Rodi

I was asking Leslie A as she seems to have a similar workflow as I do. I would add if I need to shrink files I use two programs to reduce file size, Qoppa PDF Studio has a great optimize feature that gets most files shrunk in size... when that doesn't work I go to Callas PDFToolbox, and it will really shrink the worst of em. That is mostly for emailing I understand that, I but I also regularly download large pdfs (hobby stuff) and waiting doesn't bother me in this day and age. Dial up, paging dial up. I remember when sending a one page document to service bureau took a couple hours or more!

Can you tell us why large pdf is not acceptable for you? Have you exported an IDML or packaged the InDesign file and opened the IDML in Publisher? I would make sure all the parameters of export are the same or close. Personally, I make all pdfs as large as possible with no compression, I find for my RIP systems (Founder Elecroc, Prinergy, Fiery) not having to decompress files works quicker at the time of ripping.

Thanks so much!! Just a quick look around and I am already being helped out. I do have to comment (positively) about the fonts, Postscript Type 1! Yay, try that in that other program!! I really think that is one thing that makes me happy to use Publisher even with it's little issues, Pantone Libraries and Type 1 fonts!!

I do not watch TV at all, not in the slightest. Today, at Grand Central Station in NYC, I saw some Canva ads and I can't say it moved me to even consider their products. I would say getting Affinity Suit into schools for free could be amazing!

Ya know, I use Publisher daily. It's got great features not found in InDesign that allows me to get work done faster, better and more efficiently. Would I recommend for other pros to use? YES! The suite has many cool great features that help artists to get work done. Would I recommend for other pros to leave Creative Suite for it now? No. It's not yet mature enough to handle the myriad of tasks that are required for graphic arts (print in my case). I think we are all here because we care about the whole environment of Serif/Affinity, and I think you are wholesale selling the whole community as unserious is quite fitting. Perhaps you are the one who is missing out on what drives this community, and in part it's not what drives other communities. So @Bit Disappointed what makes the suite not professional to you? Also what are the features and things you really dig?

In fact the whole industry was no more by 1995. So from 1992-1998 I had no job within the graphic arts industry. I still use many elements of those days. I do really miss the strength of that industry with proof readers, quality of fonts and cool equipment. Our camera department had distortion cameras and platen devices to distort type. We used punches to knock type out of black elements. Our typesetting equipment did some cool things, but essentially we did type that could be laid down on a mechanical easily for artists, they paid for that. We sent glassine copies (see through 16#, iirc) of the type for them to overlay before they commited to spray/wax the galleys to put on the boards.

LOL, outside of being thrown of of the typesetting industry (there was one, once, lol) I have been in print a long time! Each season brings new challenges, and as an artist I like to make clients work look as good as it can. I worked at a label shop that was spot color shop, I converted them to process work and after a few years of photoshop work for total ink, we got a new rip. Welp, first job, without adjustment gets done. Boss throws the label roll at me, "what am I gonna tell them, we didn't know what we were doing before this?" Everything went back to the way it was, lol.

Did you ever work on V1 or InDesign or Illustrator or v3 Pagemaker? LOL, every program needs time to mature to get professional. Quark took to V3 and it was so good they forgot to make it better in good ways and v4 was terrible. Have you opened a PDF with InDesign to edit it? Can't do it. You can with Affinity Publisher. It's terrifying at times, but once you work out a system, it's pretty nice.. I have edited text and extended bleeds to files that would have otherwise been total failures. Can you explain the lack of accesibility in PDFS means? I do think they should have an acrobat type of program, but since they don't I use Qoppa PDF Studio and Callas PDF Toolbox desktop and an old (7) of Acrobat. I have identified issues with Publisher but it still does a good job on a number of items that Adobe will never address. Try this, import a PDF to InDesign, say 24 pages with bleed. Do the same in Publisher. In ID you have to set each page up in the right place each page... it's work. Affinity, make 24 pages bring first page in on first page of doc, set, then copy and past and just switch the page numbers, it's very robust. On Adobe, well they are the kingpin, everyone should gun for them if they intend to dethrone them. If Affinity went after Quark... well I think you get what I mean. I really like Affinity programs even though I can't use them all 100% of the time, yet. I hope they continue to mature them and can compete. LetraStudio, ColorStudio, FontStudio, FreeHand, Quark, Corel, Canvas, Scribus, Inkscape, Gimp, Ready Set Go, Live Picture, Painter, Typestry . . . and a host of many others I have used to get jobs done. Sometimes the top dogs are great, but they don't have all the answers for all the problems. Adobe, in my, and many other's opinion are too expensive for a good amount of the design community. Affinity is trying to alleviate that problem and we salute them, but we don't give them an easy pass for short falls.

