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Hi, I apologize for bringing this subject again, but this has been a lingering issue. With approximately 400 million people who write from right-to-left in the world, the lack of RTL support is mostly excluding them from using Affinity's amazing products. (I mean, Publisher is completely useless for all RTL countries) What's funny, is that I found that you can write in RTL languages in Affinity Photo and get your text appear in reverse, but if you print it then it would print correctly. Huh?! It seems like RTL support is already half baked, so why not take the extra step and finish it up? Curious to hear everyone's opinion on that and perhaps some clues as for the timeline to integrating it into Affinity's products. (as from my perspective, this has grown to be a significant differentiator between Adobe's suite and Affinity's). Thanks, -- TR

Judging by @Patrick Connor's good-humoured reaction to my quip and positive reaction to your insightful comment, one would hope that, if Affinity is to endure as a standalone product or at the very least as an integral, offline and fully professional counterpart to Canva (hey, it wouldn't even bother me if they renamed the apps to Canva Designer, Canva Photo and Canva Publisher at some point, as long as they were still offered in a perpetual license), it should target the same markets as Canva does already. It makes sense from a financial, but also from a customer relations standpoint, because once many of Canva's current and future users get accustomed to what it is to them vital RTL support, they will naturally expect it from Affinity/the professional branch of Canva as well and might be severely disappointed if it just wasn't there. As such, I fully expect it to become a thing by at least v3, by which point it will be heavily marketed towards current Canva users as having basic feature parity and then some. Bingo! In the early beginnings, with Affinity being a Mac-only application and having a very modern look and feel to it, it seemed as if Serif was just using macOS's own text rendering stack; it quickly dawned on us all that Affinity had, in fact, an inherently portable engine, which meant it must've been using its own text renderer from the very beginning. I find it a bit concerning that RTL wasn't considered from the very beginning, as it is absolutely necessary for full Unicode compliance. At this point, almost eleven years in, I would expect Affinity to also offer vertical RTL support for CJK scripts and an equivalent to Adobe's Multiline Composer… I know that is a bit of a lofty ask, but hey, maybe for v3.5? 😉

Any timeline on the RTL support? I am a heavy Indesign user but would gladly switch if Affinity supported RTL.

The best thread to discuss font-related functionality would now be the sub-thread related to the upcoming variable font support in v2.5 beta. IMHO, I would say it is a feature worth adding, because it's something that Adobe offers and is becoming trendier, and could be very popular among big sectors of Affinity's and Canva's userbase. I provided Ash with a recommendation of one of the best experts in colour OpenType-SVG fonts in Europe – and one used to work in the UK, no less –, so the ball is on their court and let's see just how loaded with cash and willing to expand Serif is now, post-acquisition. I take it that they still have to have a bit of restraint in their recruiting process (be it for full-time employees, contractors or consultants), project management and goals, etc., but we should indeed expect speedier development from now on. The ball is on their court, in any case. Interesting as this feature may sound, I highly doubt it will ever be available. It's extremely niche, and might result in quality control issues if lower quality, user-made localisation files ended up on the web. Also, with Affinity potentially becoming bigger, hiring more people for their localisation efforts would render said feature redundant for a lot of communities. And, if I may say so myself as someone from a minority community of one of top languages globally (Portuguese from Portugal, not Brazilian Portuguese), while it saddens me to see the technical design and typography jargon in pt-PT wither away (I do fight against that by recommending technical dictionaries to my students, mind you), I don't see people defaulting to English on technical software as that dire of an issue when it comes to serving a global market (RTL and Indic script support, on the other hand…). These apps' UIs are usually very sparse on text, and YouTube and the web are chock-full of tutorials using the English terminology anyway. My €0,02.

Support for Indic scripts (most of which are LTR, although there are some RTL variations) would be yet another game changer.

