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Very very disappointed with Publisher 2


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On 11/10/2022 at 10:54 PM, ronnyb said:

1. There’re lots of pros using Affinity since v1 to earn a living “professionally,” whatever that label means. 2. In any case, I seriously doubt Serif haven’t professional designers and experienced production people on board, thats a ridiculous assumption. 3. Perhaps the more likely scenario is that a multitude of “pros” have their own unique workflows and use cases, and people quickly forget that a finite amount of time funnels an infinite amount of requests. 4. If Publisher doesn’t meet your current use cases it‘s best not to use it. 5. There are other powerful, affordable, polished, cross-platform, options available I’m sure…

To answer the points one by one:

1. Professionally means earning the larger part of your income from DTP.

2. You may be right, but it doesn't feel like it.

3. (ignoring the insulting quote marks) we are not talking here about whether we like the colours of an icon or a hundred and one things that don't matter/have easy work arounds. We are talking absolute deal breakers that anybody who uses DTP extensively for technical reports, books, magazines, company prospectuses, exam papers, etc etc etc cannot do without.

4. I don't use it, because I can't yet, but I do support it because I believe in it as a worthwhile project that I want to see succeed (yes, I know that's old school, but then I'm very old).

5. No there are not - not for macOS anyway. Or does the ellipse signify sarcasm? In which case the implication is that there are not any other such options, in which case it is more important than ever to make sure APub is fit for purpose.

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3 hours ago, captain_slocum said:

To answer the points one by one:

1. Professionally means earning the larger part of your income from DTP.

2. You may be right, but it doesn't feel like it.

3. (ignoring the insulting quote marks) we are not talking here about whether we like the colours of an icon or a hundred and one things that don't matter/have easy work arounds. We are talking absolute deal breakers that anybody who uses DTP extensively for technical reports, books, magazines, company prospectuses, exam papers, etc etc etc cannot do without.

4. I don't use it, because I can't yet, but I do support it because I believe in it as a worthwhile project that I want to see succeed (yes, I know that's old school, but then I'm very old).

5. No there are not - not for macOS anyway. Or does the ellipse signify sarcasm? In which case the implication is that there are not any other such options, in which case it is more important than ever to make sure APub is fit for purpose.

I agree.

I don't believe for a minute they have any disinterested professional consultants on staff, either that, or they ignore them. I haven't seen much evidence that they even listen to their users unless there's a firestorm that could affect their bottom line. Perhaps some consider taking bug reports and feature requests on V1 software that's long been out of development (in favor of V2) "listening"?

I actually prefer working in Affinity programs to anything else, and I'm not a DTP guy, but the lack of footnotes, et al. until this year is literally incomprehensible to me. It speaks volumes to the "professional" consultants they have on staff -- I mean, they couldn't even write a their own Shareholders' Report without completely unacceptable "workarounds"😮. Footnotes have been a core feature in even simple word-processors for home computers since the 1970s. I honestly don't understand Serif's thinking here, as this feature should have been in it before even the first line of code was written.

And now we have footnotes, but since they're a new feature, the user will have to babysit them to make sure they work properly -- although forcing customers to be beta testers is pretty standard in the software industry today these days.

 

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I am suffering very much from V2 instability. Please, Serif, don't say that our opinions are insulting, but try to understand that you placed us in a big mess releasing a production version that could neither be an alpha.

Here the point is not if we are polite or less (and believe me I make a big effort to be) but WHEN are you going to fix all these problems? Have you a plan? Did you prepare yourself before releasing a version with not enough test?

So please stop with this discussion about our politeness that make me even more angry and please try to solve the many and serious problems.

We have been liking you and we want again the possibility to trust you. But please give us some answers.

More than 30 Macs, from 1984 Mac 512K Plus to 2020 iMac 27" i9

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As a mid level user I do not understand all these complaints. I got V2 for just € 119. Adobe CC is offered for € 700+ per year!! I have a long history with QuarkXpress and Adobe CS - at the bottom line these products are not better, they may have some functions that some users might miss at Affinity apps - and vice versa. I accept some workaraounds rather than wasting money.

If it comes to compatibility: Isn't it mainly the reluctance to learn new functions?

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6 minutes ago, eWolf said:

Thanks, teacher. But I said "I do not understand". So what is your point?

You're projecting.

Humility is the path to understanding and insight.

