I cannot open Adobe Indesign CC docs with Affinity Publisher. That's why I bought it.

[cyberageous]

Centimeters to Inches Chart.indd

[Alfred]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, @cyberageous.

Affinity Publisher can open IDML files, but it can’t currently (and probably never will be able to) read the closed format of INDD files.

[PaoloT]

I wonder why you bought Publisher to open InDesign CC docs, if it can't do it?

Paolo

 

[cyberageous]

2 hours ago, PaoloT said:

I wonder why you bought Publisher to open InDesign CC docs, if it can't do it?

Paolo

 

I read somewhere it was equivalent, shame on me. What a dirty trick to take InDesign away from us non-professionals.  I loved it! I HAD to use Quark back in the old days and hated it. I only use it to make recipe and greeting  cards.  Could you recommend a program equivalent to InDesign? NO cloud! I'm old, we don't accept that.

 

Edited June 17, 2022 by cyberageous

[Alfred]

16 minutes ago, cyberageous said:

I read somewhere it was equivalent, shame on me. What a dirty trick to take InDesign away from us non-professionals. I loved it! I HAD to use Quark back in the old days and hated it.

If you really need to open INDD files, rent InDesign for a month and open those files so you can export their contents to IDML format. As for QXP, how much you hated it probably depends on just how long ago “the old days” were.

[PaoloT]

38 minutes ago, cyberageous said:

Could you recommend a program equivalent to InDesign?

No program that I know can read InDesign files. They may be nearly-equivalents in features, but this doesn’t mean they can open InDesign files.

I see two solutions:

- If you still have InDesign, export your old files as IDML files, and then open them with Publisher.

- If you can no longer access InDesign, you can try opening the PDF files with Publisher, and probably be able to recover most of your work.

Paolo

 

[wonderings]

1 hour ago, cyberageous said:

I read somewhere it was equivalent, shame on me. What a dirty trick to take InDesign away from us non-professionals.  I loved it! I HAD to use Quark back in the old days and hated it. I only use it to make recipe and greeting  cards.  Could you recommend a program equivalent to InDesign? NO cloud! I'm old, we don't accept that.

 

I make my living using Adobe CC and Indesign is what I use most. Affinity Publisher is the closest thing to Indesign that I have seen. It is relatively simple to use (with understanding of how Indesign works). Adobe CC is made for professionals, it is their market, they are not aiming this at casual home users. This is where Serif shines with their 3 apps, Publisher, Designer and Photo. Amazing price for feature rich applications. They are not perfect, and have room for improvement, but the price tag is amazing.

Not sure what type of work you are trying to do, but Publisher should be able to handle just about anything you throw at it if you are creating from scratch. If you need to work collaboratively with people using Indesign then you should be using Indesign, you will have nothing but headaches trying to work in an Indesign environment with anything but Indesign. 

ALWAYS test out demos before buying to make sure it does what you need it to do, no excuse for a bad purchase if you don't try out a demo first. 

 

[MikeW]

31 minutes ago, PaoloT said:

No program that I know can read InDesign files. They may be nearly-equivalents in features, but this doesn’t mean they can open InDesign files.

Here ya go...Viva Designer can.

So can IDMarkz SE, its output is .idml which can then be opened in APub or anything that can open .idml:

 

[dcr]

IDMarkz from Markzware can also convert InDesign files to IDML so they can be opened in Affinity Publisher.