Getting Variable Typefaces out, as promised, on next week's beta would be a great sign. Getting colour OpenType-SVG by the end of the v2 cycle or at the beginning of the v3 cycle, an added sign of consolidation on that front. Getting RTL support would be a game-changer market-wise and show that Canva is really serious about this. I know I sound too hung-up on typography, and I'm obviously biased, but, as I've said before, eschewing entire markets and cultures based on technical constraints and… on having bet mostly on certain text/cultural-agnostic professional niches, such as digital illustration, that are pretty much well covered already by competitors (either by Canva itself, which is no longer a competitor, or by other products such as Pixelmator, Procreate, etc.) feels, in hindsight, a bit misguided but arguably still necessary in that earlier context. I didn't personally like it, but I understood that it was necessary for Serif's Affinity's continued survival. 🤷‍♂️ Yes, Serif was trying to secure a few of those niches as their cash cows (and indeed sort of succeeded at it) while they were, as it turns out, strapped for cash (or at least not rich enough to properly tackle Adobe). Conversely, with Canva's backing, they can now go head to head with the proverbial 80lb gorilla and start chipping away at their legacy feature set and keep introducing novel features, i.e. they can walk and chew gum for a change instead of dragging on with development. Again, I know fully well of the Mythical Man-Month fallacy, but it did feel as if Serif was biting more than they could chew, and I do believe that instead of having a tiny team spreading itself thin over three apps on three platforms, having a separate typography team, a separate vector design team, a separate pixel manipulation team, while keeping them tightly-knit – also unlike whatever the hell is going on at Adobe, with their sprawling thousands-strong team and dizzyingly comprehensive family of apps – is not only feasible, but the best way of going about developing a suite like this. That's the optimistic view, which I know many – including myself – don't 100% subscribe to, but we have to at least consider it as a possible scenario. Does it assuage our fears or preclude us from pursuing asset and portfolio migration plans? Sadly, no. Does it at least provide us with a glimmer of hope that we will not only end up in a better place than we are in right now as DTP suite customers, but also better than we were even back when Macromedia MX was still a thing (i.e. not eleven, but twenty years ago)? Maybe… By the way, and while on the subject of Macromedia and competition with Adobe in general, Flash and Dreamweaver, which were the main drivers behind the infamous acquisition (remember GoLive? Yeah, me neither 😂), are now relics of the past, but way before all that went down they did try to go head-to-head with Adobe also on the digital photography editing side of things with their Macromedia xRes product, and failed miserably and promptly threw in the towel by their very first and last attempt, v3 (because, mind you, they didn't even develop it in-house, instead having acquired it from Fauve Software, the true pioneers of layers before even Adobe)… Serif, on the other hand, managed to not only stay afloat for all those years with their Plus suite and then produce something competitive with freaking Photoshop v16 (the 25th anniversary, CC 2015 edition, which had been, by then, an actual verb-worthy product for around two decades and a half, and now for around 35 years), and stuck to it; they have to be commended for that.

Hi, Can you please consider supporting RTL languages like Hebrew and Arabic? As a Hebrew speaker, I have to write texts In my designs backwards, which makes me frustrated, and I know there are many other people who would like to get this feature. I use affinity design & photo for around 3 years, and that's the only con I found compared to Adobe's programs. I know that many rtl-languages speakers don't buy Affinity suit just because of this reason.

Once again and again and again, please, pretty please, support rtl texts on affinity package, I use affinity publisher to setup Arabic books with long texts, and it takes sooooo long to prepare texts outside affinity then paste them back to the the publisher. Please help!

From a very quick perusal of the Canva site, it would seem they support many different RTL languages, so it is possible this will help with adding RTL support to Affinity. I guess time will tell ....

With the new funds as resources, does this mean people like me who are interested in RTL Languages will be more of a strong reality in the very soon future as opposed to the usual Serif replies of "having to reprogram from the grounds up because RTL language support" is a complex process? They missed out a huge opportunity to potentially capture the market share in India, Arabic Diaspora, Hebrew, and East Asian (Mandation, Japanese, Etc). Regardless of this news, can we also remember the company's kindness and understanding during the pandemic? Serif for the longest time discounted their softwares to 50%. Does anyone remember this? I have privately expressed my grievances towards Affinity and I refuse to upgrade to any of their software until they include the RTL Languages. For my needs, Publisher 1.X has served me well and will continue to do so. I am a current Adobe CC Photography Plan member and also continue to be perpetual license holder of Capture one 16.3.X. Their Black Friday deal of 50% off the perpetual license was too good to pass up! These fees (to me) are cost of doing business and I'll simply adjust my fees accordingly. Can we be little bit more optimistic and hopeful?!

