Affinity Publisher & Digital Publications

[Transrobotism]

AFFINITY PUBLISHER & DIGITAL PUBLICATIONS

"Affinity Publisher will be crafted to help professional designers get the very best results on every layout, page, magazine, book, and digital publication, with stunning typography and vibrant colour."

I don't know if this is jumping the gun but... As a user of PagePlus, Quark Xpress, and InDesign I can tell you that PagePlus is up there when it comes to paper-based publishing. However, PagePlus has always fallen short in the area of digital publishing. The audio and video players embedded in PDF files looked really bad in comparison to InDesign produced PDF files with audio and video files embedded within. InDesign one is able to output to Flash (at least when I was using version 5 of the Adobe Suite). Sure, Flash is dead.

One of the attributes that I would like within Affinity Publisher would be to create beautiful, elegant looking PDF files with audio and video embedded. The

HTML5
Another attribute would be to export to HTML5... Here I envisage web-like pages that can include PowerPointesque slideshows; magazine style web pages and so on. I would imagine that HTML5 could create and include some nice transitions between pages/slides. 
 

EPUB
Oh! Yes! When it came to EPublications, PagePlus was abysmal. I would want the EPUB capabilities to produce excellent and consistent results each and every time. 

MOBILE APPS & EXES
I would also like Affinity Publisher to produces APKs for Android and the equivalent for iOS apps. I would imagine that this can be achieved by using a combination of HTML5 and Java. 

NO WEBPLUS EQUIVALENT???
I think it was Alfred who stated that there will be no WebPlus equivalent in the Affinity range and that web page production will not be supported in the forthcoming Affinity Publisher. Is that correct? That would be a terrible shame as WebPlus is such a decent web design application. Affinity Publisher, in theory, could pick up the web design slack. I always appreciated that PagePlus could output pages to HTML. As you can tell from the above text that I am hoping that Affinity Publisher would feature HTML5 output. 

I do think that web pages and web design are evolving into what I would call "Channels" whereby the web page is looking pretty much like a TV channel - especially now that video has become a major part of the web. I reckon that a "Channel" approach to web pages produced with Affinity Publisher may be the way to go. 

Well, that's my 2 cents worth! Oh, did I say that I am very curious about Affinity Publisher?  :lol: 
 

[ostonica]

Strong support for this request, especially for the Epub support. InDesign CC has a VERY attractive feature called Publish Online which I use often. BUT everything I've published there will disappear once I stop the CC subscription. So if the HTML5 option will do what Publish Online will do, that would be wonderful.

 

Jim

http://js-ca.net

[Transrobotism]

Strong support for this request, especially for the Epub support. InDesign CC has a VERY attractive feature called Publish Online which I use often. BUT everything I've published there will disappear once I stop the CC subscription. So if the HTML5 option will do what Publish Online will do, that would be wonderful.

 

Jim

http://js-ca.net

I  think that Affinity Publisher has to surpass InDesign like Affinity Photo has surpassed Photoshop and like Designer has blown Illustrator out of the water! 

EPUB; HTML5 and, at least, Android apps should be included. I would imagine that it is pretty easy to use HTML5 for iOS as I do believe that there is a stringent process to get apps on the Apple App Store. 

[Frank Jonen]

One way to surpass InDesign is typography. InDesign has been struggling with that for years now and has every fallen behind Quark so badly publishers are saving money in page count when printing books by using Quark vs InDesign. But Publisher doesn't have to beat any of those. It has to beat LaTex, or at least get to parity. 

 

For web typography, supporting the latest OpenType features is a must now that the problem with legacy browsers is fading away. Colour and SVG based OpenType fonts is one thing. Variable fonts is quite another. It saves download time for the user since you only have to serve one font to provide all the weights. Recent Safari versions handle this well.

 

Also for ePub, support of iBook packages would be great as well as the ability to create them as well as some way of easy round tripping with Tumult's Hype.

