Why, you might ask, is the coauthor of a book about InDesign reviewing a direct competitor, Affinity Publisher?
Because it’s new and I wanted to check it out.
And because it’s so much more affordable than Adobe’s Creative Cloud: $600 a year for the Adobe suite vs. a one-time total of $150 for the full line of Serif’s products: Publisher, Photo, and Designer (all at half price until May 20). We both bought the Affinity software for desktop, and I must say that for the most part, we love it.
The Affinity Publisher app is for desktop use on PCs and Macs. Photo and Designer can also now be used on iPads, so check back on Publisher to see when the iPad version becomes available.
My method in trying out Affinity Publisher was to go through Book Design Made Simple and see whether I could accomplish all the book design and typesetting tasks we give you in the book.
And the answer is: Yes, almost.
And does Publisher have any extra features that might be useful to a book designer? Yes, definitely.
Are you considering trying the new #bookdesign software called Affinity Publisher? We've reviewed it for you and offer a few tips to get you started quickly. https://bit.ly/2YSC33L. Click To TweetSo here you’ll get the straight scoop on what’s good, what’s not so good, and what’s absolutely terrific about Affinity Publisher—from the point of view of a book designer and as it relates to Book Design Made Simple. I purposely have not read any other reviews of Publisher; these observations are my own.
What’s good about Affinity Publisher
Just so we’re clear what we’re talking about here: Affinity Publisher is the equivalent of Adobe InDesign, and you can open and edit .idml files. Affinity Designer is the equivalent of Adobe Illustrator, and you can open and edit .ai files. Affinity Photo is the equivalent of Adobe Photoshop, and you can open and edit .psd files.
The best thing about Publisher is that you’ll be able to accomplish almost anything you’re used to doing in InDesign. But you’ll have to search a bit on the screen at first, and learn a few new terms. For instance, the Control panel is called the Context tool bar. If you use a Library in InDesign, instead you’ll find a very convenient Assets panel. Hidden characters are easily accessible but are called Special Characters.
Be aware that there are dozens of helpful tutorial videos for Publisher (more are being added), plus many others for Photo and Designer. I’d very much like to get my hands on a printed manual for Publisher, but it’s not available yet.
Also—and this is very important—if you install all three applications, you’ll be able to work on your photos and illustrations without switching out to the other programs, as they are all so fully integrated that they are simply called “personas.”
Here’s a list of some of the more important features and actions that you’ll encounter:
- Importing InDesign files. Okay, call me crazy, but when I opened an InDesign .idml file in Publisher, it appeared so beautifully and so close to perfectly that I actually jumped out of my seat and started dancing around. (However, if the fonts had been leased from Adobe, they would probably not have imported.)
- User interface. Take a peek (below). Does this look like something you’ve seen before? If you have any experience with InDesign, you’ll notice right away the Context tool bar (Control panel) at the top and flyout panels on the right, a Pages panel on the left, and several other familiar-looking features.
This is a new document, with the Pages panel on the left. It all looks incredibly familiar, doesn’t it? Notice the three little colored squares at the upper left corner. They represent the Affinity Publisher, Designer, and Photo personas, and switching among them involves just a single click.
- Preferences and Document Setup. Some of the items that you’d find elsewhere in InDesign are in Publisher’s Preferences panel instead, and vice versa. For example, Document Setup (rather than Preferences) is where you’ll choose your units of measurement. And some of the choices are located in Spread Setup. As far as I can tell, everything you’d need is there—somewhere.
- Importing and placing text. This works almost exactly the same as in InDesign, including text autoflow. There’s only one minor glitch involving typographer’s (curly) quotes. (See “What’s not so good” below for details).
-
The Object Styles panel in Publisher looks nothing like the one in InDesign.
Styles. There are character, paragraph, and object styles (see right) with all the familiar attributes. You’ll find lots of styles already listed and defined for you, but you can change them in every way and add your own. Use Affinity Publisher Help if you get confused.
- Master pages. Yes, they’re included and work as you’d expect.
- Typefaces. You’ll need to purchase your own fonts; no more leasing from Adobe. When you highlight some copy and you want to change the typeface, move your mouse up and down your list of fonts and the highlighted copy changes to each one you roll over. It’s entertaining!
- Colors, swatches, and gradients. These work almost the same as in InDesign and are very easy to figure out.
- Hyperlinks. Yes, you can create them, of course. The procedure requires a little extra clicking around, but there’s a tutorial for that.
- Section Manager. It is well worth your while to learn to use the Section Manager. This is where you add changing running heads (text variables) and is very clever indeed.
- Merge documents. This is equivalent to InDesign’s Book feature and purports to work more or less the same way. I did not try it.