If you want to ask questions in order to begin understanding the scope of your lack of understanding, just do that rather than being somewhat presumptive about what the problems might be that cause the complaints that you don't understand.

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It sure would be nice if we could all stick to discussion about the Affinity products and our own perspectives in these forums. Alternate points of view can be expressed without criticizing someone else’s opinion, or them personally.

The Affinity forums have felt more like a social media site recently, with all the negativity and vitriol being directed at individuals.

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Today with Affinity Publisher I had 34 crashes.

For unknown reason, with M1 processor, the size of the file grew from about 500M to 2G (known bug).

I save about every 10 minutes, so I stored today about 72G byte of various versions.

Sometimes previous version cannot be reopen, so in that case I lose 20 minutes work instead of 10.

These are facts, not words.

More than 30 Macs, from 1984 Mac 512K Plus to 2020 iMac 27" i9

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On 11/16/2022 at 2:40 PM, ChopperNova said:

I actually prefer working in Affinity programs to anything else, and I'm not a DTP guy, but the lack of footnotes, et al. until this year is literally incomprehensible to me. It speaks volumes to the "professional" consultants they have on staff -- I mean, they couldn't even write a their own Shareholders' Report without completely unacceptable "workarounds"😮. Footnotes have been a core feature in even simple word-processors for home computers since the 1970s. I honestly don't understand Serif's thinking here, as this feature should have been in it before even the first line of code was written.

And now we have footnotes, but since they're a new feature, the user will have to babysit them to make sure they work properly -- although forcing customers to be beta testers is pretty standard in the software industry today these days.

Oh, come now. Let's be realistic, and compare Publisher's development progress with InDesign:

InDesign 1: Everything new! (1991) <--> Publisher R1: Everything New! (2019)

Both were products developed from scratch by companies with a deep understanding and experience developing design software.

Either first release lacked footnotes or book support. But Publisher R1 offers a wide range of features that were only introduced in InDesign by version 2 ~three years later in 2022: transparency, TOC, indexes, glyphs panel, tables - to name but a few things.

And MANY features that are part of Publisher R1 only became available after years and years of development later in subsequent InDesign releases: multi-page PDF placing, bullets and numbering, dynamic spelling, IDML format, multiple page sizes in a single file, primary text frame, Hunspell dictionaries, anchored objects, data merging tools, doc info fields, hyperlinks (pdf), smart guides, effects, and so on and so forth.

InDesign 2 <--> Publisher R2

InDesign became somewhat usable compared to QuarkXPress three years later. Rather lacking, but it was the first release that professional users (including myself) began testing the waters with. SO MUCH was missing compared to Publisher R2. But one thing InDesign 2 had going for it: OS X was supported. QXP only supported that OS much later, and it was one reason why Mac users installed it.

The InDesign developers also inexplicably removed useful features such as SVG export in 2008 with CS4, however. (Publisher has been a gods' end in this regard: I have converted quite a few InDesign publications by opening the IDML, fixing a few things, and export the pages to SVG! 🙂 )

Version R2 of Publisher is a far more mature product compared to InDesign 2, 3, or even CS2 (which was released 8 years after version 1).

I am aware it is not possible to compare the development cycles of the two programs directly. Affinity Publisher started development in a time when dev tools have become easier and more efficient to develop with. But still, to state that development is lagging or slow is rather out-of-touch with the realities of complex software development.

In fact, I am quite impressed with what the Affinity devs have accomplished so far with Publisher. They are far ahead of the curve compared to InDesign's development cycle.

All that said, I do agree that there are a few inexplicable omissions in Publisher that seem so foundational to publishing in general that prevent myself from using it - because I simply cannot produce a press ready PDF. My personal pet peeve is the lack of 1bit bitmaps and support to output these properly in a PDF. The lack of spreads beyond two pages is another one. And reflowable epub export would be grand.

Yet as it is said: Rome was not built in a day. Neither was InDesign, and the same holds true for Affinity. Even though I cannot use Publisher yet for much of my work and still rely on InDesign, I position myself as a pragmatic person. I trust these issues will be tackled and solved in the not-so-long term. I am patient. And there is no need to flip over in anger over software or what could have been.

(I continued to use QuarkXPress till 6-7 years later after InDesign's first release).

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🥱

 1) You have completely wrecked the layers panel, Serif.

