Search the Community

Greetings from someone who never used desktop publishing software until age 75. (Admittedly, I was a programmer/analyst on the mainframe IBM360 during the 1980s.) However, my previous experience is thus analogous to a dirigible mechanic trying to fix a modern fly-by-wire fighter jet. Back in my misspent youth, I was an historian, a museum curator, a darkroom technician and magazine editor, and wrote several books and many articles. With some book projects that had been rusticating on the back burner for decades, I shopped around for a powerful, yet affordable, publishing software and kept coming back to Serif Affinity. I purchased the suite of programs and the updated versions and have not regretted that decision. After the steep, but not daunting, learning curve from knowing absolutely zero to being able to actually produce print-ready pdfs, I edited, designed, illustrated and published a three-volume introduction to (U.S.) Civil War paper ephemera, and a reprint of a Victorian "dime novel" between August 2022 and February 2023. I'm currently in the final stages of resurrecting the works of "Bracebridge Hemyng," a nineteenth-century London barrister-turned sensational novelist who created "Jack Harkaway." A friend created a video "book trailer" on YouTube for the Civil War volumes: The books average about 300 pages each, with hundreds of illustrations in full color. And here is my preliminary cover design for the upcoming "Jack Harkaway" biography/bibliography: Still discovering the ins and outs of Affinity Designer and Photo, but they have made these projects much easier and allowed total artistic and editorial control. My message is: If an old geezer can do it, go for it!