upgrade to Affinity v2 totally worth it, I have found it more stable and usable on every front and the little updates aren't as quircky as some 1.x versions were. What do you do about new spot colors or changes to files with Postcript type 1 fonts? As far as the past, graphic designers were not content but frightened that if they didn't use particular software that was top dog at the time they would not be respected... I used Illustrator and Freehand, Quark (later InDesign, but that was 2005) Photoshop, Live Picture. I also used cool little programs for vectors LetraStudio. I hated Corel, but I was able to make color bars with slurs for a place I worked at. I try to find what works. The only adobe product I can say I need professionally is Acrobat, but that's because Pitstop don't stand alone like Callas PDFToolbox that I use. I still have Freehand 10 (the best version) on Windows 10 machine. Canva has been a thorn in my professional bottom, I told my bosses these customers are so cheap they should buy Affinity! IT's so much better! LOL...

This is partly true and partly an issue within the graphic arts community, which is very conservative (much like the guitar community) in their choices. No one wants to make a mistake. Aldus/Macromedia Freehand was a great program that did three things very well, .ps fidelity, vector art and page layout. It had a way to make word spaces tighter than the letter spaces, which we used in old typesetting systems. Very nice. It's nowhere in Illustrator but made its way into InDesign. I am a pro and I use Affinity Publisher a lot, but not exclusively because it has a few nagging issues, one of which is importing spot color pdfs from other programs, most of the time (especially having more than one of the same page to adjust for panels) it processes out. If I worked in an all digital shop, I would def swap out some adobe licenses for Affinity. I know hi end boutique guys state the type engine will never work with new font technology, but they are crowing in rare air, I have only seen a few files that have those multiple weight fonts. I do a lot of varied work, including with one of the larges printers in the world. Affinity was never going to smash Adobe because the scale in comparison is crazy! Adobe is huge. Affinity is like Robin Hood and his merry men!! I found my use for the Affinity suite in professional arena. It's a super capable PDF editor and opens IDML files from InDesign pretty darn well. I live with the shortfalls because I have no choice and there is no other viable alternative.

Hi, Did you send a pre separated file? 6 pdfs per color? I have some use for that in a certain subfield, but it's been a while since they can be used with modern rips architecture, you lose a way to trap. Yes on Picas! When I was a camera man and did not need to know about sheet size I used picas forever! My only issue with picas is real picas vs picas on computer are not equal (digital picas are exactly 1/72", whereas regular picas on my Plankcs Typographic ruler is slightly larger 72.3 or so per inch. I have one thing that kills me in printing. PANTONE Color books are not numerical anymore. Some genius's decided to put them numerically at the index and by hue on the printed page. Well that's just a pain somewhere... I get files in that have the same issues as in the 1980's, RGB/missing fonts... just had a canva job yesterday where a maroon red was picked from two different online colors that look similar I am sure, but they converted to cmyk and it was light years different. I blame schools for hiring poor teachers in graphic arts programs. I would love to teach a class on production values of printing. Type, Color and Bleed. I regularly run into experienced designer who don't bleed out items... I would teach about quality font choices on a budget, PANTONE Color to Process, document size!! How about a class how not use photoshop as a pagelayout program!!