[Transrobotism]

One way to surpass InDesign is typography. InDesign has been struggling with that for years now and has every fallen behind Quark so badly publishers are saving money in page count when printing books by using Quark vs InDesign. But Publisher doesn't have to beat any of those. It has to beat LaTex, or at least get to parity. 

 

For web typography, supporting the latest OpenType features is a must now that the problem with legacy browsers is fading away. Colour and SVG based OpenType fonts is one thing. Variable fonts is quite another. It saves download time for the user since you only have to serve one font to provide all the weights. Recent Safari versions handle this well.

 

Also for ePub, support of iBook packages would be great as well as the ability to create them as well as some way of easy round tripping with Tumult's Hype.

I am sure that Serif will come through on the DTP front. This is a great time for Serif to produce yet another revolutionary application. This is going to be Serif's era and it is about time too! 

[anon1]

One way to surpass InDesign is typography. InDesign has been struggling with that for years now and has every fallen behind Quark so badly publishers are saving money in page count when printing books by using Quark vs InDesign. But Publisher doesn't have to beat any of those. It has to beat LaTex, or at least get to parity. 

 

For web typography, supporting the latest OpenType features is a must now that the problem with legacy browsers is fading away. Colour and SVG based OpenType fonts is one thing. Variable fonts is quite another. It saves download time for the user since you only have to serve one font to provide all the weights. Recent Safari versions handle this well.

 

Also for ePub, support of iBook packages would be great as well as the ability to create them as well as some way of easy round tripping with Tumult's Hype.

let´s just hope they need less than a year to implement linked text boxes and pages (left out everything you said, otherwise we´re in 2030 until AP sees the light of the day) 

- and they´ve already been busy doing that (or - not even that) for some years  :ph34r:

 

they said they´d release it as soon as it would be useful to some....

[Transrobotism]

let´s just hope they need less than a year to implement linked text boxes and pages (left out everything you said, otherwise we´re in 2030 until AP sees the light of the day) 

- and they´ve already been busy doing that (or - not even that) for some years  :ph34r:

 

they said they´d release it as soon as it would be useful to some....

I think that Serif has worked enormously hard on Designer & Photo - those applications are great! People in the design world are praising those apps from Serif! You read and hear terms such as, "Photoshop Killer," "Easier and more powerful than Illustrator," and so on. So, there is a tremendous amount of pressure for Serif to get Affinity Publisher right from the first release. That is not going to be easy! Quark & InDesign are powerful apps and Serif have its work cut out. I predict that a beta will be ready for March 2017 and a possible release would be August 2017. I guess I am a little optimistic! :lol:   :D  :P

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Colour font support would set Affinity Publisher apart from the competition. PhotoShop supports SVG Colour fonts, but not OpenType (AFAIK). Some browsers already support colour fonts. 

[Peter Werner]

Digital Publishing in InDesign is also largely not very good, mostly due to Adobe trying to monetize the hell out of this market with their hosted solutions, or recently their push to the cloud system with their Publish Online feature – your client's publication stops working if you have an issue with your Adobe subscription or cancel it. You can't host it on your own server. Great. Before that, there was this horrendously expensive abomination called DPS with its Flash-based UI panels, ginormous files and messy bugs.

 

One thing where InDesign is particularly horrible is with authoring interactivity parts. In an effort to make it simple, they came up with this unnecessarily complicated preset-based system for animations, whereas a simple timeline like in Macromedia Director and its Behaviors (scripted procedural animations you could apply with a single click) would make everything so much more intuitive. Scripting basic interactivity inside the application? Not a chance.

 

Also creating slideshows, buttons, scrolling areas and any kind of multi-state object is a royal pain. It is really unintuitive to select objects after these compounds are created. It all feels like someone hacked a plugin onto the application instead of really thinking about how it could properly fit into the software architecture.

 

Another problem is that half of the interactivity features only work with PDF, others only with Flash, others are exclusive to ePub, others are for DPS, and so on. There is just no consistent concept that unifies all the interactivity features, there are all sorts of different previews for different workflows, and half of them are obsolete because Adobe had to change course.

