Goodbye, Adobe??

[Bold Venture]

Hello!

Okay ... In 2008, I purchased a used Adobe Creative Suite CS3 for eight-hundred dollars. For the past thirteen plus years, I have avoided upgrading. Today, I'm not certain what my options are ... my local computer repair shop replaced my dying hard drive. They preserved all of my old files (created with CS3). Unfortunately, I had to reinstall the software. Adobe gave me "activate" messages, but they've removed all the activation pages for older software.

In a nutshell, I can no longer use my perfectly good program because ... well, because.

Judging from tests, I believe it's possible to continue working with Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer, and just dump Photoshop and Illustrator. The program I really needed was Adobe InDesign, and Affinity Publisher seems more complicated. Not to mention, Affinity does not recognize my old InDesign files. For example: If I open a PDF file (created in my old Acrobat) with Affinity, the files has a few discrepancies. A perfectly aligned table of contents page now has unjustified lines.

Opening some old PDF files in Affinity would save me a tremendous amount of time, but not if text boxes and graphics are misaligned or moved around.

How can I open PDF files with minimal problems? Would it be easier, I wonder, to just subscribe to Indesign 2022 and use it in conjunction with Affinity Photo and Designer?

Edited December 31, 2021 by Bold Venture
double word

[TheDoc]

I have had a similar problem importing PDFs. But I have overcome these using a suggestion from an expert on this forum. He said load the pdf into the free adobe pdf program and do nothing but save it again. This will give you a perfect pdf that is easily downloaded to your affinity publisher.  I happened to have a copy of Wondershare PDFElement which I use to convert my WORD PDF files to PDF to publish my books on KDP Amazon. Without doing anything but uploading and downloading the pdf files I got perfect PDF's. Just a thought.

[ashf]

Try to open the pdf in a PDF viewer(Chrome, Edge, Apple Preview, etc.) and save(print) as pdf.

[Eddie Aguirre]

On 12/31/2021 at 12:02 PM, LondonSquirrel said:

You could do a temporary Adobe signup, and export your InDesign files to IDML format which APub can open. These should be better than importing PDFs.

You're right, IDML import is probably a better option than the PDF import. Keep in mind that even the IDML import will likely require some updates in Publisher. If you're looking for a long-term IDML solution, you can take a look at IDMarkz, which can convert your old CS3 documents to IDML and open those in Publisher directly, without InDesign.

IDMarkz is sold as both a macOS and Windows application. And can be purchased with a perpetual (forever) or subscription (annual) license. It's not free, but for $149, you can have peace of mind knowing that you can quickly convert any of your existing InDesign files to Affinity Publisher.

Use Promo Code IDMSE for 15% off through January 2022.

IDMarkz SE for Windows product page
IDMarkz for macOS product page
Comparison page

[Ross Gunn III]

My computer is a Mac Pro (Mid 2012) 2 X 3.06 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon with 64 GB Memory, running Mac OS 10.14.6.

I have about 200+ CS3 documents that I can not open. Is there a IDMarkz product or another product that can safely and easily open and export these documents into Affinity Publisher 1.10.5 (or another product) without problems or do I need to drink the Adobe Kool-Aid and use their $$$$ subscription platform ?

[Eddie Aguirre]

2 hours ago, Ross Gunn III said:

My computer is a Mac Pro (Mid 2012) 2 X 3.06 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon with 64 GB Memory, running Mac OS 10.14.6.

I have about 200+ CS3 documents that I can not open. Is there a IDMarkz product or another product that can safely and easily open and export these documents into Affinity Publisher 1.10.5 (or another product) without problems or do I need to drink the Adobe Kool-Aid and use their $$$$ subscription platform ?

IDMarkz will do exactly that, enable you to open your CS3 InDesign documents in Affinity Publisher. It does so by converting the INDD files to IDML and opening the IDML in Affinity Publisher, but that's all done with a simple click of a button. But, "without problems" is a bit subjective. In many cases you'll need to make minor updates to the document to handle the differences in the apps. Things like text flow will be different, you may need to adjust text boxes. The vast majority of conversions will get you 95%+ of the way to your final document.

IDMarkz Product Page