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Affinity Publisher - Sneak Preview


TonyB

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3 hours ago, Krustysimplex said:

You clearly haven't tried to do anything serious with the current AD implementation of tabs.

 

Guilty as charged! :$

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2 minutes ago, Arun Sarkar said:

Ha Ha Ha....

 

Did you try Tab Alfred in your work? :D

 

I think I’ve already answered that, Arun! ;)

 

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On 12/14/2017 at 4:23 PM, Alfred said:

 

We were previously led to expect the beta this winter and the retail version next summer! Oh well....

 

Edit: I've just seen the 'patience' hashtag on the Twitter page. LOL.

 

We were previously lead to believe - TonyB post 2nd Nov 2014 - Publisher should be in beta by the end of next year, I make that 2015.

 

As I don't use Twitter cannot find patience hashtag

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On 3/2/2018 at 0:25 AM, nwhit said:

While noticing today's new upgrades for AP and AD, I stumbled across this news and the video. Sounds great! 

What new upgrades for AP & AD?????

What news & video????

 

 

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On 27.2.2018 at 8:33 AM, nitro912gr said:

Actually now that you mention it, I think inDesign files compatibility is more important than pageplus, simple because it is more likely to receive a file from another agency or the client himself made with indesign. Nothing "personal" but inDesign is the industry standard now and the only way to "steal" users from it is to have compatibility with it's files, like designer open .ai and photo open .psd.

Will publisher be able to do this?

InDesign is not an industry standard. A program cannot be an industry standard because other programs produce similar-looking results.
There is a single standard of relevance that Adobe has created, and that is PDF format. It is therefore very important that APub is able to create flawless PDFs. Serif is certainly capable of this.

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On 27.2.2018 at 8:54 AM, TonyB said:

InDesign IDML files are something we would like to support. The format is very large and complex so will not make it into the initial release but we will support them in the future.

IDML support is of course important. This will be difficult enough, because even Adobe makes mistakes here.

I'm interested in another subject:
InDesign files are never backward-compatible. This disturbs many users colossally. Will this also be the case with APub files?

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On 28.2.2018 at 8:24 PM, LCamachoDesign said:

... DTP's tend to have better typographic control and better asset placement/management. ...

AD and APub have the same code base.
 

On 1.3.2018 at 9:01 PM, Rainer101 said:

Manuals was written and produced with FrameMaker, long before InDesign existed at all and I assume, they are written still with FrameMaker, and not only by Adobe. Best former DTP and probably still today. Bad only Adobe killed it for OS X/MacOS. I was using FrameMaker at times of NeXTStep and it already had at least all the functions asked for in this blog. So that might be the goal for Affinity Publisher at first.

FrameMaker is totally unsuitable for creative design!

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37 minutes ago, Michail said:

InDesign is not an industry standard. A program cannot be an industry standard because other programs produce similar-looking results.

Well, that’s something one can argue about; it depends on the definition of “standard”. Colloquially this means it’s the application with the widest usage, i. e. it’s basically a standard to use this and whoever uses other programs is kind of in a niche.

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18 minutes ago, VIPStephan said:

Well, that’s something one can argue about; it depends on the definition of “standard”. Colloquially this means it’s the application with the widest usage, i. e. it’s basically a standard to use this and whoever uses other programs is kind of in a niche.

An industry standard does not define the use of something (e. g. a program) but the adherence to something (e. g. the PDF norm).

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9 hours ago, PeanutsA said:

 

 

The upgrades to Mac AP and AD as of March 1.

 

The "news" is this thread and the preview video in the first post.

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Suffice it to say that InDesign is and has been the predominant software for the creation of professionally printed documents and their associated PDF derivatives for various uses. Ever since PageMaker and then InDesign, this is the most-used "creation" software by professional shops. While there are many others (and I've used and taught most of the biggies over the years like Quark and FrameMaker), professional media creation shops still mostly use InDesign to create documents for offset printing and pdf versions of that print job; and print shops will most often have it as well if it is desired to have them open and adjust a file.

 

Therefore, as per my earlier post, we as a creative and media production shop have thousands of client documents/files already created in InDesign. It would be essential to be able to open and convert them in the new A-Pub. If that cannot be done, about 60-80% of our client work could not be done in the new app since the clients are not going to be willing to have us recreate existing documents (but needing updates, etc.) at their expense. And we sure aren't going to do it at our expense! 