Don't hold your breath Affinity will NOT support any RTL or and thing else that is not Latin based - They shy away from the topic with the usual "Currently not support or no plans" which frankly becomes tedious and annoying - So don't waste your time posting these as NOTHING will be done about it.

Don't even get me started on its glaring lack of RTL support, which basically eschews a gigantic chunk of the international market… I've beaten that horse so much here in the forums it's basically glue by now. 😂

I don't think there will be fully-fledged web apps. But it will certainly incorporate some of the rudimentary functions of the Affinity Suite. And as far as Linux (Wine) support is concerned, I wouldn't get my hopes up for the time being. There are enough development priorities that have priority here. Above all, the stability of the programs, RTL and CJK support (with possible extended localization), to name some. However, the development roadmap may be different!

They could, however, have reasons to kill products that compete with Canva. Though it’s patently obvious that they target slightly different segments of the market, and that they’re adjacent enough for Affinity to be a bit of an upsell/upgrade, which might give Canva an edge over Figma or whatever lower-priced clone – offered under an equally lower-priced subscription tier, of course – Adobe may create or acquire at some point. As I’ve said: this all comes down to how greedy, complacent and/or shortsighted Canva’s executives may be in the future. Yes, they may see the cheap perpetual licenses with no extensive on-line sync and collaboration features as a gateway for more profitable – or at least more consistent as far as revenue is concerned – subscriptions, but the case for them being able to milk us all due to an independent option like Affinity – especially Affinity Publisher, even in its incomplete, RTL- and multiline-composer-less form! – no longer being available can also be made. For Affinity’s perpetual licenses to be completely safe, the folks over at VectorStyler and those at Pixelmator would have to partner up and somehow concoct a PageDesigner (sorry, FOSS peepz, Inkscape+Gimp+Scribus just don’t cut it on a technical level, because they’re frankly horrible in different ways and aren’t integrated in any meaningful way like LibreOffice is, so they don’t even have that redeeming quality going for them) and start eating away at both Adobe’s and Canva’s user base with the perpetual licenses they also based their business model on, because that’s how healthy markets work, with proper checks and balances, and not as duopolies. And I’m not even joking about this; with one company based in Salo, Finland, and the other in Vilnius, Lithuania, they’re practically neighbours when compared to the Canva-Serif pairing, and almost on the same longitude, let alone the same time zone. Heck, if either team was up to learning the other’s exceptionally weird native language, they might even properly merge and still be able to visit their loved ones every now and then after a short flight or 11-hour drive (or shorter, after that newfangled Finland-Estonia tunnel under the Baltic Sea is finished, of course, and let’s not forget the high-speed train corridor that’s being built over there as well). And, to wit and from a geopolitical/economical/regulatory standpoint, because I did mention the US’s and someone else mentioned the Aussie context as well, it would neatly split all actors between the behemoth that is the US, the historical Commonwealth (yes, we can see how synergies across it are easier, that’s not being called into question) and the EU (especially the Baltics and the Finns, which might very well stick together or at least forge powerful alliances even in a post-EU scenario, for reasons I’m pretty sure I won’t have to elaborate on here), thus keeping things a bit more cohesive and compartmentalized, i.e. safer from acquisitions across those “borders”. It would be a huge win for us all as consumers. 🤷‍♂️

Correct me if I’m wrong, but they do different things. - RTL Fixer allows one to write in any application. - ParsiNegar gives you a dedicated editor, from where you can copy text that you can then paste in other software. With RTL Fixer you can actually work as if RTL was natively supported by the underlying app.

For the maximum possible expansion of the product, it would certainly like RTL and vertical. - Optimization of curves, reduction of redundant nodes. - Support for plugins with which applications can be extended. - Support for macros/scripts that can be used to perform frequently performed actions. + many more from the "Feedback and Suggestions" thread 🙂

Yes as I mentioned in my previous reply V2 have almost every things needed to work its need some work arounds with image tracer and rtl support which I'm fine with at least we got what we bought 🐱, my expectations is low very low but let's see what time will brings us.

