely affected by the application failing, including the total loss of any documents. 
We hope you enjoy the product, and as always, if you've got any problems installing or running up, please don't hesitate to post in this thread.
Any problems actually using this version please make a new topic in this forum and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Please feel free to leave general suggestions and comments in the Discussion Forum. Many thanks for your continued feedback.
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Updates
This build is the first Publisher Beta build containing the updated Artwork for the 1.7 Releases.
Fixes
This build fixes a critical bug preventing run up on some Windows 7 systems.
This build fixes a critical bug in PDF Export and Printing where rasterised elements could be omitted or corrupted.
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Thank you for helping us track down these issues and for your continued support.
Earlier Release Notes Beta 167

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.