2) I recommend Reddit groups instead of this forum. Not the same few bot-like users replying to everything, a wider representation of users, fewer fanboys, more qualified users. In short, better!

3) I was here to report bugs and submit improvement requests for professional work professionally in a large setup and to bring a lot of knowledge from the world, i.e. professional product development, web- and software development, usability, user experience design and accessibility. I actually know what I am talking about!

BUT! We are phasing out Designer and Affinity in 2022 Q1 - and replacing it with feature complete and algorithmically competent alternatives.
Publisher is unsuitable for serious use, and was never adopted.

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51 minutes ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

Oh, come now. Let's be realistic, and compare Publisher's development progress with InDesign:

InDesign 1: Everything new! (1991) <--> Publisher R1: Everything New! (2019)

Both were products developed from scratch by companies with a deep understanding and experience developing design software.

Either first release lacked footnotes or book support. But Publisher R1 offers a wide range of features that were only introduced in InDesign by version 2 ~three years later in 2022: transparency, TOC, indexes, glyphs panel, tables - to name but a few things.

And MANY features that are part of Publisher R1 only became available after years and years of development later in subsequent InDesign releases: multi-page PDF placing, bullets and numbering, dynamic spelling, IDML format, multiple page sizes in a single file, primary text frame, Hunspell dictionaries, anchored objects, data merging tools, doc info fields, hyperlinks (pdf), smart guides, effects, and so on and so forth.

InDesign 2 <--> Publisher R2

InDesign became somewhat usable compared to QuarkXPress three years later. Rather lacking, but it was the first release that professional users (including myself) began testing the waters with. SO MUCH was missing compared to Publisher R2. But one thing InDesign 2 had going for it: OS X was supported. QXP only supported that OS much later, and it was one reason why Mac users installed it.

The InDesign developers also inexplicably removed useful features such as SVG export in 2008 with CS4, however. (Publisher has been a gods' end in this regard: I have converted quite a few InDesign publications by opening the IDML, fixing a few things, and export the pages to SVG! 🙂 )

Version R2 of Publisher is a far more mature product compared to InDesign 2, 3, or even CS2 (which was released 8 years after version 1).

I am aware it is not possible to compare the development cycles of the two programs directly. Affinity Publisher started development in a time when dev tools have become easier and more efficient to develop with. But still, to state that development is lagging or slow is rather out-of-touch with the realities of complex software development.

In fact, I am quite impressed with what the Affinity devs have accomplished so far with Publisher. They are far ahead of the curve compared to InDesign's development cycle.

All that said, I do agree that there are a few inexplicable omissions in Publisher that seem so foundational to publishing in general that prevent myself from using it - because I simply cannot produce a press ready PDF. My personal pet peeve is the lack of 1bit bitmaps and support to output these properly in a PDF. The lack of spreads beyond two pages is another one. And reflowable epub export would be grand.

Yet as it is said: Rome was not built in a day. Neither was InDesign, and the same holds true for Affinity. Even though I cannot use Publisher yet for much of my work and still rely on InDesign, I position myself as a pragmatic person. I trust these issues will be tackled and solved in the not-so-long term. I am patient. And there is no need to flip over in anger over software or what could have been.

(I continued to use QuarkXPress till 6-7 years later after InDesign's first release).

Development cycles are irrelevant. They need to compete with the contemporary market just like every other product.

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1 hour ago, ChopperNova said:

Development cycles are irrelevant. They need to compete with the contemporary market just like every other product.

The first statement is wrong, the second is correct. A small company like Serif will find it hard to compete with a large company like Adobe, for example, on sheer development capacity. They can only do so much, while the larger company can do more. Adobe evidently have development cycles too, hence their list of "new features" in CC. This year's features were not there a year ago. And the same for a year ago. Development cycle?

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1 hour ago, LondonSquirrel said:

The first statement is wrong, the second is correct. A small company like Serif will find it hard to compete with a large company like Adobe, for example, on sheer development capacity. They can only do so much, while the larger company can do more. Adobe evidently have development cycles too, hence their list of "new features" in CC. This year's features were not there a year ago. And the same for a year ago. Development cycle?

Comparing the development cycle of InDesign starting in 1991 vs. Affinity Publisher starting in 2019 is patently irrelevant.

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1 hour ago, ChopperNova said:

Comparing the development cycle of InDesign starting in 1991 vs. Affinity Publisher starting in 2019 is patently irrelevant.