 

As I said in my earlier post, for Affinity it's a matter of a slow rollout versus a faster rollout. If media production shops cannot use it to integrate into their InDesign workflow for clients until much later versions, then it will only be used for a "new" job or messing around. But even then, why create a client's job in a totally new format if that's not supported at other agencies, clients and print shops? In the pro world, you really do need to be able to share editable files and currently InDesign is the one most have/use.

 

I would love to adopt Affinity Pub. It looks good in the preview video and we do like AP and AD. But we need to be able to correctly open InDesign files in order to actually use the new app for more than playing around. That's just business.

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On 3/1/2018 at 4:25 PM, nwhit said:

While noticing today's new upgrades for AP and AD, I stumbled across this news and the video. Sounds great! 

 

While I oftentimes hate to admit it, I started out on PageMaker 1.0 with the then brand new LaserWriter ($6k+) and Mac SE. I not only used virtually all early DTP/graphics software and new iterations for many of my companies (including a media production company), I also taught the software during its several-year rollout. Also evangelized and set-up numerous ad agencies, media producers, newspapers, printers and university "commercial art" departments in the "new" electronic publishing and graphics methods and equipment/software. Over the years, I used and taught most of the popular software packages. Some good, many terrible. I came from the "manual" world, so understood what was really needed for day-to-day production versus flashy features.

 

My 2¢ on the new A-Publisher is that I hope it can correctly open recent InDesign documents (we've stayed pre-cloud). While I saw one poster who wondered why anyone wanted to open an old document, the reality of media production has been and still is the ability to use the thousands of client files we store to either update materials, specifications, pics, etc., or to use an old publication/document as the basis for a totally "new" design -- but a "new" design that uses much of the old design as its basis. Just how it is for commercial design/publication work. And clients most often aren't willing to simply abandon otherwise good publications. Many just don't spend money for total from-scrartch redo's. Thus recycling is critical to a normal workflow.

 

If accurate import of InDesign (notice that I didn't ask for import of PageMaker docs????  ;-D ) is not available or working well, it would terribly slow down the adoption of this new software. Just can't spend client's money rebuilding hundreds and hundreds of previously created work.

 

There are many other "base" features that are important in DTP, but I assume Affinity has studied ID for quite some time. But it doesn't hurt to verify with people who make their living with this software every day for many, many years what are "nice to have" versus "critical". Could mean the difference between rapid adoption versus a multi-year roll-out. 

 

I'll keep my eyes and ears open to see how this all shapes up. Very encouraging. While our staff still occasionally curse and swear at things that can't be done in AP and AD, overall have been very pleased. So that bodes well for Publisher!

I started out with CorelDraw 4 (disaster!) Well, actually a CompuGraphic MCS 10 (and before that an EditWriter) but I prefer to not dwell on those. Draw finally turned into something usable but buggy about v. 7, but still not suitable for page layout.It remains better for sign design (with CoCut as a backend) but can't compete with Illustrator for heavy-weight graphics. But Adobe has gotten so bloated and kludgy, like PageMaker 4 in the early 90s; PageMaker rebuilt it from the core out in version 5, which is what Adobe should do with ALL their stuff, but won't.

The point of all this is (aside from establishing my creds) is that it's always been a hassle "translating" past work into new software—imagine my backlog of sign work trying to jump from Draw to Illustrator!—and I agree with you that it would be so nice if Publisher would import InDesign. But since Affinity has already made clear that it won't import PagePlus files, requiring the user to export to PDF and then import, I wouldn't get my hopes up. Also, my trial of Design showed me that importing Illustrator files was not 100% reliable, to say the least. So, wonderful as Publisher promises to be, we're going to have our work cut out for us making the transition from whatever we were using before.

Beginning to believer be, in all things Affinity.

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14 hours ago, Michail said:

InDesign is not an industry standard. A program cannot be an industry standard because other programs produce similar-looking results.
There is a single standard of relevance that Adobe has created, and that is PDF format. It is therefore very important that APub is able to create flawless PDFs. Serif is certainly capable of this.

