Who will use Publisher in 2025

[PaoloT]

New year is the time to make plans for the forthcoming months. Among them, how to set up the working environment, the planned purchases, the things to synchronize with the partners. One has to do some forecast, and use some divinatory science to try to do the things right.

Publishing software is one of the most delicate items in this list. During the latest nine years I’ve slowly moved from Adobe to Affinity, but the transition is far from complete. While I’m mostly happy with Affinity Photo and Designer (despite the ugly and severely slowing-down single-document design), I can’t still find a place for Publisher.

Judging from the pace of its development, I doubt 2025 will be the age of its adoption on my side. Both Canva and Serif have announced a few priorities, and among them ePub export. I personally think this will be another point slowing the development of things I find more urgent. In one year we will probably see a rudimental ePub export features that will delude those who think that going from a complex page layout to a reflowable ePub can be just one click.

Maybe implementing an RTF or DOCX exporter would have required much less time, and allowed easy reuse of data from Publisher into already established ePub development tools (and other tasks).

To put things in perspective, and try to understand the future of Publisher, I will try an analysis of a few typical use cases.

- Technical documents. I’ll start from my own case — mainly a technical writer, making spec requirements for development teams and user manuals. While this type of project is moving toward prioritizing the web format, PDF files are still required, either as the main or an alternative document.

To make my PDFs I need long-document management features, and the Book, Sections, Synchronization, ToC, Index, Tagging features of Publisher are great ones for me. Variables are great for keeping alternative models in a single project. Layer states are very promising as an alternative to traditional object styling.

But I miss an advanced way of making tables, as well as conditional text for alternative models. And object styles are still the easiest and most predictable way to apply styles to images. RTL text is going to be more and more important in my work. And I’m still asking myself how good the CJK languages are being supported (none of my colleagues can answer, since they don’t use Affinity, despite an initial interest a few years ago).

The lack of integration with translation tools is also making Publisher totally unfit for the task. Without a way of round-tripping to CAT software via import/export of IDML files, there is no chance of using it for multilingual projects like ours.

Also, the lack of export to editable text formats makes it unusable as the starting point for projects to be also reused for the web. The opposite is also true: with web projects starting in Markdown, not having a way to directly transform Markdown to a Publisher document makes concurrent targets too difficult.

- Narrative, essays and schoolbooks can already be made with Publisher. A project I’m curating now could even benefit from the triple flow of notes. However, not being able to export to tools for editing and generating ebooks is a severe limitation in the modern times. My publisher, making sophisticate literary books, opposes to ebooks. But most self-publishers are out without it. And I can't pre-assemble styled text and images in Publisher, to be then refined by my publisher in InDesign.

Canva and Serif have promised ePub export, but this is a huge undertaking that will take several years to be completed correctly (Adobe is still struggling with it). Exporting to RTF or DOCX would have let one use the many existing tools, but this doesn’t seem to be planned. This omission also makes translating the original book into other languages particularly difficult. The book I’m working on is in Italian, and there are plans to also make it available in German. The translator will ask it in DOCX or IDML…

- Monthly magazines could already be made with Publisher, despite the current limitations in handling color in print. I may believe that it’s very near to be ready, but it all depends on how much Canva and Serif believe finishing these features is relevant to their vision. At the same time, I wonder if magazines are still published out of the major houses, and can be of any interest to the world of smaller publishers that are likely the target of Publisher.

- Local and community newspapers could be handled by Publisher. This type of publication is disappearing quickly, being replaced by social media, but they still exist in the USA (and maybe somewhere else?). However, there is no easy way to manage individual contributions, like InDesign does with InCopy. It’s all a matter of copying&pasting, &applying styles each time. A Markdown-based flux would seem the most obvious decision in these times of blogging, but I don’t see signs of this feature being added. Also, column spanning is a severe omission for titles that can variably extend on more lines.

- Booklets and leaflets seem to be an ideal target for Publisher. The former aren’t yet possible, due to the lack of multi-page spreads, but will be with the official release of v2.6 in the next months. At the moment, this seems the most balanced area of use for Publisher.

So, as far as I can see, the only area Publisher will be perfectly at home in 2025 is hand-distributed printed advertising. Useful and necessary, but a bit limited in scope. Like with PagePlus, there is a risk of lack of a wider vision, and Publisher may end up being confined to very trivial tasks. Without the advantage that PagePlus had, living in an age of printed newsletters and community newspapers. This world no longer exists, having been supplanted by the web and social media.

Are there some areas where Publisher is already a perfect fit, and that I’m forgetting to mention?

Paolo

 

[zakoops]

I, for one, will be using Affinity Publisher in 2025. My annual subscription to InDesign ends at the end of January and I plan to use Publisher as a replacement. ePub export is absolutely crucial. If Affinity manages to let us tweak css in the export, like InDesign actually does, then it will be perfect. Sigil was a necessary tool even with InDesign to polish the ePub export.

