Very very disappointed with Publisher 2

[Gianni Becattini]

WARNING, DON'T USE PUBLISHER V2 if you have serious work to do. It is absolutely unreliable. I lost an entire week of hard work. The file passed from 500M to 5G and now it is no longer editable.

I was already late with my work, now I go into big troubles.

The only solution is now going back to rev. 1, comparing line by line each of 410 pages of graphics and re-converting 59 images by hand. Another week, if I am lucky.

Very, very disappointed? Believe me, the point is not the price, I would pay 1,000€ now for having not trusted Affinity.

Thanks, Serif.

 

[ChopperNova]

25 minutes ago, Gianni Becattini said:

WARNING, DON'T USE PUBLISHER V2 if you have serious work to do. It is absolutely unreliable. I lost an entire week of hard work. The file passed from 500M to 5G and now it is no longer editable.

I was already late with my work, now I go into big troubles.

The only solution is now going back to rev. 1, comparing line by line each of 410 pages of graphics and re-converting 59 images by hand. Another week, if I am lucky.

Very, very disappointed? Believe me, the point is not the price, I would pay 1,000€ now for having not trusted Affinity.

Thanks, Serif.

 

You probably already know this, but Affinity Photo can open .afpub files. You go spread to spread via little arrows on the lower left. Could be helpful, depending on the exact problem.

Releasing final versions before public betas also speaks to management quality.

[Amateur John]

22 hours 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?

Remember 'The Mythical Man Month' . It was a book published in the mid seventies about the development of an IBM operating system. The project ran late and IBM threw more and more people into the team. Progress slowed.

Much later Pro-Engineer, a CAD CAM company was founded by a very small team of software engineers who were fed up with their large employer. They produced a very successful innovative product which became more popular than that of their previous employer. I expect that there are many examples where small teams successfully challenge big teams.

A small expert and enthusiastic team in which everyone knows and understands what everyone else is doing can make rapid progress. Big teams get bogged down with lack of communication and lack of shared understanding. A small company like Serif does compete with the Adobe leviathan.

I have bought the full Affinity licence although I only use Photo (and Publisher occasionally). I wish the company well.

[PaoloT]

2 hours ago, ChopperNova said:

You probably already know this, but Affinity Photo can open .afpub files.

If AfDesigner can do the same, maybe I would use it, since it would also recover the text frames.

Paolo

 

[4dimage]

On 11/10/2022 at 7:28 PM, Bryan Rieger is on a break said:

While I'm disappointed with this release, I'm still optimistic that Serif is listening and will do better in the future. 

Maybe this is the right time for Serif to try the whole public roadmap thing again (but different from last time)? For those of us along for the ride, it would be nice to know where we're heading.

My feelings are also very ambiguous. I hope for some public betas again?

[rparmar]

I commented on page one of this thread and only now came back. In the meantime, I was out there doing real work, some of which involved teaching Affinity products. In the interim I updated to version 2, despite the fact Publisher is lagging quite severely behind the other components. 

I have just read several posts saying that Publisher works just fine and is "missing nothing" from Adobe's products. Such comments are simply the product of ignorance. Perhaps it's worth repeating the missing features, so that people joining the thread more recently can learn.

• No spreads of 3+ pages. This is a problem I encounter on day two of teaching first year design. Day two. It's not an advanced feature at all, but rather a requirement for covers with spines, flyers, and many other types of publications. 
• No informal spreads, which allow temporary reorganisation for side-to-side comparison.
• No scripting, which strictly limits automation, making Publisher unsuitable for complex documents. 
• No conditional text or objects. Ditto.
• No regular expression search/replace. Ditto.
• No global layers. The current layer implementation works on a page-by-page basis which is unsuitable for many use cases. 
• No Markdown import, IDML export, ePub export, etc. which seriously limits inter-operability in professional workflows. 
• No cross-references for story text, only indices.
• No vertical text or RTL (right-to-left) text.
• No typeface sets, which helps organise resources across project pools.

On the plus side, we did get these features:

• Footnote / endnote support.
• Ability to compile documents as a Book.