If 99% of the listed jobs ask you to know indesign to work there then yes, it is industry standard. Adobe suite is industry standard at the moment and this is disastrous in so many levels.

PDF is a file standard.

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2 hours ago, nitro912gr said:

If 99% of the listed jobs ask you to know indesign to work there then yes, it is industry standard. Adobe suite is industry standard at the moment and this is disastrous in so many levels.

PDF is a file standard.

Of course, you are free to create your own definitions (e. g. according to the degree of popularity). I just wanted to put some order in the terminology. Nobody is forced to create their publications with InDesign. But everyone must adhere to the PostScript specifications of the PDF format. No indd files are expected from the print service providers, but PDFs. That's why this is the industry standard.

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8 minutes ago, Michail said:

Of course, you are free to create your own definitions (e. g. according to the degree of popularity).

 

I don’t think anyone is creating their own definitions here, unless you include the definition of what constitutes a definition! ;) The point that @nitro912gr was making is that InDesign is a de facto standard application for the types of work we’re discussing.

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15 hours ago, nwhit said:

Suffice it to say that InDesign is and has been the predominant software for the creation of professionally printed documents and their associated PDF derivatives for various uses. Ever since PageMaker and then InDesign, this is the most-used "creation" software by professional shops. While there are many others (and I've used and taught most of the biggies over the years like Quark and FrameMaker), professional media creation shops still mostly use InDesign to create documents for offset printing and pdf versions of that print job; and print shops will most often have it as well if it is desired to have them open and adjust a file.

 

Therefore, as per my earlier post, we as a creative and media production shop have thousands of client documents/files already created in InDesign. It would be essential to be able to open and convert them in the new A-Pub. If that cannot be done, about 60-80% of our client work could not be done in the new app since the clients are not going to be willing to have us recreate existing documents (but needing updates, etc.) at their expense. And we sure aren't going to do it at our expense! 

 

As I said in my earlier post, for Affinity it's a matter of a slow rollout versus a faster rollout. If media production shops cannot use it to integrate into their InDesign workflow for clients until much later versions, then it will only be used for a "new" job or messing around. But even then, why create a client's job in a totally new format if that's not supported at other agencies, clients and print shops? In the pro world, you really do need to be able to share editable files and currently InDesign is the one most have/use.

 

I would love to adopt Affinity Pub. It looks good in the preview video and we do like AP and AD. But we need to be able to correctly open InDesign files in order to actually use the new app for more than playing around. That's just business.

I am still amazed at the visceral blow back toward any idea that the upcoming Publisher should be able to handle any file format other than a PDF.I had my head bitten off for suggesting that bringin in their own pageplus formats would be a help

And now other main stream formats are not to be considered since they are not "industry standard" whatever that means. A whole bunch of people and businesses use it but apparantly that does not matter

And now AP is not meant to be in competition with the top line products? What are they building, a toy? 

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30 minutes ago, Rick G said:

I am still amazed at the visceral blow back toward any idea that the upcoming Publisher should be able to handle any file format other than a PDF.I had my head bitten off for suggesting that bringin in their own pageplus formats would be a help

And now other main stream formats are not to be considered since they are not "industry standard" whatever that means. A whole bunch of people and businesses use it but apparantly that does not matter

And now AP is not meant to be in competition with the top line products? What are they building, a toy? 

It means something that has a ISO Standar, for example, PDF is ISO 32000-2. One of the benefits of this kind of standards is that you don't pay royalties in order to support such format and you can see it's specification. In the case of INDD files, I guess the main obstacle is that it's a propietary format and its specification is not being publicly available. By the way, some folks have talked about supporting the IDML format instead.

My opinion is that the technological barriers are preventing Serif from supporting such format. They've made a good work with PSD, but now trying to do the same with AI (without the PDF stream) and INDD would be titanic for them. (I'm sure they are the first ones interested in supporting such cases, and we can include: CDR, "layered" PNG, and many more).

Now, de facto Standard is what INDD is. And that's because a lot of folks use it. Same case with PSD, but even the support we have today is somewhat limited.

So, I get how you feel about it and how this is developing, but one could say that for the time beign it's as far as they can go.

Best regards!

