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Florian Karsten

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  1. Sorry i didn't mean to imply that it is working right now. I wanted to say that it is separate thing and even if it worked it is not sufficient for scripting.
  2. I am not sure if we are not mixing up things together. I thought that you meant using apple script as scripting language for Affinity products (it's not only about publisher). Meaning scripts that Affinity can run to control itself (and get low level control) like transforming text, populating frames with images, get data from excell table, connecting to web to grab something, drawing points and lines... basically anything. For this AppleScript would be a bad choice because its old (last version 2014) and does not have any ecosystem (dont forget the amount of libraries javascript or python already have for any possible usecase) and it's not open-source. It seems that you talk about ability of Affinity programs to be programmable/automatable from outside with applescript or things like automator. This is very different thing. But this type of programmable user actions is on OS level and you can already do it. If you put this in OSX Script Editor tell application "Affinity Publisher Beta" activate open "/Users/user/Documents/test.afpub" end tell It will work and you can script user actions in the software. I guess adobe is exposing more controls to OS so more things can be automated this way (and they have it documented here https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/photoshop/scripting/Photoshop-CS6-AppleScript-Ref.pdf ) so you might want to want for Affinity to think about this. Who knows maybe it is easy for them to expose more functionality this way. There is probably some work needed to be done so script editor get documentation like some other software (screenshot of Adobe Illustrator) currently it doesnt. By the way Apple it seems is already moving away from Applescript to Javascript for OS level automation. In script editor you can switch to Javascript mode and do everything. They cal it JXA - javascript automaton. https://apple-dev.groups.io/g/jxa/wiki/JXA-Resources But overall i think people in this thread are mainly interested fairly low level scripting access to Affinity products. Personally i never found much that much usecase for automation of GUI apps on OS level. On the other hand what i totally need for my work is to generate PDFs. Imagine for example you are making book of all pantone colors from excel table - this would be insane without automation (and yes you can generate those pdfs somewhere else but ability to still edit afterwards is priceless).
  3. I am doing both print design and also programming websites. And i have generated some books using indesign scripting. Indesign scripting is not good because it is many things slapped together with old legacy support. Also the Javascript there is really old. This does not mean Javascript is bad choice. Apple script is really bad choice for multiple reasons: It is not platform agnostic - i am mac user but there are many win users and you just need shared ecosystem of scripts period. This would mean having Serif supporting multiple languages one on mac one on windows. Too big burden. As far as i know apple script is going away. It might just happen that apple just kills it. So any good scripting language will do honestly. Current Javascript, Lua or Python are all good choices. I am sure Serif knows about all of the above and are working on some unified scripting solution for all of affinity software. If you would ask me Javascript would probably be best choice (similarly for how most game engines use JS for scripting) because it is just most commonly used programming language. It has biggest amount of libraries, tutorials and resources. You will easily find someone who can program JS. Biggest plus actually could be (in future) similar thing what adobe is doing. Including light webrowser and using html+js for scripts UI - this is easiest way how to add some UI to your software. This is not possible with python or lua. Anyway Serif please do it some day. And please do just One proper way.
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