Can Newspapers use Affinity instead of Adobe

[Christopher J.]

I run a small newspaper company in Iowa and am in working in cs6. I would have a tough time affording 7 adobe cloud licenses and am looking at alternatives. please let me know if affinity products would work and if other newspapers are using it.

thank you

[Seneca]

2 hours ago, Christopher J. said:

please let me know if affinity products would work and if other newspapers are using it.

The short answer is yes, the longer one is it depends.

However, only you can answer that question adequately by testing the software and testing it again.

Don't rely on anybody's opinions in this matter because each company/users have different expectations.

So once again, test, test and test again.

Once you do that you will arrive at own conclusion which is the most important one.

Practical suggestion: recreate your newspaper with Affinity Publisher (try to test Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo as well).

 

 

[thomaso]

1 minute ago, Seneca said:

Practical suggestion: recreate your newspaper with Affinity Publisher

... or simply start in Publisher the test with an imported .IDML document from your newspaper.

[h_d]

Hi @Christopher J. and welcome!

As a former newspaper editorial production person with a fair amount of experience in system upgrades and replacements, I would say:

As @Seneca says: test, test and test again before you consider committing. You can download a 10-day free trial of all the apps, but considering the time you'll need to come to a fully informed decision, I would suggest buying at least one licence for Publisher and Photo, and possibly one for Designer if you produce a lot of graphics.

Consider every aspect of your workflow, end to end - page planning, advertising, editorial, page output, web output (if appropriate), archiving. If you decide to change, it would be a major project - and a major upheaval - that would require huge commitment from staff and suppliers.

For example advertising - the Affinity apps don't currently supported embedded fonts in PDFs. If that's how many of your ads are supplied, you'll either have to ask your advertisers to flatten their ads before submission or supply you with the fonts. (I can hear the screams from across the Atlantic - and there may be issues with font licensing.) How do you currently place ads on the page? Manually or automatically, with external systems? What would you do about classified ads?

Editorial - Affinity apps don't lend themselves to collaborative working in the sense that there's no integrated text-editing app. So it wouldn't be straightforward to have one person working on the copy while another works on the layout. If you're used to that with InDesign you'd need to work out different editorial workflows. How would you replicate your existing colour palettes, paragraph styles, standing artwork etc?  How do you manage picture flows? Would you need to buy licenses for Affinity Photo as well as Affinity Publisher (still a heck of a lot less expensive than Adobe...).

Web - how do you process pages and/or individual stories? PDF upload? XML? You could do the former in Affinity Publisher but possibly not the latter.

Page output - make absolutely sure that your printers can accept what you are producing (either EPS or PDF), and ask them to run test pages to iron out details before going live.

Automation - the Affinity apps have no scripting capabilities beyond some fairly basic single-app macros. If you you rely on scripted automation (AppleScript, VBS, whatever) then Affinity may not be ideal.

And finally - try not to let anyone persuade you that this would be a good time for a redesign 

In my humble opinion: yes, in basic terms it would be perfectly possible to produce a newspaper using the Affinity suite of applications. But the devil is in the details. And there are many more things to consider than I've covered here!

Good luck, and post back if you need more input!

 

[thomaso]

15 minutes ago, h_d said:

Editorial - Affinity apps don't lend themselves to collaborative working in the sense that there's no integrated text-editing app.

+1 more missing feature regarding text which may influence your newspaper workflow:

In APub you can't place text files (.doc / .rtf /.txt) as linked objects, for instance to update them with an edited text version.

[wonderings]

As others have said over and over again, TEST! I am in print but not newspaper printing so not sure what your needs are specifically there when it comes to formatting and prepping the paper. One big thing that may or may not effect you is how Publisher handles PDF's. If you get an ad or anything in PDF that has text in it and place it in Publisher you will probably have issues. Publisher cannot use embedded PDF fonts and cannot place in the same way Indesign does. What this means is Publisher attempts to make the PDF editable. This is good for some things but I find the bad outweighs the good in this regard and would rather stay away from editing PDF's in my page layout program.

The software is cheap, I would purchase Publisher, Designer, and Photo (if you need vector and photo editing) for one user and let them try and work with it. I would seriously check every single job produced with it for a while till you understand it's limitations and problems. 

h_d summed it all up perfectly and I agree completely with everything he said. 

[Fixx]

Main problem may be placing adverts in PDF format. It does not really work at the moment. It might be possible to create automated workflow which takes incoming PDFs, converts them to .PS with fonts outlined, and you could place them to layout. So far no one has implemented this I am afraid.