Nico Posted February 22, 2019 Share Posted February 22, 2019 Is there anything on the market or planned by Serif to implement versioning? Sketch files are zipped to contain text format data and image which allowed products like Kactus/Abstract to collaborate with Git. I have affinity products across Mac, pc and iPad, and would be nice to have a centralised way like a git friendly system with meaningful diff/commenting that goes beyond simple binary replacement. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff Gabe Posted February 22, 2019 Staff Share Posted February 22, 2019 Hi @Nico , We have no plans to implement this at the moment. Sorry Moved to feature requests. Thanks, Gabe. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nico Posted February 22, 2019 Author Share Posted February 22, 2019 7 minutes ago, GabrielM said: Hi @Nico , We have no plans to implement this at the moment. Sorry Moved to feature requests. Thanks, Gabe. Thanks for letting me know Gabriel, do you have any idea or resource about internal file structure approach for designer/publisher/photo? Interested to know if the actual file is a proprietary binary or approached more of a open container with an internal structure like excel, open document or sketch files, perhaps compressed. Also to see if there is any potential to create a third party tool/service. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff Gabe Posted February 22, 2019 Staff Share Posted February 22, 2019 I'm afraid the native file format is proprietary binary and not an open-source structure. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
v_kyr Posted February 22, 2019 Share Posted February 22, 2019 9 minutes ago, Nico said: Interested to know if the actual file is a proprietary binary or approached more of a open container with an internal structure ... The file format is pretty proprietary, so to say sealed and closed for the outer world! Quote ☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan ☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nico Posted February 22, 2019 Author Share Posted February 22, 2019 Cool, no hope for third party work about this then. As I have seen there is request to support Sketch file format, here's another candle about it, if well supported export format it could be an alternative and therefore could save and git diff to that format. If your format is a typical proprietary format, it's going to be very hard time to turn it at this point, so probably my money are into sketch container support Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
v_kyr Posted February 22, 2019 Share Posted February 22, 2019 Well there are different solutions available to work with git here, in terms of storing large binary files into shared repositories for that. - See for example this short article ... Storing Large Binary Files in Git Repositories Quote ☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan ☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nico Posted February 22, 2019 Author Share Posted February 22, 2019 1 hour ago, v_kyr said: Well there are different solutions available to work with git here, in terms of storing large binary files into shared repositories for that. - See for example this short article ... Storing Large Binary Files in Git Repositories Thanks for that, but my point was about having the opportunity to explode the container file and git manage internal resources like text or json which could be used to store vector like well-structured svg like and therefore be able to diff changes at line level just like dev code. As Affinity designer seemed interested to put a mark into icon/ui/ux space (or perhaps giving up to more established sketch/invision solutions and focus on traditional illustrator/photoshop/indesign replacement user base), this is a feature increasingly important to have for better structured projects as designers get more and more used to git like workflows. This would allow to scan all changes across different versions of designs, icon sets and so forth. From my understanding Large files addons around git just speed up the versioning but doesn't really offer any further benefit of exploding and indexing internal resources. We can imagine Affinity publisher could benefit from internal indexing to modify embedded images and their data associated in like large books, magazines, if an image changes or some of its data, you can store those specific changes that are also human readable, designer with icon sets, multi screen apps, photos could be non-destructive multi layering. In general whatever needs granular detail and a lots of things going on in larger projects, might be very useful. These days I think it's way more useful to have an open format to interact with other apps, than an optimised binary to save space, storage in plentiful Unless they have any business/protectionism reason, not considering that could cut some potential market through integrations. I hope to see good news in the future, as I would like to adopt affinity apps more. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
v_kyr Posted February 22, 2019 Share Posted February 22, 2019 AFAIK the software uses a LZW compressed binary file format, so not the structure or way Sketch uses here. Though for the handling you describe, of course a format like Sketch uses has it's advantages. 6 hours ago, Nico said: Unless they have any business/protectionism reason, not considering that could cut some potential market through integrations. I hope to see good news in the future, as I would like to adopt affinity apps more. Well they seem to think more or less that keeping their file format and file handling secret is crucial and essentiell for them. - Related to integrations, since there is no real API or anything else into this direction (beside the usage restricted Adobe PS plugin interface), there isn't much you can integrate for a collaboration at all. Quote ☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan ☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
franzk Posted March 21, 2019 Share Posted March 21, 2019 +1 for a git friendly solution. It's a needed feature for a perfect integration in a development workflow Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glinkot Posted April 7, 2020 Share Posted April 7, 2020 Yes I've just been looking for something similar. I'm going to use publisher for technical docs/manuals, and version control or at least diffing the text content is very important for that use case. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Linwood Posted May 26, 2020 Share Posted May 26, 2020 Also would encourage/vote for a way to merge two people's work - typical modern features in a versioning system. OR at the least allow just copy/text diffing so that copy editors and graphic designers can easily coordinate (possibly a plugin?) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kernig Posted June 17, 2020 Share Posted June 17, 2020 +1 We would also like to see an integrated versioning system :) For Adobe there is at least a third party addon - https://www.goproof.net/goversion/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TeryFlip Posted September 16, 2022 Share Posted September 16, 2022 +1 On this. I've worked in the video game industry and versioning was something that I got used to and really really find it useful. Changing file names causes problems especially when linking/placing files within files within files etc. As for keeping different version we would use SVN for the artists in the video game studio. It seemed to work fine, but the repository got bloated fast. It wasn't a problem since we designed the servers to scale, but for a small guy like me, a solution like that be overkill or just too much to manage. I'll have to check out that Adobe one to see what it's like, but versioning really does come in handy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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