- Indexing. This feature works very well and includes a handy panel on the left that shows all your entries. You can find, add, or delete entries right inside the panel either before or after you’ve added the index on the page.
- Automatic table of contents. First watch the tutorial, and then it works like a charm.
- Producing PDFs. PDFs are generated pretty much the same way as in InDesign, with professional results, as far as I can tell.
What’s not so good about Affinity Publisher
A few nifty features that we use happily in InDesign seem to be missing at the moment from Publisher, or they work so differently that you’ll need to relearn them.
- Purchasing fonts. If you’re used to relying on Adobe’s Typekit, you’re going to be a bit perplexed at first. (“What?!?! I have to pay for typefaces?”) This doesn’t bother me at all, and you might also discover that shopping for them is one of life’s little pleasures.
- Importing text from Word. In general, all your text will come in just fine, but if your Word doc has straight quotation marks, you can’t change them to curly (typographer’s) quotes with just one click as you import. Your best bet is to change them in Word (it’s very easy) ahead of time. For our own detailed instructions on how to change quotation marks either before or after you place your text, click here.
- Layers. I am still struggling with the Layers panel. It works sort of like the layers in Photoshop, so that every time I add anything to the document it appears on its own separate layer. Once I get accustomed to it I’ll be fine, and I hope you will, too. In the meantime, I’m learning not to drag anything up or down on the Layers panel, as that only wreaks havoc. I must use the Layers menu instead (Layer > Arrange > Move to Front [or Back, etc.] ).
- Strokes. Stroke styles are limited to solid and dashed—no double strokes, dots, or wavy lines. However, you can customize the dashed lines, just as in Adobe Illustrator. So with strokes, some things have been taken away but replaced with a precision dashed line feature, which also means you can devise a custom dotted line with a little extra effort.
What’s absolutely terrific about Affinity Publisher
The price. I can’t stress it enough: Affinity Publisher is very inexpensive compared to the Adobe subscription, and even much, much less than buying Adobe products before a subscription was required. Even with a few minor missing features, it is completely worth buying and hanging on to. And until May 20, 2020, Serif is offering all three apps for half price. Updates are free.- The shape drawing tools. Look at the choices (right)! This is going to be so much fun.
- The Crop Tool. Finally, finally, you can crop your geometry shapes right inside the program. Here’s an example below. I grouped the rectangle and the jagged line on the left, selected the Crop tool, then shaped the crop frame the way I wanted it. Is this not completely cool?
The original green shape and yellow line (left) and the cropped version.
- Switching among the Affinity “personas.” If you’re in Publisher and you decide to use a brush tool, simply click on the Designer icon at the top left corner of the screen, and your very same workspace loses the Publisher tools and gains the Designer tools. Ditto with the Photo persona. When you’re done, just switch back; it could not be any easier.
- The type menu. As I mentioned above, if you highlight some text and then roll over the list of fonts, the selected text will change as you move up and down the list. The same thing happens to a paragraph if you roll over the paragraph styles list.
- The Artistic Text Tool. This is like a dance party for type geeks! Just select the “A” tool and type something, then resize the text frame at random and you’ll watch the type shrink and grow to fit. Next, roll over your font list and the font will change accordingly, too.
Is it any wonder that Affinity Publisher was the official Mac App of the Year for 2019? We encourage you to try it, using the current 90-day free trial version if you like. Watch the tutorials, try their instructions, and you’ll soon feel like a Publisher pro.
I do believe that, with patience, you could use Affinity Publisher with Book Design Made Simple as your guide and successfully design your first or hundredth book.
Read more: InDesign object styles » works in general with Affinity object styles, too.
Read more: Using a layout grid in book design » demonstrates how to keep your design under control (and thus more attractive).
Read more: Your book promotion materials » suggests many more uses for Publisher.
Book Design Made Simple. You can do it yourself.
After your favourable report on Affinity Publisher, would you be thinking possibly of writing a “Book Design Made Simple” centred around the use of Affinity Publisher?
I have been using Serif DesktopPublishing Applications to produce paperback books for thirty years ever since Version 1 of PagePlus and Serif really know their business when it comes to Publishing.
I am only waiting for Publisher to include some of the useful aspects I rely upon in PagePlus such as Footnotes, endnotes and the inclusion of an included text editor before I switch entirely over to Publisher.
Hello John,
How nice to hear from a long-time Serif user! My path to Publisher runs through Pagemaker, Quark XPress, and InDesign. Like you, I’m still waiting for all the little extras to appear before I switch off my other apps completely.
Our book was a huge amount of work (all those screen shots and examples!). But still, if we were about 10 years younger, we would definitely produce an edition of Book Design Made Simple for Publisher. As it is, we have no such plans. We’ve heard that the current book can still be used with Publisher, though.
