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InDesign compatibility


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Affinity Desktop appears to have the same problem that Affinity Photo Does: Compatibility. It will not open an Adobe Indesign document, just as Affinity Photo can't handle Adobe Lightroom documents. With Lightroom the problem is that metadata for processed photos is not transferable do to differences in the tool set. So it would seem that with Affinity Desktop, InDesign styles and formatting are not transferable. This is remarkable because InDesign can import Microsoft word styles quite well. It makes migration from InDesign to Affinity Desktop impractical if not impossible. That's unfortunate because Affinity Desktop seems to be an excellent program.

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3 hours ago, Whitedog said:

Affinity Desktop

Do you mean Affinity Publisher?

Try search in forum. 

Affinity Store (MSI/EXE): Affinity Suite (ADe, APh, APu) 2.4.0.2301
Dell OptiPlex 7060, i5-8500 3.00 GHz, 16 GB, Intel UHD Graphics 630, Dell P2417H 1920 x 1080, Windows 11 Pro, Version 23H2, Build 22631.3155.
Dell Latitude E5570, i5-6440HQ 2.60 GHz, 8 GB, Intel HD Graphics 530, 1920 x 1080, Windows 11 Pro, Version 23H2, Build 22631.3155.
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15 hours ago, Pšenda said:

Do you mean Affinity Publisher?

I appear to have confused the name of the product.  Affinity has a new product out in beta, Affinity Publisher for Desktop. I downloaded it and tried it out on some InDesign documents. They were grayed out. Perhaps I could cut and past some text to see what is transferred, but this is not practical for a long form document I've been working on in InDesign CS6. InDesign CC is prohibitively expensive, requiring a $20 a month subscription. I expect Affinity Publisher to be priced comparably with their other products so it is an appealing alternative. I checked out all their online tutorials and it is already quite capable. It's compatibility with the other Affinity products has not yet been implemented, but that's not an issue for me as I am not using them. Compatibility with InDesign is my issue.

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Hi @Whitedog,

Have a look at the beta forums for Affinity Publisher. It appears that compatibility with Indesign is on the roadmap, but it isn't there in the first beta version, which was only released a couple of days ago.

Edited by h_d
Typos

Affinity Photo 2.0.3,  Affinity Designer 2.0.3, Affinity Publisher 2.0.3, Mac OSX 13, 2018 MacBook Pro 15" Intel.

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28 minutes ago, h_d said:

Hi @Whitedog,

Have a look at the beta forums for Affinity Publisher. It appears that compatibility with Indesign is on the roadmap, but it isn't there in the first beta version, which was only released a couple of days ago.

Thanks for the update. There does not appear to be a good search function, or any search function, on the forums so I missed that info. Be looking for the update.

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14 minutes ago, h_d said:

Yeah I don't think searching on these Support Forums finds anything in the Beta Forums.

Searching here will find info on the Beta forums, as long as you don't restrict the search to a specific forum using the search options.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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2 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Searching here will find info on the Beta forums, as long as you don't restrict the search to a specific forum using the search options.

Using h_d's link I found the InDesign thread on the forums. I'm far from the only one concerned about InDesign import. It appears they are working on it.

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6 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Searching here will find info on the Beta forums, as long as you don't restrict the search to a specific forum using the search options.

True

Affinity Photo 2.0.3,  Affinity Designer 2.0.3, Affinity Publisher 2.0.3, Mac OSX 13, 2018 MacBook Pro 15" Intel.

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As a temporary workaround, have you tried exporting from InDesign as a pdf and then importing this into Publisher?

John

Windows 10, Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Designer 1.10.5 and Publisher 1.10.5 (mainly Photo), now ex-Adobe CC

CPU: AMD A6-3670. RAM: 16 GB DDR3 @ 666MHz, Graphics: 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 630

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I still think there should be App specific sub-forums, even though all the apps have commonalities, having to ask which app people are using all of the time is a PIA, having the sub-forums would at least make that unnecessary and make for a tidier forum

Shame there isn't a Java'esque File Format.