Not all of these features are equally important, but this list should at least demonstrate the gap between Affinity Publisher and the competition. There's far more room for improvement in this application than the rest of the suite. But I suppose that DTP is less glamorous and has a smaller user base. So perhaps we will never have a competitor for Adobe?

[debraspicher]

16 minutes ago, rparmar said:

I commented on page one of this thread and only now came back. In the meantime, I was out there doing real work, some of which involved teaching Affinity products. In the interim I updated to version 2, despite the fact Publisher is lagging quite severely behind the other components. 

I have just read several posts saying that Publisher works just fine and is "missing nothing" from Adobe's products. Such comments are simply the product of ignorance. Perhaps it's worth repeating the missing features, so that people joining the thread more recently can learn.

• No spreads of 3+ pages. This is a problem I encounter on day two of teaching first year design. Day two. It's not an advanced feature at all, but rather a requirement for covers with spines, flyers, and many other types of publications. 
• No informal spreads, which allow temporary reorganisation for side-to-side comparison.
• No scripting, which strictly limits automation, making Publisher unsuitable for complex documents. 
• No conditional text or objects. Ditto.
• No regular expression search/replace. Ditto.
• No global layers. The current layer implementation works on a page-by-page basis which is unsuitable for many use cases. 
• No Markdown import, IDML export, ePub export, etc. which seriously limits inter-operability in professional workflows. 
• No cross-references for story text, only indices.
• No vertical text or RTL (right-to-left) text.
• No typeface sets, which helps organise resources across project pools.

On the plus side, we did get these features:

• Footnote / endnote support.
• Ability to compile documents as a Book.

Not all of these features are equally important, but this list should at least demonstrate the gap between Affinity Publisher and the competition. There's far more room for improvement in this application than the rest of the suite. But I suppose that DTP is less glamorous and has a smaller user base. So perhaps we will never have a competitor for Adobe?

Agree with most everything here despite the backhanded commentary. It being further down the list in features behind the other apps makes sense since Publisher came later compare to Photo and even Designer. I'm not sure that a Publisher app was always planned? I could be wrong, but some of us were surprised when it was announced when were waiting on Designer, in particular, to receive critical features.

Spreads and conditional formatting to me are essential to get me to break my workflow from Designer to Publisher for folded items. This is something for Serif to consider, even for light users. And yet, this post which is quite old said in 2018 they didn't have plans to add them at all. Hopefully this has changed internally. Feel free to add your take to that thread as well:

[fde101]

1 hour ago, rparmar said:

No scripting

Serif has clearly stated that they do have a team working on this and it will be coming when it is ready.

 

1 hour ago, rparmar said:

No regular expression search/replace

This has been available for several versions now.  In the Find/Replace panel, click the gear next to Find and choose Regular Expression.

 

1 hour ago, rparmar said:

IDML export

QuarkXPress doesn't have this either, at least not "out of the box" - it has IDML import only, just like Affinity Publisher.

[Granddaddy]

On 12/20/2022 at 10:49 AM, rparmar said:

Not all of these features are equally important, but this list should at least demonstrate the gap between Affinity Publisher and the competition. There's far more room for improvement in this application than the rest of the suite. But I suppose that DTP is less glamorous and has a smaller user base. So perhaps we will never have a competitor for Adobe?

I am amused by this comment because I have posted that Affinity is concerned only with desktop publishing on the Mac platform and therefore ignores APhoto.

[François R]

38 minutes ago, Granddaddy said:

I am amused by this comment because I have posted that Affinity is concerned only with desktop publishing on the Mac platform and therefore ignores APhoto.

So to sum up your comments, Serif Software is massively behind with their flagship Publisher, although they may even be focusing too much on it. It takes the focus off their other products which are also massively behind. If you are entertained by such things, this Catch 22 is good stuff.

I've heard from almost reliable sources that Buddhist monks in Nepal are sending their young monks on a final training course in patience... "Go to Nottingham in the land of the hungover, seek not pubs nor inedible food but wisdom, bring this feature request to the company with hollering marketers, and return home only when it is successfully implemented."

None have succeeded, so far.