Canvas was a program that promised integration between page, vector raster and web. It failed. Theversions I tried were buggy. It had great fonts though! 2540 quality URW fonts. I always think historically that Affinity accomplished what was promised on the dawn of the DTP revolution (1980s!!) of an all in one program. No double clicking from Q to P, you just worked in it. Now there are two programs that can do this pretty well, PDF Tuner from CGS and Affinity. PDF Tuner is free! You have to have one of their other programs/plans to get it and it's pretty expensive!

Adobe, in the font world, got a patent (due to being chummy with the then President) for a font that is historically well known (Garamond) and honestly, a pilfering of Berthold Garamond by Günter Gerhard Langes revival of Garamond in the early 70s... Then what they did with the ScannGraphic font Today Sans (a beautiful font!) and made it an Adobe exclulsive named Kronos... What they did with Ares Font products (Font Chameleon, Font Monger, Fonthopper, Font Studio) was buy and can. Then what they did Freehand... that was the death knell of competition in DTP on that level. Adobe has a bad rep in my mind for most everything.

Coming from a typesetting background then early to semi mature dtp, Quark was great, much better than other offerings. It was stable, it trapped where you could do it one of several ways. V 3.xx was great. Quark had a dominance issue. Adobe was barely competing with em, they came up with CS so people who barely needed it would buy CS over AI and PS alone, this allowed them to say we are gaining and growing. Quark should have wrangled Freehand, but they did all stupid things, their license was hard. etc etc. The last version of Quark I tried was a joke. But I bet they have Pantone colors!

Hey Bryce, Spot color issues going to process, black going to process. Here is a regular problem. Spot color job have to adjust for folding panels. Most times it is quicker to duplicate the pdf and crop n move the panels, but they touch and ouch, process! So now I Generally use Affinity as a panel check file. It's a tough spot because the pdfs I get in are questionable at best at times. I've done a lot of work with it and I have touted it to many people. They are freaked out when you show how to edit a pdf and make it a page layout program instead of a pdf. I do that for envelope work that will be repeated and changed in the future. Try this in InDesign, 84 page pdf. Each page you have to bring in and drop just right or adjust. Affinity drop once adjust copy go to next page, very nice!

I am a fan of Affinity, but in Prepress it needs maturing. I have regular stupid issues that are not my fault, but the program. I can use Adobe CC for everything, but I don't because I like Affinity. Two years of more and more use and still not ready to tell the boss to ditch Adobe. I will say it runs much better with a lot RAM than it did on my older computer, but that's on me.

I think Affinity Suite was too good, too small and too poor to stay the way it was. I get the business reality. I also understand what happens with mega buying meager, mega is always hungry. So that being said, until they prove us right, lets just dig in and do good stuff. BTW, lol, I use Affinity to fix a good number of Canva created PDFs I get in... lets hope it stays that way! So, I wanna dream big. Affinity show us pros that Canva can do it better. Get the right tyopgraphic engines that can run the big fonts with all the styles. Make a fourth killer program that introduces pro stuff to edit PDFs and open them in less destructive ways. I am preparing for the worst and hoping for the best. Congrats on making some moolah!

I am at a similar crossroad, but I am taking the approach of "one day" perhaps. I can't yet switch from Adobe subscription to Affinity. However, it's much closer this year than last year. My suggestion for you is to get adobe for 1 year and learn Publisher in and out and just work on those files to see where it works. Honestly, I can probably use Publisher now if I absolutely had to, but it's not always easy. I could easily exchange Designer in place of Illustrator, but Acrobat and Photoshop would be really hard. I have yet to get the hang with Photo. I do prepress for two businesses in the same building and I have to have some agility in Photoshop (total ink, GCR, Channel Mixer), it's aloof in Photo, wheras in Photoshop it's quick. Sometimes with Publisher it's got it's own stupid little issues, and learning those is frustrating, when the money is on the line. I think you already answered that question. That's the hard part about not updating (ask me about how long I held on to Freehand!) to latest software. It sucks, it's costly. Yes Adobe is a great product line, but the price they want is seriously tough on smaller businesses.

