Need help understanding Affinity and AI / InDesign / Photoshop open/save capabilities

[RobWatson]

I just purchased Affinity as an alternative to buying the much more expensive (over time) subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud. I was hoping that Affinity would be "good enough" for opening Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop files. After experimenting with a real-world AI and InDesign file, I'm finding that content is either missing or misplaced regardless of the settings I selected when opening the files.

As an example, attached is a zipped package I got from a designer who uses Adobe. It includes all font files (which I have installed) and a PDF to compare against. The AI and INML files don't do well when opened in Affinity Publisher or Designer in comparison to what's in the PDF.

What am I getting wrong? How feasible is it to use Affinity as a direct replacement for Adobe's suite? Especially if I'm working with others who do have Adobe Creative Cloud products?

CLL files for Rob.zip

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Affinity forums, Rob.

Specifically for .ai files, if the file was saved in "compatibility mode" so it contains a PDF, then the Affinity applications will be able to Open it.

However, the PDF format does not support all the information/functions that Illustrator supports, so the PDF is only a subset.

The IDML files should be close when Opened in Publisher, though there are still missing functions items such as footnote import. Additionally, Publisher does not have a paragraph composer like InDesign has, so text flow and justification will work differently. (And even if it had a paragraph composer, there's no guarantee the layout would be duplicated identically.)

There are also PhotoShop functions in PSD files that are not supported, and Affinity applications will always rasterize text when exporting/saving to PSD.

There are also some functions in Affinity that are not supported in the Adobe products, I think.

If you need absolute compatibility, you need to use the same products (and releases) as your collaborators are using.

[RobWatson]

Ok. I think in that case it makes more sense for me (a business owner coordinating work) to just hire freelancers to do these one-off occasional jobs rather than trying to wrangle it all myself through Affinity or buy a long-term subscription to Adobe (which is almost impossible to cancel and restart based on demand).