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What is the target market for Affinity Publisher? Is it intended for professional typesetters or only enthusiastic hobbyists? If the former at what stage do you intend to offer multiline composition? This was the key feature that won me over from QuarkXPress 4.1 to InDesign from the day version 1.0 was released in the UK. And I suspect its continuing omission from XPress is central to Quark's failure to win back disgruntled users of InDesign, despite the current upgrade offer (upgrade to XPress 2015 via Xpress 10 for £299 from XPress 3 or later).

New here — not much luck yet with forum search. If there's a discussion about this, apologies for not having found it. Back in the Neolithic I used QuarkXPress, which supported a tagging method for text import: Simple codes embedded in plain text were transformed into complex formatting during import. The competition didn't have such a feature at the time. It was among several reasons for QXP's becoming the program of record for book pagination (until InDesign came along). Even years before microcomputers took over the world, the typesetting systems I used had tagging and translation-table features. Same purpose: Prepare text containing simple codes, then get complex formatting during text import. The machines' CPUs ran at glacial speeds compared with what we have now. But the text-import systems were fast and efficient. It's orders of magnitude faster than importing plain text into a design/pagination program and then hand-formatting it. Search/replace is not efficient unless a program supports complex search/replace enabling it to find starting and ending tags and formatting text located between those tags. Even at that, having to do it repetitively is tedious and time-consuming. (If search/replace can be controlled via scripting, that certainly helps.) Manipulating text outside the pagination program is inherently more efficient. It can be done with powerful and fast tools ideal for that purpose (Python, Perl, Ruby, and so forth). Affinity Publisher looks like an excellent contender. It too needs this kind of feature. If the company has no such plans for the near future, I hope the program has a plug-in architecture enabling a third party to add this functionality. To anyone importing a lot of text, that kind of automation is worth paying for.

Do Affinity Photo offer the same option as Adobe Photoshop to store composite Alpha channels that QuarkXPress can read. I use frequently the lasso tool to create alpha channels to isolate parts of an image (to isolate the background from an object). In Photoshop this is done under the Select menu. The mask is stored as a channel that you activate in QuarkXPress. I don't get it work in Affinity Photo.

1. Would I be able to open files created in InDesign or QuarkXpress in Publisher like I can do with Illustrator files in Designer and Photoshop files in Photo? I use InDesign a lot want to know if I need to start converting files before Publisher is released and before I let go of my Adobe Subscription. 2. Would we be able to create interactive PDFs as we can do in InDesign? Hyperlinks, Cross-Referencing, Table of Contents, etc.? 3. Any news on release date for Publisher?