So I ran into a problems of another sort with v 2.1.1. I was pulling my hair out. Instead of blaming the software, I kept trying different things. I don't know Publisher nearly as well as InDesign, 23 years of learned production to 2 years of self training, with lots of iterations. I see the promise and the problems. Sometimes you have to rethink how you problem solve. Simple issue I had was a 1 color envelope that was processing out. Well I wrote a little spiel to submit here, but I kept on working on it. Turns out it was a pretty neat thing to fix upon export. I kept saying to myself 30 seconds in InDesign, I know the link is correct! Well, Serif doesn't quite problem solve the same way as Adobe, surprise!! But they do problem solve. It's a lot of work to figure out what is causing an issue. It's not that Publisher is unprofessional, it's raw and not the Industry standard, but it's really good. I guess I take issue with blaming the program as being faulty but not questioning how you got there! I'm still trying to figure out why you would switch at the last moment to Publisher, unless you don't have InDesign and are just importing. I get that! I want to get to the point of that, but I am not there yet, but it's a learning curve.

Why? If you have InDesign why not just finish it off there for very complex jobs? I love Macromedia Freehand, but I would never open a job that was totally done in Illustrator then open in Freehand, unless it does something I need at that point. To my thinking it makes no sense. I have honestly had better results with opening .pdfs with certain files than IDML.

Beg to differ, it does some great work, but it seems like you took a very large project to create a gotcha moment. I have had some issues, including having to save as, which I then remove the old and resave as original. It's not fun, but remember, many issues with standard programs that have workarounds we no longer think much of, but to rethink certain aspects of workflow is work!! I have had issues with spot color pdfs (not so much now) and I have worked on files that did not work out. I left em. Later went back and tried again. It's a learning curve. When I convert IDML Files I immediately save and close the file. I save very often. I don't have a built in trust for Publisher that I do for InDesign, but I do keep going back and using it. It's a great tool if you work with it. Try saving a quark file that InDesign can convert (smiles, lol). So that Publisher can even open an IDML is pretty cool.

Why would you want to do that at this time in the project? So, first thing I would do, is make sure to link pictures/art instead of embed them. IF you still have the same issue, is there a .pdf you can open? Funny enough I was very worried about Adobe nixing postscript type one fonts, but it has become a blessing for me, now files are much more cross platform. I open many .idml files in Publisher, to see how they work, and they do a pretty good job, not perfect, and when the money is on the table, it's a risky venture.

Keeps crashing, but it's not insolvable as I change to the other program. But I find more and more that I use Affinity Publisher. Mind you I am in commercial printing, where speed accuracy and repeatability are necessary tools of the trade.

Ok, So yes there are some potential drawbacks with editing pdfs in Publisher. I think as a whole, Affinity is not ready for prime time. Presently I am having issues importing large pictures into Publisher, it needs to work like every other program that is a page layout program in that sense. Variable Fonts are a big deal too. I have to fiddle around with exporting to PDF too, it's not up to par. Mind you my critiques are not "don't get it" but "please fix it" to affinity. It;s a great product at a fair price and it does some amazing stuff, and some stuff is frustrating. I keep trying it to use it more and more. One thing is now that Adobe no longer has Pantone spot colors (for the most part) Affinity is the way to go. Not having spot colors was a big mark against a lot of ok programs.

How does black type work out that way? the problem with handing off RGB files to a CMYK shop is variants (SRGB, Adobe RGB) of the same build may not end up being the same color o n output. What to do? At least if you take the responsibility to convert you will see the color differences. Anyone want to pay to get those colors fixed? Time adds up in a hurry in prepress land.