 

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9  
B| (Please refrain from licking the screen while using this forum)

Affinity Help - Affinity Desktop Tutorials - Feedback - FAQ - most asked questions

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3 hours ago, firstdefence said:

I still think there should be App specific sub-forums, even though all the apps have commonalities, having to ask which app people are using all of the time is a PIA, having the sub-forums would at least make that unnecessary and make for a tidier forum

How would you make sure people post to the appropriate sub-forum? As it is, even though this forum's new name should make it clear it is not for the iPad apps, people still post questions related to them here. We also see questions posted to the bug forums that have nothing to do with bugs, feedback & feature requests posted to various forums not intended for that, & so on.

We have been through all of this before, including various suggestions about how to handle questions that are not product-specific. But there are now six non-beta apps, & soon there will be eight, plus various betas at different times, covering three different operating systems, so how do you propose all of that should be broken down into sub-forums without creating so many of them that users & potential users would have no clear idea about which one they should choose?

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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6 hours ago, firstdefence said:

I still think there should be App specific sub-forums, even though all the apps have commonalities

When 1.7 builds are released and Publisher is sold I plan to do this to the Bugs reporting forums (not before for logistical reasons). The questions and customer service forums are ok I think, but the bugs matters more for tracking things down. Anyway we have a cunning plan... but just not for now.

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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Just for the record, I did not say that I think there should be App specific sub-forums, as the quote above implies.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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If not sub-forums, mandatory tagging i.e you cannot write a post until you have chosen which App you are referring too, although I still think sub-forums are a good idea because other forums with multiple apps manage this so why not Affinity. Look at car forums, each model of car under the car brand has it's own forum, all cars have wheels, engines, doors, lights etc but then the model makes it different, so it is with Affinity apps

Referring to a feature that is in all Affinity Apps is all well and good but there are workflows that also require app specific features as well as the included ecosystem wide feature, so job lotting everything in one forum in the vain hope people are considerate enough to tell you what app they are referring too and what Operating System they are on is not really going to work, hence the myriad of "what app are you using" and "what Operating System are you on" questions that proliferate posts. In an organised forum these questions would not exist. I regularly look at persons profile to see what other posts they have made in order to glean app info and Operating System info so that I can refer to the question better, but I shouldn't have too.

As the forum gets larger manageability becomes more of an issue and from an organisational point of view having sub-forums becomes clearer, it can also help with searches and browsing for info. Having sub-forums does not alienate Operating Systems it just makes it easier for people using those Operating Systems to relate to the posts they are looking at. 

Would you run an office like this forum? where you lump all files into one folder, I think not.

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9  
B| (Please refrain from licking the screen while using this forum)

Affinity Help - Affinity Desktop Tutorials - Feedback - FAQ - most asked questions

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1 hour ago, R C-R said:

Just for the record, I did not say that I think there should be App specific sub-forums, as the quote above implies.

The quote was from firstdefence. As far as I can see your name was not mentioned in connection with it. Rather just the opposite.

The problem is, and has always been, how to find the forum you're interested in. I created my own topic because I couldn't find this one. I was eventually directed here by another user. What the site needs is a decent search function. I looked for one before I started posting about InDesign compatibility. Fortunately, for me, h_d read my thread and posted a link. Though he talks about searching and I could find no way to do so. If there is a search function, it's well hidden. You know, like not at the top of every page where it belongs.

That said, once I got here I found this thread to be a robust one and that it is monitored by dedicated users like Patrick Conner, who apparently knows what's happening on the ground, so to speak. h_d also directed me to the beta forums where I found a discussion on InDesign compatibility. Chris_K, a staff moderator, reassured concerned users like me that InDesign compatibility is in the works: 

It's worth noting that InDesign cannot open Word docs directly. I used an old version of Pages to open my (old) long document from AppleWorks. Then I exported the document to MS Word. After which I cut and pasted it into InDesign. What amazed me is that my style sheets survived the process more or less in tack. The issue might be for Publisher to do as well, recognizing InDesign style sheets and page layouts when text is cut and pasted from one to the other (and Word docs too). Actually opening InDesign and Word documents may be a bridge too far.

