I printed 120 pages catalog and used only Serif's Apps!

[gracjangk]

Hey I just wanna share a quick story of how I finished  and printed 120 pages company catalogue inside Affinity Publisher Beta! [Yeah I'm crazy sometimes]
If Publisher devs would be interested I can provide three source files so they could use them for future bug squashing. 
So let's start with the background - I started working for the company 1.5 yer ago as a marketing departament employee and my main focus was to gather new clients, but soon they discovered that I can quickly edit PDF files, tweak colors in photos and draw vectors - I used my personal copies of Photo and Designer for that. Later I officially become one and only company graphic.

Finally I got biggest project in my life: I had to make company catalogue - three bilingual versions Polish/English, German/English, Russian/ English with up to date content, products and photos. I had only compressed PDF file of the previous catalog project that I edited few times in Designer, but it was only for web use. When I was starting out the Publisher Beta wasn't even out yet. So I took the PDF to designer and started from converting Project to 400DPI CMYK, then replaced all photos with CMYK tiffs that I made with Photo Batch Work feature. Then I discovered that blacks should be changed to 100%K - huge pain in the a** because text boxes were bilingual and used two text colors. It took ages. Also Designer Artboards are cool but changing page order is a pain. And don't even get me started on page numbering : )

While I was working like crazy I got email with a link to Publisher Beta - this changed everything. It was early beta so I didn't trusted the software and I was right because it crashed like crazy - as beta should right? I got an idea that I would use publisher for page numbering process and place Affinity Designer pages with "Place Image" feature. Do we all remember bug with linked files that were really embedded? Catalogue made in designer with full resolution images took about 2GB of disk space, imagine that I use this file on 120 pages as placed image with different artboard chosen - My 16GB RAM MacBook Pro looked like that  every time I opened the files, it grew to to about 60-80 gigabytes and hang my machine after few minutes. Beta got few updates - and then there was the feature where it could convert Artboard to a Spread - kudos to developers for that. I had a file that was usable, software with every update was more stable. 

From that time I mainly used Publisher and Designer/Photo as a support. I continued the project, when finally I got to the point where I could add missing content, photos, drawings. So I started working on it, I was so absorbed with photos and text , that I had no time to draw our products. At the time we were looking for apprentice, we recruited a girl with an 2018 iPad and Apple Pencil. I bought her a copy of Designer iPad - she never used a software before but after few days and with my support she draw  first product - it looked great so I told her: listen I like how you draw this products could you draw the missing ones? She agreed. Affinity file format is cool, we were exchanging files back and forth with almost no issue (except fonts but we found a workaround). 

Finally after almost three months of tweaking, changes, discussions and working sometimes 12-16 hours per day I exported pages and a cover and  uploaded onto print company server. It passed verification process, but until I saw the physical copies I was nervous and kinda afraid  because if something would be messed up it would be my fault no matter what. 
Everything was printed properly and it looks good to my eye. Ufff
Final digital product Polish/English (without cover) can be accessed here: click

I can tell that I found my passion and built some kind of career based only on Serif's products: I bought Photo, Designer, Designer iPad and two Workbooks, I would definitely buy Publisher minutes after it hits the Mac AppStore. Thank you for producing such a great software. The work is so fluent and so enjoyable inside your apps - keep working. I wish everyone at Serif Happy New Year! Keep improving great products. 

Bugs I encountered in the process:

• Embeded/linked files even when linked are embeded
• Copied vectors from Publisher are pasted as rasterized pixels in Photo/Designer 
• Export bugs - elements linked via Affinity Designer Artboards aren't exported properly
• Replace all crashed the app
• Moving single page in facing pages document = crash 
• Removing  one page in facing pages document = crash 
• After many hours app become sluggish - closing the document does the job
• App cache in library sometimes exceeds 20GB 

If you have any questions feel free to contact me. I would reply in my free time. 

Sample spread:

 

[jmwellborn]

59 minutes ago, gracjangk said:

Hey I just wanna share a quick story of how I finished  and printed 120 pages company catalogue inside Affinity Publisher Beta! [Yeah I'm crazy sometimes]
If Publisher devs would be interested I can provide three source files so they could use them for future bug squashing. 
So let's start with the background - I started working for the company 1.5 yer ago as a marketing departament employee and my main focus was to gather new clients, but soon they discovered that I can quickly edit PDF files, tweak colors in photos and draw vectors - I used my personal copies of Photo and Designer for that. Later I officially become one and only company graphic.