Yes, I know about that. But as several people have already mentioned, Canva already has experience in several of the things Affinity users have been asking for, like RTL support, so it is not as if they are starting from scratch for all of it.

Yes, that's an important consideration. But there are areas where a new group of developers could help, such as Variable Font support, or Scripting, or RTL support, which may offer large functional areas that can be largely isolated so they can be worked on separately and on their own schedules. That can mitigate the effects that Brooks discussed.

Thank you for clarifying this mr Walt, for me the V2.4.1 have everything I need if I need auto tracer I go with inkscape if I need RTL I go with leomoon so my expectations are low in this maters but to have V2 better thank run into V3 subscription. I appreciate your comment,

The missing functions and futures like auto trace and rtl support etc .. is the only winner card for V3 or Canva suite v3 or whatever, Lower you expectations we all in same boat and show some respect

The simple fact that Canva is subscription based is enough to ring the alarm bells that Affinity WILL BE the same and there is nothing ASH & Co. can do as they have bought out and they simply cannot make this decision. Affinity simply does not have the cash or man power like Canva to take these trio forward and this simply means the only option however with a lot of caveat - It would would have been better to approach Adobe or Corel or even Microsoft than Canva and they fact Canva approached them simply means they were not in a great position - Some of their practice is wrong some of the most fundamental features (RTL Support) were and are not even considered and we are reaching 2.4.1. - Senier engineers have left the company - So Canva was a life save for Affinity (At least) - Don't for one moment think you will not be forced into subscription scheme - I will be amazed if we even see version 3!!!!

From an article in Business Wire: Is it too much to hope that their multilingual experience could be leveraged to address the Affinity apps’ current lack of support for Indic and RTL languages?

I too am very disappointed that RTL is not an option. I do love affinity, but now I will have to find another source to do a large portion of my work that was intended for Affinity. Again, I love Affinity so far, but I am really hoping that this becomes an option really soon.

Hi, Not a feature request, but a short recap of what I still miss to make Publisher my page layout program. As a premise, I must say that I'm a technical writer, with the occasional narrative/philosophy book on which to work. So, my needs are very much specialistic, and not obviously general. - Export to DOCX. This is a file format that would allow exporting to word processors for further reuse, and to programs to be used to generate reflowable ePub books. It would open many opportunities for integrating Publisher into consolidated workflows. - Export to IDML. This would let InDesign users open Publisher files without too many issues. Reuse would be finally possible, and Publisher will be allowed in a consolidated workflow (as is, for example, LibreOffice or Google Docs into a workflow based on the DOCX file format). - Support for long and complex tables. As a technical writer, it is easy to understand how essential this feature would be. - Picture frame/object styles. Being able to quickly adapt the style of image frames to a different house style or output type is essential. For example, I could have shadowed images in the onscreen reading version, and have to remove them for digital printing. Styles would let one do it by just applying a template or editing some parameters in a style. - Accurate CJK language support. I just need the horizontal version, with correct spacing and line breaks. In my agenda, China and Japan are essential markets for both devices and books. - RTL language support. While a less immediate need than CJK support for me, this is important. I have to admit that these wouldn't really be a show-stopper for me, at the moment, since my partners usually prefer to work on a Word/LibreOffice file. But it would be handy, when making multilingual publications and wanting to avoid pasting text as images. - Conditional text. I make different versions of the same project, and conditional text would let me keep all the source materials in the same file. Check a few conditions, and you go from a larger edition to a limited one, or to one for a customized model. - Scripting. This is very much tied to the ability of exporting to different file formats, so it would be a bit premature. Batch-converting several files would be my main use of scripting in Publisher. So, maybe I just need a batch-convert feature. I would like more things (like export to a web site project, or finer navigation through a structure tree), but the above would really be enough to allow abandoning InDesign once forever. And getting able to take advantage of the integration with the other Affinity programs. Paolo