Another reason I'm interested in Publisher is that InDesign CS6 is 32bit only, if you can believe it. Whereas Photoshop CS6 is 64bit—and cannot be run in 32bit mode, as Photoshop CS5 can. The whole CS6 suite is equally schizophrenic, including numerous 32 and 64bit apps. The next version of the macOS after 10.14 Mojave will be 64 bit only. The Mojave beta throws up a warning the first time you launch a 32 bit app that it is not optimized for 10.14. macOS 10.15 won't be out till late next year, and even then no one will be compelled to upgrade their OS, but the handwriting is on the wall. InDesign CS6 is approaching EOL.

So, $50 for a standalone version of Publisher, as opposed to $20 a month for an InDesign CC subscription, is a no brainer. As I said, I looked at the online demos for Publisher and it is impressive. As well, the learning curve will apparently not be too steep.

One note of caution—and I'll post this as well on the features request forum, is that Apple's Pages now has a new and improved way to link text boxes. For a long time it lacked text box linking. Apple cut it out way back when. Well, in the latest version text box linking is back with a vengeance. Instead of the traditional lines linking boxes, which can get tedious to use to say the least, Pages now links text boxes by the numbers, with different threads with different color tabs so you can easily tell what you are linking to. You can change the numbers to move boxes around and even change thread colors. This may be one of the greatest innovations in desktop publishing in years. IMO Serif would do well to sit up and take notice of this new approach. Who knows if Adobe will. And, at this point, who cares.

By the way, I found the Search icon at the top of these pages. Don't know why I didn't see it before. Sorry for the scolds.

 

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sorry for the quote confusion, by bad (and corrected)

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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5 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

If not sub-forums, mandatory tagging i.e you cannot write a post until you have chosen which App you are referring too, although I still think sub-forums are a good idea because other forums with multiple apps manage this so why not Affinity. Look at car forums, each model of car under the car brand has it's own forum, all cars have wheels, engines, doors, lights etc but then the model makes it different, so it is with Affinity apps

Mandatory tagging, even if the site software supports it, would be a bad idea for a product support site. Users & particularly potential buyers too often resent having to 'jump through hoops' to get support, & go elsewhere.

Car manufacturer's web sites are not a good comparison because so many of the support issues discussed here are in fact equally applicable to all the Affinity products, or at least to all the desktop ones. For example, almost all questions about the Node or Move tools apply equally well to all the desktop apps, & many to the iOS apps as well.

You also can't ignore that lots of people get here through a web search & just add posts to existing topics based on what they think might be the same or a related issue (but often is not), so neither mandatory tagging nor fragmenting this forum into many sub-forums will prevent that.

But more to the point, how exactly would you organize this forum into sub-forums? Do you want separate ones for each desktop OS, & maybe further subdivisions into one for each product? What about questions that are indeed neither product nor OS specific? Do you want one or a few general forums or sub-forums for that, & if so how would you suggest them not becoming pretty much what we have now because users won't want to limit their questions to anything more specific than that?

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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29 minutes ago, Whitedog said:

Though he talks about searching and I could find no way to do so. If there is a search function, it's well hidden. You know, like not at the top of every page where it belongs.

Something like this, which is on the top of every page? (At least, using a web browser. On a phone it's just shown as the magnifying glass.)
image.png.a6ca57bbe4b00a24a3484a9d856fe819.png

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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2 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Something like this, which is on the top of every page? (At least, using a web browser. On a phone it's just shown as the magnifying glass.)

Yes, it is there but even the staff acknowledge that it does not work very well, & of course if someone does not know the right term to search for then it is just about useless. I do usually know more or less the right term but I all but gave up on using this site feature long ago because it typically generates way too many irrelevant hits & often nothing very relevant is among them.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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even my staff use google searches like this

site:https://forum.affinity.serif.com indesign compatibility

O.o

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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35 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

even my staff use google searches like this

site:https://forum.affinity.serif.com indesign compatibility

O.o

I find the site search works well enough, especially if the additional options are used appropriately, but it did take a bit of getting used to. Thanks for the hint about using Google, though. I may play with that.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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