Thank you!

[Tony Pritchard]

Dear Affinity Community

I bought Affinity 2.0 to produce a book. I learnt the software from scratch. When I came up against issues I found it useful to post on the forum. The book is now printed and due for distribution. 

Thank you Affinity and the community.

Tony

[JannekeAdri]

I looks great, congratulations!

 

[Tony Pritchard]

22 minutes ago, JannekeAdri said:

I looks great, congratulations!

 

Thanks. It had its struggles. Maybe some of the issues are resolved in new updates. The default optical alignment was a bit much on the left but I could reset those. The main thing was the optical kerning. There wasn't anything as you might find in InDesign. My main kerning issue was the number 1 so I kerned this manually. Overall I managed to achieve what I wanted within Affinity. And importantly when sending to PDF for Print everything worked out with the printer we were using. I also bought the typeface I used. So everything was legit and legal. I doubt if most people would spot the difference between InDesign and Publisher.

[Evaluation complete.]

I can absolutely see what you mean, and this is precisely why I’m evaluating Affinity Publisher for similar purposes. InDesign’s Paragraph Composer clearly makes a difference in handling optical alignment and kerning, which seems to be a notable gap in Publisher for projects like these.

My evaluation is essentially that I’m creating an entire book, which I luckily have plenty of time to work on, and possibly migrating to InDesign if the visual appearance of the text starts to look too “retro word processor”-like. I can see from my own comparisons that InDesign’s algorithms do a better job, but for now, in my evaluation, I want to see what I can manually adjust to enhance the result.

The history of beautifully crafted paragraph design spans centuries, rooted in manual techniques by pioneers like Gutenberg, Manutius, and Tschichold, who used optical alignment, line balancing, and spacing to create harmonious layouts. To continue working within these foundational principles, I need software that supports these refined typographic practices - otherwise, my document risks looking pre-Baroque in quality.

But now I need to get a book ready in my own evaluation, where I’ll be making direct comparisons with InDesign. I’ll be looking at the time required to achieve results and whether the software I’m using acts as a partner, adds extra work, works against me, or actually produces a beautiful result without needing me to fine-tune every detail - and perhaps still falling short aesthetically.

[Tony Pritchard]

Thanks. I had retired and no longer had access to the work Adobe account. So I could pay Adobe rent or buy Affinity. I made a decision. There are always pros and cons. Overall I think it worked out but for Affinity Publisher to be a commercial competitor, in my view, of InDesign some of the typographic nuances should ideally come into line with expectations. But I'm happy to have gone through the process.

[Pšenda]

37 minutes ago, Tony Pritchard said:

But I'm happy to have gone through the process.

We say: "Když se chce, všechno jde" (If you want, anything goes?) 🙂

[Evaluation complete.]

There's a somewhat universal saying that goes along the lines of, "Where there's a will, there's a way," which is a good basic mindset. Sometimes, however, the way goes like this, then I turn off:

[fde101]

32 minutes ago, Ingelise said:

Sometimes, however, the way goes like this, then I turn off:

There are specialized tools for fixing that sort of thing:

https://www.dxo.com/dxo-viewpoint/

https://konecarbide.com/9-common-machines-for-road-construction/