Finally I got biggest project in my life: I had to make company catalogue - three bilingual versions Polish/English, German/English, Russian/ English with up to date content, products and photos. I had only compressed PDF file of the previous catalog project that I edited few times in Designer, but it was only for web use. When I was starting out the Publisher Beta wasn't even out yet. So I took the PDF to designer and started from converting Project to 400DPI CMYK, then replaced all photos with CMYK tiffs that I made with Photo Batch Work feature. Then I discovered that blacks should be changed to 100%K - huge pain in the a** because text boxes were bilingual and used two text colors. It took ages. Also Designer Artboards are cool but changing page order is a pain. And don't even get me started on page numbering : )

While I was working like crazy I got email with a link to Publisher Beta - this changed everything. It was early beta so I didn't trusted the software and I was right because it crashed like crazy - as beta should right? I got an idea that I would use publisher for page numbering process and place Affinity Designer pages with "Place Image" feature. Do we all remember bug with linked files that were really embedded? Catalogue made in designer with full resolution images took about 2GB of disk space, imagine that I use this file on 120 pages as placed image with different artboard chosen - My 16GB RAM MacBook Pro looked like that  every time I opened the files, it grew to to about 60-80 gigabytes and hang my machine after few minutes. Beta got few updates - and then there was the feature where it could convert Artboard to a Spread - kudos to developers for that. I had a file that was usable, software with every update was more stable. 

From that time I mainly used Publisher and Designer/Photo as a support. I continued the project, when finally I got to the point where I could add missing content, photos, drawings. So I started working on it, I was so absorbed with photos and text , that I had no time to draw our products. At the time we were looking for apprentice, we recruited a girl with an 2018 iPad and Apple Pencil. I bought her a copy of Designer iPad - she never used a software before but after few days and with my support she draw  first product - it looked great so I told her: listen I like how you draw this products could you draw the missing ones? She agreed. Affinity file format is cool, we were exchanging files back and forth with almost no issue (except fonts but we found a workaround). 

Finally after almost three months of tweaking, changes, discussions and working sometimes 12-16 hours per day I exported pages and a cover and  uploaded onto print company server. It passed verification process, but until I saw the physical copies I was nervous and kinda afraid  because if something would be messed up it would be my fault no matter what. 
Everything was printed properly and it looks good to my eye. Ufff
Final digital product Polish/English (without cover) can be accessed here: click

I can tell that I found my passion and built some kind of career based only on Serif's products: I bought Photo, Designer, Designer iPad and two Workbooks, I would definitely buy Publisher minutes after it hits the Mac AppStore. Thank you for producing such a great software. The work is so fluent and so enjoyable inside your apps - keep working. I wish everyone at Serif Happy New Year! Keep improving great products. 

Bugs I encountered in the process:

• Embeded/linked files even when linked are embeded
• Copied vectors from Publisher are pasted as rasterized pixels in Photo/Designer 
• Export bugs - elements linked via Affinity Designer Artboards aren't exported properly
• Replace all crashed the app
• Moving single page in facing pages document = crash 
• Removing  one page in facing pages document = crash 
• After many hours app become sluggish - closing the document does the job
• App cache in library sometimes exceeds 20GB 

If you have any questions feel free to contact me. I would reply in my free time. 

Sample spread:

 

 It could have been a case of "Never Volunteer."   Instead, it was "Always Persevere," and you have an extraordinarily elegant first catalog.   Well done!!!!      

[thomaso]

6 hours ago, gracjangk said:

I discovered that blacks should be changed to 100%K - huge pain in the a** because text boxes were bilingual and used two text colors.

Any reason not mention this in your list of your experienced bugs? Black text in 100% K as an applications default. 

What did prevent to solve it simply by changing the color swatch definition of the affected text styles? 

[gracjangk]

Styles weren’t eneabled on all text elements and I wanted to be 100% sure. I agree with you - while converting document to CMYK publisher should change black text to 100%K instead of random values.