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34 minutes ago, Mithferion said:

It means something that has a ISO Standar, for example, PDF is ISO 32000-2. One of the benefits of this kind of standards is that you don't pay royalties in order to support such format and you can see it's specification. In the case of INDD files, I guess the main obstacle is that it's a propietary format and its specification is not being publicly available. By the way, some folks have talked about supporting the IDML format instead.

My opinion is that the technological barriers are preventing Serif from supporting such format. They've made a good work with PSD, but now trying to do the same with AI (without the PDF stream) and INDD would be titanic for them. (I'm sure they are the first ones interested in supporting such cases, and we can include: CDR, "layered" PNG, and many more).

Now, de facto Standard is what INDD is. And that's because a lot of folks use it. Same case with PSD, but even the support we have today is somewhat limited.

So, I get how you feel about it and how this is developing, but one could say that for the time beign it's as far as they can go.

Best regards!

I am glad you mentioned de facto standards as that is what many standards are. PSD has an ISO standard but some claim Adobe keeps tweaking it anyway

I don't care what one calls it or how some want to define it. If a major chunk of the market uses file format X and you want to grab that market then you have to offer support for getting those documents into a new environment quickly and easily or the potential customers are just not going to bother with it. I am sure a lot of shops don't mind tweaking graphic placement oddities and odd line breaks etc.AFTER IMPORTING. But having to recreate an entire business?

Also PDF was designed for sharing documents across platforms so if I create one from WordPerfect for MSDOS you will be able to read it reasonable the way I published it on your Windws, Mac or Linux system.It is not designed for importing. Quite frankly Word and Open Office will import one but the results are usually not that great

I am not a pro in this department and don't have documents in PagePlus that I cannot recreate. I would ask them to consider how they are going to get the Photo and Designer books into AP in preparation for the next printing?

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3 hours ago, Michail said:

Of course, you are free to create your own definitions (e. g. according to the degree of popularity). I just wanted to put some order in the terminology. Nobody is forced to create their publications with InDesign. But everyone must adhere to the PostScript specifications of the PDF format. No indd files are expected from the print service providers, but PDFs. That's why this is the industry standard.

actually I am forced to work with indesign if everybody else is working with indesign (or photoshop, or illustrator, or you name it). If I have other professionals sending in open files in this format and there is no way to open a file that was saved as a pdf in the same way I could open the original indesign file, then I am forced to work with indesign or have a problem.

This is why I'm a fierce opposer of pirated adobe software, while there are a lot of cheaper and good applications out there.
If tomorrow we could somehow remove every pirated adobe software out there, this could make our work much easier, because now everybody have a pirated photoshop and do more or less some work in it, so this make it accessible to everyone and as a result "everyone use photoshop" and I have to use it too to be able to open the files.

Standard is what most people use, unofficially of course, but unless there is balance in the market that's it.

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nitro,

 

While I have been a single-person shop for some time now, there has never been a time that X percentage of my clients have requested files returned in a specific application format. That mainly applies to the layout application I use, to a good degree of the vector design application file format, and once in a blue moon as regards bitmap formats I need to return. And therefore to the application(s) I use for repeat work from said clients. There's no way around that.

 

When I do obtain work where there is no specified return format, I am free to use what I deem is the most appropriate application(s) for the job at hand. Which generally means I am not going to use ID, Illy or PS for those jobs.

 

I do not see that changing just because there is a new kid on the block. As well, APub itself simply won't be capable to handle very much of what I do at the beginning and possibly for years to come. This is especially true if scripting and plug-ins are not possible. Oh, I will use it some like I do AD if for no other reason as to keep abreast of what I can do in them and to keep myself as efficient as possible. But I have few delusions when it comes to doing much in APub.

 

I personally do not see how creatives can completely cut the Adobe cord. Luckily I can continue using CS6 versions and rent when needed (it's only happened for me a few times since CC). But not ever using at least some version of ID? Nah. I'm pretty certain I'll pass away before that day comes.

 

That said, I do love this quote from Rick:

1 hour ago, Rick G said:

I would ask them to consider how they are going to get the Photo and Designer books into AP in preparation for the next printing?

 

It's a fair question, Rick. But what do they have? Two printed workbooks and at some point one for Publisher? It's not too big a deal to walk them into APub manually. Seeing how they are their won "client" they can spec whatever application to use for the workbooks. That's quite a different situation than what's been described above. 

 

Mike

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