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Hey guys,

I love the Affinity Suite, and I made the jump from Adobe CS4 to Affinity several months back (and am very happy I did). One thing I am still lacking though is a good PDF editor. I need one that has basic page layout functions (add/remove/rearrange pages), but also has things like OCR capability. I know this isn't technically an Affinity question, but since the forums have been super helpful in everything else, I figured I would ask fellow designers here. Any recommendations?

Thank you!

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Hi RenWaller,

Have you tried Affinity Publisher? it has page layout features along with many other features you would expect from a DTP app. Unfortunately in regard to OCR compatibility if you are referring to Optical character recognition its not something we currently support or have plans to implement at the moment however we never like to rule anything out completely.

If you would like to try the free Affinity Publisher Beta you can download it below :)

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/62-affinity-publisher-beta-forums/

Thanks

Callum

Please tag me using @ in your reply so I can be sure to respond ASAP.

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Hi RenWaller - Publisher is very good for opening PDFs as long as you have the fonts within the PDF on your computer. If not, it will ask to use different fonts and this will almost certainly cause problems. On the odd occasion that I need to use OCR on a PDF I use Abbyy Finereader. It's not free but the OCR is pretty good. You could probably get a trial.

Windows 10 Pro, I5 3.3G PC 16G RAM

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Thanks guys, I have been using Publisher a lot lately (and loving it), but what I'm really wanting right now is something with OCR (actually so I can remake a document in Publisher). slvJoe, does Scribus do OCR? MickRose, how did you find Abbyy? What does you like about it besides the OCR?

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If you have Google Drive available to you it will OCR scan documents, you can then download them: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/176692?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en

A more detailed explanation of the process here: https://business.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-ocr-documents-for-free-in-google-drive--cms-20460

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  
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If you are on Windows then Office Lens is free and can do OCR. I have sued it successfully for large documents and it outputs in Word or PDF.

However you need to convert the input document to an image(jpeg, png, bmp etc) . I do this in Affinity  Designer/Photo.

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Thank you guys! Gerard O, no I'm not on Windows anymore. My husband, a non-artist, really wanted me to switch to Mac. So I am now a Mac user (although still have much more familiarity with Windows and often lament how I prefer many Windows features).

Firstdefence, thank you! I didn't know that, and I will definitely be using that.

Thank you!

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Also, another feature I'm wondering if any other programs have is "output preview." I really like being able to check out the color separations in a document to make sure all of the colors are what they're supposed to be. Does Publisher do this?

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There is a Preview mode on the View Menu View > Preview Mode 

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  
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15 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

There is a Preview mode on the View Menu View > Preview Mode 

All that does is what clip to canvas does plus hide margins & text frame borders.

@RenWaller,

The only other application for viewing color seps, ink density, etc., is callas pdfToolbox. Unlike Acrobat, there really isn't a means to edit a PDF in pdfToolbox nor does it have an OCR component.

There is no means of viewing separations, ink densities, etc., in Affinity applications.

As I use Windows, I don't have any recommendations for a PDF editor. Sorry.

Mike

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Thanks for letting me know MikeW :)

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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I've been on the hunt for a replacement to Acrobat pro 9.5.5 - so was exited to see that PDF studio offers output preview and the ability to verify compliance which are the main things I use before sending PDFs to the print shop, and don't seem to be available in any of the other PDF editors - so I downloaded PDF studio and found it to be a little slow and clunky compared to my 10 year old version of Acrobat, also output preview and the ability to verify compliance in pdf studio are pretty terrible, with output preview you have to select your colour profile from a long list instead of auto-detecting and theres no separation preview also the verify compliance feature which I tested on a CD jewel case insert set as PDF/x 1a 2003 from Designer, passed compliance in Acrobat and failed in PDF studio. it's also pretty expensive for the pro version.

Looks like I'm sticking with Acrobat 9.5.5 till theres something else that does what I need - only prob is Adobe CS5 has loads of problems in Sierra - Mojave so I'm stuck for the time being in El Capitan 

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Mac Pro Cheese-grater (Early 2009) 2.93 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon 48 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC Ram, Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 580 8GB GDDR5, Ugee 19" Graphics Tablet Monitor Triple boot via OCLP 1.2.1 - Mac OS Monterey 12.7.1, Sonoma 14.1.1 and Mojave 10.14.6

Affinity Publisher, Designer and Photo 1.10.5 - 2.2.1

www.bingercreative.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

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For OCR, I've used a few over the past few years, some are terrible (Cisdem OCRWizard) the best I've come across for my needs is Leadtools OCR which is free and just works https://www.leadtools.com/sdk/ocr 

Daz1.png

Mac Pro Cheese-grater (Early 2009) 2.93 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon 48 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC Ram, Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 580 8GB GDDR5, Ugee 19" Graphics Tablet Monitor Triple boot via OCLP 1.2.1 - Mac OS Monterey 12.7.1, Sonoma 14.1.1 and Mojave 10.14.6

Affinity Publisher, Designer and Photo 1.10.5 - 2.2.1

www.bingercreative.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

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