Which is why I mentioned we cannot compare them directly. Yet I do see parallels between QuarkXpress and InDesign back then, and InDesign and Affinity Publisher now.

Users were not unhappy with QXP, but rather with the company and its business practices at the time. Similarly, many Adobe users are quite happy using the software, but rather frustrated with Adobe's rental business model.

Quark had all the bells and whistles while InDesign was lagging behind in key areas for many years. InDesign was patently unable to compete on features with QXP for quite a while (in some areas they still can't). Publisher has a broad set of features that compares quite well with the current version of InDesign despite only being on the market for 3 years. Much better in any case than the first three/four versions of InDesign compared to QuarkXpress.

And no matter back in 1991 or now in the 2020s: development takes time. It's not a matter of merely throwing more developers at a project and expect faster development, because that is not how it works in practice.

This comparison I made was merely to point out these three things. And compared to how long it took the InDesign devs to implement "we can't live without X or Y feature", I am actually quite amazed how far Publisher has progressed in a mere few years.

Do I think the devs should focus more on base features that have been around and in use since the beginning of DTP? Yes, I do. But I expect them to get it right in the not-so-long term.

19 minutes ago, deeds said:

are they competing?

Oh, they definitely are, even if Serif wouldn't be competing intentionally. 

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39 minutes ago, Medical Officer Bones said:
1 hour ago, deeds said:

are they competing?

Oh, they definitely are, even if Serif wouldn't be competing intentionally. 

You don't think there's more equivalence with a suckerfish (remora) and its host shark?

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11 hours ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

And no matter back in 1991 or now in the 2020s: development takes time. It's not a matter of merely throwing more developers at a project and expect faster development, because that is not how it works in practice.

While true to some degree, it isn't entirely the case, else Adobe would have little advantage. When you look at the development rate of something like DaVinci Resolve Studio in the past two years alone, it makes Serif's development look positively glacial.

At any rate, I lay the blame entirely at the feet of management. It doesn't matter if you have a first rate engineering team, if you have fuzzy-minded management that's not only inept, but has misplaced priorities. Think how much dev time they're wasting on this MSIX fiasco, and they still can't even manage an ETA for industry standard installers for V2. They act like some Kick-Starter Startup, rather than a real company.

What's actually in Publisher V2 is great, I just can't wait 'till they finish it.

(Slight correction: Wikipedia places the intro year of InDesign at 1999, but it doesn't change the discussion.)

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28 minutes ago, ChopperNova said:

While true to some degree, it isn't entirely the case, else Adobe would have little advantage. When you look at the development rate of something like DaVinci Resolve Studio in the past two years alone, it makes Serif's development look positively glacial.

At any rate, I lay the blame entirely at the feet of management. It doesn't matter if you have a first rate engineering team, if you have fuzzy-minded management that's not only inept, but has misplaced priorities. Think how much dev time they're wasting on this MSIX fiasco, and they still can't even manage an ETA for industry standard installers for V2. They act like some Kick-Starter Startup, rather than a real company.

What's actually in Publisher V2 is great, I just can't wait 'till they finish it.

(Slight correction: Wikipedia places the intro year of InDesign at 1999, but it doesn't change the discussion.)

I feel like with V1, there were growing pains and significant challenges, so was easier to overlook the release of unfinished features and lack of polish. With V2, I seriously believe that the tolerance for that is going to be much lower simply because the marketing hype set a standard.

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1 hour ago, ChopperNova said:

At any rate, I lay the blame entirely at the feet of management. It doesn't matter if you have a first rate engineering team, if you have fuzzy-minded management that's not only inept, but has misplaced priorities. Think how much dev time they're wasting on this MSIX fiasco, and they still can't even manage an ETA for industry standard installers for V2. They act like some Kick-Starter Startup, rather than a real company.

1 hour ago, debraspicher said:

I feel like with V1, there were growing pains and significant challenges, so was easier to overlook the release of unfinished features and lack of polish. With V2, I seriously believe that the tolerance for that is going to be much lower simply because the marketing hype set a standard.

You two nailed it. Management is ultimately responsible for direction, marketing and delivery. With V1, I was very patient and understanding. With V2, I expected more, especially given the build up. Upon arrival, it really feels like Serif overpromised and underdelivered, while adding dismissiveness to V1 customer concerns for good measure.

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