Input from long-term Adobe user

[CameronQ]

Together the help of a graphic designer with 40 years experience we are in the last few days of a nine month project (thanks Covid lockdown!)  for the reprint of a book I wrote in 1987. It's a big project: 272 pages, English and Japanese, 32 page colour section, 300+ illustrations and photos. In 1987 we did the lay-up with expensive colour seps, waxed bromides, layout boards and pencils. This time we did it with Affinity Publisher and Affinity Photo. Will, the designer, has used InDesign since Quark Express days but before this one I suggested Affinity Publisher. It has been a real time saver for many reasons and we both fell in love with many of the features, but boy oh boy we had some issues. Just thought I'd mention them for Serif's perusal. The footnotes problem has been covered elsewhere so will leave that. We found a useable workaround despite it being time consuming. I wrote and illustrated the book and had a lot of input with how I wanted it to look so used Affinity Publisher to get the bulk of it ready. Will added his experienced touch to tighten everything up and prepare it professionally. We were mostly working in two locations and i was constantly making changes so firstly had a lot of problems embedding the many images.

Just wanted to say thank you as I am going to be using the Affinity suite and Will wants to as well but will continue with AI, PS and InD for a while yet. We just had too many head-scratching moments. The 1987 version became a big hit and second hand copies still sell for $1,000 a copy. We reckon this one is going to be even better largely thanks to Affinity. But the issues are real and worth mentioning, only because we want things to be easier for the next book (next year).

Here's a conversation with Will just this morning:

 

[garrettm30]

I feel like we need some more context to understand what is being expressed in the screenshot of the text messages. I do not doubt that there is much room for improvement, but I am just not understanding what it is that you are suggesting in this thread.