Appreciation post for the Publisher team

[000]

Hi,

just wanted to let you guys know how incredibly impressed I am with how Publisher is developing -- I am really happy with you adding some extra features and having a really long beta cycle rather than pushing out a software that cannot compete with others. Love the reworked master pages, the search--replace enhancements (RegEx, RegEx, RegEx!) and the new pinned objects!

It's about time that Adobe gets some competition in the pro market (there's lot's of semi-pro applications out there with tons of templates and flashy features, but nothing except Quark Xpress that can actually do what InDesign does).

Thanks for your hard work!

[VillyReality]

I have paid for the full Adobe CC subscription for 5 years, before that, i paid for the Adobe CS3 Mastercollection (Way to expensive back in the day). I just found out about all of this software, and i have tried the Designer program for 1 day and i already like it more than Illustrator. Thank you for making this software and i cant wait to learn more about all your programs. Looking forward to pay your for your hard work with Publisher aswell. Thanks for taking up the fight with Adobe!

[World View]

I think the software is very intuitive. Given that I just started with it about three weeks ago I could create a good demo document and several drafts of an eMagazine.

And it's fun to work with.

Thumbs up!

 

[garrettm30]

I think the appreciation thread is a good idea, and I would like to join in expressing my appreciation to Serif.

As we are invited to share our criticisms of the software—both of bugs and missing or imperfect features—for the purpose of improving it, it might also be nice to take some time to notice what it gets right.

[Interior Book Design]

I also do appreciate your hard work and I'm very impressed with the progress your are making. You are really listening to us, the users and customers.

Thank you!

[garrettm30]

8 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

it might also be nice to take some time to notice what it gets right

I thought I might follow up with some specifics. I think part of what attracts us to Publisher is the reasonable (or outstanding, rather) non-subscription price, but there are other various things that are positive advantages as opposed to InDesign. To balance out our "Why won't Publisher be like InDesign?" feature requests, maybe we can point out some things that are Publisher advantages even now.

One of the things I am excited about is the fact that bold, italic, underline and superscripts are not treated as local formatting when applying a style. In InDesign, when I want to clear out local formatting (my predecessor did not ever use character or paragraph styles), I still need to preserve these things in body text, because they are essentially semantic markup rather than mere formatting style. So I create a mundane set of character styles:

I apply those with a series of find/replace based on format. Then, with those attributes that I need to keep are safely marked off as character styles, I go back and apply fresh paragraph styles with "clear overrides," so that weird spacing and other overrides are gone, but these attributes are preserved.

Publisher's behavior makes all of that completely unnecessary. I can clear out most overrides while still preserving italics, bold, underlines, etc. without needing to define character styles.

And similarly, Publisher seems to know what is bold, italic, etc., even when the font style names are something different. If I want to change the font from, let's say, plain old Georgia to ITC Garamond Condensed, then it just knows that anything that was Georgia with the font style "Italic" is now ITC-Garamond Condensed with the font style "ITC Garamond Book Condensed Italic." InDesign is not so smart. It just throws up its hands and says that there is no "Italic" font style in ITC-Garamond Condensed. So then I have to redefine my "Italic" character style to use "ITC Garamond Book Condensed Italic" font style instead of just "Italic."

That took a lot of explaining, but in Publisher, it just works.

So that's one (or two) advantages that come to mind. I could list others, and maybe later I will. How about you? Are there other particular advantages that get you excited about Affinity Publisher?

 

[Michael117]

I’d like to add my appreciation to all the great Serif staff who take time to respond to questions on these forums.  I know you are all very busy and it’s great to get a chance to get advice from the people who are extremely knowledgeable about the product and can help us understand the thinking and the proper way to use the software.  

[rbsund]

+1 !!

[rcheetah]

I think that AP was very well developed. Congrats to you guys! It’s great that you have implemented pinned objects, and also, that you thought about GREP/REGEX functionality!

[garrettm30]

Here are some other things that I like as compared to InDesign, in no particular order.

I can send up to 9999 copies to the printer. With InDesign printing to the same printer with the same print driver on the same computer, I am limited to 999 per print job. We typically print in the low thousands, so most of our stuff would be sent as several print jobs in InDesign but as one in Publisher.

I love that I can set up a numbered list style to restart numbering at "Any Non List." How has InDesign missed that all these years?

Paragraph before and after spacing is superior, in that it there is the option to sum spacing between multiple paragraphs, and that one can choose to apply the spacing at the top and bottom of columns. These things give us more control.

You can set tab position relative to the right margin.

Publisher on Mac (as best as I can tell) is one single program that is open only when needed. Adobe has its tendrils all over the system with multiple background programs, even when InDesign is not open. Worse, they make it so that it loads for every user, so that when multiple computer users are logged in (I'm referring to the fast user switching on Mac), duplicate instances of these background programs are running and taking up memory. Today I counted 21 background programs that I could identify as coming from Adobe (including copies) that were running on my machine for three users, when no one had any Adobe application open. The two other users never use anything Adobe, and I only use InDesign. What a waste of resources!

[garrettm30]

And two three four more came to mind.

All the Affinity apps have awesome snapping. For the last two years when using InDesign, I have wished for Affinity's snapping capabilities. Now I have it!

The Initial Words capability configurable with End Characters.

Actual Mac-native full screen mode.

Better GPU rendering. InDesign seems buggy in this respect. When text reflows in ID, often I get to see where the text was and where it now is on top of each other for a few seconds. I saw this on my 2012 iMac and now on my 2019 iMac with very different GPU capabilities.