 

While I do think Publisher should tackle print production features first, interactive digital publications are certainly an area where the experience in InDesign is severely lacking and a new product like Affinity Publisher could finally get things right.

 

Simple straightforward HTML5 output like the In5 plugin for InDesign offers (with support for Designer's constraints so that documents can adapt to the screen size), and ePub would cover the essentials for Affinity Publisher 1.0 I think. Features could then be expanded starting from there.

[jrutled3]

One way to surpass InDesign is typography. InDesign has been struggling with that for years now and has every fallen behind Quark so badly publishers are saving money in page count when printing books by using Quark vs InDesign. But Publisher doesn't have to beat any of those. It has to beat LaTex, or at least get to parity. 

 

For web typography, supporting the latest OpenType features is a must now that the problem with legacy browsers is fading away. Colour and SVG based OpenType fonts is one thing. Variable fonts is quite another. It saves download time for the user since you only have to serve one font to provide all the weights. Recent Safari versions handle this well.

 

I think I great way to achieve this is if they used HarfBuzz as their text shaping engine. To quote the official website (which I have linked), "HarfBuzz is an OpenType text shaping engine. The current HarfBuzz codebase, formerly known as harfbuzz-ng, is versioned 1.x.x and is stable and under active maintenance. This is what is used in latest versions of Firefox, GNOME, ChromeOS, Chrome, LibreOffice, XeTeX, Android, and KDE, among other places."

 

HarfBuzz allows for the fullness of OpenType features to be implemented, including native right-to-left language support and Oriental ligatures.

 

But regardless of whether or not they use HarfBuzz as their text engine, I trust that Publisher will excel in the typography department. Serif did a great job with this in PagePlus, and so I anticipate that they will make it even better with Affinity Publisher.

 

While I do think Publisher should tackle print production features first, interactive digital publications are certainly an area where the experience in InDesign is severely lacking and a new product like Affinity Publisher could finally get things right.

 

Simple straightforward HTML5 output like the In5 plugin for InDesign offers (with support for Designer's constraints so that documents can adapt to the screen size), and ePub would cover the essentials for Affinity Publisher 1.0 I think. Features could then be expanded starting from there.

 

Could not agree with you more! I think you hit everything spot on with that, my friend.

[Frank Jonen]

XeTeX is to (La)TeX like InDesign is to Quark. You're still wasting pages, just not as many as you'd waste with InDesign.

Ideally it'd be something that hooks up OpenType to TeX with an extended and updated version of Hz-program. At least in result as I doubt Serif has any interest to integrate that weird mix of Pascal, PERL, C and whatnot. :) 

 

Right now getting the perfect page requires a lot of work converting OT fonts to TeX fonts, which is not at all trivial. It took me forever to get one to work and I still don't know why it worked. 

 

Something that gets the same result without that level of Aspirin consumption would be great. 

 

 

 

I think I great way to achieve this is if they used HarfBuzz as their text shaping engine. To quote the official website (which I have linked), "HarfBuzz is an OpenType text shaping engine. The current HarfBuzz codebase, formerly known as harfbuzz-ng, is versioned 1.x.x and is stable and under active maintenance. This is what is used in latest versions of Firefox, GNOME, ChromeOS, Chrome, LibreOffice, XeTeX, Android, and KDE, among other places."

HarfBuzz allows for the fullness of OpenType features to be implemented, including native right-to-left language support and Oriental ligatures.

But regardless of whether or not they use HarfBuzz as their text engine, I trust that Publisher will excel in the typography department. Serif did a great job with this in PagePlus, and so I anticipate that they will make it even better with Affinity Publisher.

 

 

Could not agree with you more! I think you hit everything spot on with that, my friend.

[jrutled3]

It took me forever to get one to work and I still don't know why it worked. 

 

Something that gets the same result without that level of Aspirin consumption would be great.

 

That sounds like me with practically everything! Lol Especially when I'm doing anything with TeX. When it works, I don't know why or how, but I'll take it! When it doesn't and won't, I can never figure it out.