My project is a book of around 400 pages. Yes, reflowable too.

I know I'm taking a big guess here. Fingers crossed.  

 

[PaoloT]

2 hours ago, zakoops said:

I, for one, will be using Affinity Publisher in 2025. […] ePub export is absolutely crucial.

ePub is not yet even in beta, so I wonder how you can be using it for your project in the current status. Obviously, Serif may surprise us, and add this feature to the current beta. Or release a new beta including it in the middle of this year. But it is really a hard bet. Adobe took some ten years to get to the current ePub exporter.

Paolo

 

[Meliora spero]

The invisible hand of the market (Adam Smith) has spoken, and therefore Publisher 2.5 is virtually invisible in the market, no matter how many laugh emojis people use here or how much they claim otherwise.

After starting some publications (which ended up as beautiful drafts) in Publisher, I've realized that I'd rather work without interruptions, make money, and get my work published both digitally and in print quickly than waste valuable time in an unfinished and poorly developed program like Publisher. I'm switching to Adobe InDesign for private use, because my private projects also require professional quality and a modern portfolio of features.

It's up to Serif/Canva to make massive and drastic investments and changes in the product, staff, and marketing before things change significantly. It's not up to the customers to squeeze results out of it and thus lose money and time. I was an adventurer wanting to try something different, but I've seen brands fail and stray too far off course before. The point of no return passed long ago for Affinity, already.

Adobe InDesign it is. Not my best friend, but my best colleague. And InDesign pays for itself by being a competent tool.

[zakoops]

3 hours ago, PaoloT said:

ePub is not yet even in beta, so I wonder how you can be using it for your project in the current status.

A few reasons for electing Publisher that I didn't bother to write:

• There is an ongoing editorial work on my book before using Publisher.
• A print version (pdf) is also in the work.
• The new Book feature of Publisher is already at hand and usable for pdf export. In all likelihood, it will also be used for ePub export.
• According to the Affinity and Canva Pledge of March 2024, the ePub export (among other features) “will be released over the coming year as free updates to V2.”
• Adaptation from print to ePub version will also be required.
• And lastly, I prefer the UI of Publisher…

Hey, I just raise the hand telling you that I use Publisher in 2025. As I wrote, I do know it involves some risk-taking.

[PaoloT]

17 minutes ago, zakoops said:

According to the Affinity and Canva Pledge of March 2024, the ePub export (among other features) “will be released over the coming year as free updates to V2.”

Keep in mind that what was promised is fixed layout ePub first. Reflowable should come later. We don't know if the plans have changed, but fixed layout is obviously much easier that reflowable from a page layout document.

Not trying to dissuade you from making the work in Publisher. Just a grain of salt to be prepared for a Plan B, and remake the ePub project from scratch with a different set of tools.

Paolo

 

[zakoops]

23 minutes ago, PaoloT said:

Keep in mind that what was promised is fixed layout ePub first.

In Affinity circles, it’s now many years that ePub is in the talks, and with fixed layout being planned as you write.

But since then, as a developer, I would be kind of ashamed to publish such a diminished functionality in 2025.

If fixed layout is the only feature available for ePub export, then yes, I would laugh and revert to InDesign for good. Adobe is such a good company.

 

[PaoloT]

Two more use cases I've not considered, not being part of my everyday experience:

- Comic books. I guess Publisher can do them with ease, and the close integration with the other two apps make it the most natural way of publishing these books. As far as I can see, they are still mostly sold in printed form.

- Tabletop roleplaying game instructions. These, too, are distributed in printed form. Apparently, there is a high number of developers, many of them using Affinity.

Paolo

 

[Oufti]

9 hours ago, PaoloT said:

Two more use cases I've not considered, not being part of my everyday experience:

- Comic books.

For comic-books (and other tasks), I regret that 1-bit colorspace is not supported. 
I would like to be able to have pure black images at 1200 ppi and contone images at 300 for example, in the same document. 

The absence of color-separation control tool is also problematic… 

For the rest, I'll continue to use Publisher for creating traditional books, ads and posters. 

[Snapseed]

Who will use Publisher in 2025?

The answer to that is anyone who doesn't want to be ripped off by that clay building material corporation.

I see that they are trying to extend the rentalware scam to Photoshop Elements now with a licence which expires after 3 years. That is why I recommend the Affinity products to anyone with a Windows or macOS operating system.

[PaoloT]

1 hour ago, Snapseed said:

The answer to that is anyone who doesn't want to be ripped off by that clay building material corporation

Eh. Assuming they can.

 

[DavidMKelly]

I've been using Publisher (and the other Affinity products) for several years, and will be again this year. Freed myself from Adobe years ago and never regretted it.