master page templates? - who is Publisher for?

[Julia Bird]

I am a professional with over 25 years experience in the technology and publishing sectors.

I was really looking forward to Affinity Publisher after a very positive experience with Designer (not so much with Photo which has a confused interface and workflow).

I am sorry to say that despite really wanting this new software to disrupt a market totally dominated by Adobe, I am severely disappointed.

I could point out deep flaws like a lack of master page templates - essential , no - critical, to doing any work with documents more than 10 pages. But something deeper is more concerning - the thought process behind Publisher. Who is it for? It's clearly not for anyone wanting to work with documents larger than about 10 pages - because there is nothing in the released preview that enables those workflows. Is it for brochure designers, or poster makers? Well in those use cases, Designer is more than sufficient. 

I won't begrudge anyone on here who is offering "tips" on how to have the same text frame on every page - but really, that advice isn't scalable nor robust for serious projects of any meaningful size. 

I am truly sorry to have to agree with several reviews which summarise Publisher as Designer with support for a few pages.

And I do't agree with the comments that this is a beta. Beta isn't about half implemented features. As several here have said - an alpha is a set of experiments for exploring potential solutions, and a beta is for finding issues through wider use. An alpha establishes the workflows and features to solve particular problems - and a beta irons out bugs. That's been basic software development for about 20 years.

 

Julia