Glenna
Great to hear your story Glenna, If you want to see some of what I’ve been doing, do look at my ISSUU pages, a good way to get my stuff on line for prospective customers. It doesn’t include all the private family history books I’ve done, but you might find it interesting, most if not all of them are downloadable.
https://issuu.com/johnkay6/docs
https://issuu.com/jayarkay/docs
https://issuu.com/jayarkay/docs/timely_texts_2
John
I’ve been using Affinity products for about 3 years now (I have no Adobe products on either my iMac or MacBook Pro). I never bought into Adobe’s subscription plan so the last version of InDesign and other programs I was using was CS5.5. No problems on my old MacBook Pro which I kept “dumbed-down” with an earlier OS so as to be able to keep using the old software.
I started using Affinity Publisher the moment the Beta version was released and practiced and familiarized myself with it while simultaneously using QuarkXpress (yes, you heard right). Once the official version of Publisher was released I purchased it and began with simple single page layouts and a few magazine spreads. Those worked great without a hitch and those projects were all printed.
Jump ahead to April 2020 and I completed a full 100 page issue, cover-to-cover, of Skin Art Magazine, which I’ve been Art Directing and Designing for 4 years. The process from design to PDF creation to uploading to offset printer and online proofing went smoothly and the issue is available both digitally and print (#174). I’m not trying to sell the magazine (although you’re all welcome to purchase), but, rather, to exclaim my excitement at using all Affinity programs to create a full issue from the ground up. I’m never looking back to Adobe. In the end, no printer wants a native file. It’s all PDF workflow. Anything you create in Affinity products can also be used for digital/web graphics.
As Publisher is new, there are a few features missing but I’m sure they’ll be implemented in the course of time. One semi-minor one is “Column Span” (Ability to have a headline span multiple columns-available in Quark and InDesign). The workaround is the same as I used to do before those features were available: make a separate text box. The other feature that MANY have held up their switching to Publisher from InDesign is a “Data Merge” function. I only bring this up because when I worked at a Print Shop, it was a heavily used feature for bulk mailings, custom invite envelopes, custom postcard mailings, etc. If you have no need for that function, then it shouldn’t affect your decision to purchase Publisher. Further, with bulk mailings, print shops and mailing houses usually prefer to perform that function themselves.
Just my 2-cents.
Hello Danny,
I am excited to read your hearty approval of Publisher. I agree completely and can hardly wait to design my first book, which I will do soon. At the moment I am also using a dumbed-down computer with InDesign 5.5, but that can’t go on forever.
Since I published my review, a couple of readers have pointed out two other things missing from the application: the lack of scripting (I have never used this, so I didn’t think to look for it in Publisher), and the inability to export a file to EPUB format. Now I know about Data Merge also (this is not something a book designer would usually need).
But we are all hopeful that Serif will add these features in the future. In the meantime I am thrilled with the Affinity products.
Thanks for taking the time to write! I am learning all sorts of things from our readers!
Glenna
Affinity Designer is also missing a HUGE component… SCRIPTING! I rely upon 5-6 scripts to get my books designed.. without scripting support – this is not a viable option to most professionals. I do like the integration of their other products – something sorely missing in Adobe suite of products… I would love to be in Indesign and simply open up illustrator, select an item and hit a button for it to appear in Indesign.. without having to jump through hoops!
Hi there,
Thank you for your comments about Publisher. Somehow I managed a long career in book design without using scripting at all, and we don’t cover it in our book, so I didn’t think to even look for it. Perhaps others will now see your comments and be alerted to this missing element.
You’re right that the tight integration among the 3 products is a real plus.
Glenna
Thank you so much! I’m a complete newbie to design and page-layout software, and you surely just saved me a lot of money. I read through part 3 of your book earlier and opened it up today in preparation for downloading InDesign but thought, oh, I’ll check the blog first. Glad I did!
I figure that since I haven’t invested any time learning InDesign (except reading part of your book), I might as well invest my time in a recommended but less expensive program. Thank you again!
Hello Nancy,
I’m so glad that the timing was right for you! I hope you enjoy learning Publisher (and the other 2 programs as you need them). They are all really excellent. Combining the design concepts and the order of doing the steps in our book plus the methods you can learn from the tutorials and the Help menu, you should be able to produce a professional-quality book.
The discount price is good only through May 20, I believe. If I were you, I’d look at the free trial for a couple of days before putting down any money, just to see if the whole thing seems doable, and then jump in just in time to get the good deal.
Good luck!
Glenna
Thanks, Glenna! I already did purchase the 3 programs–the price seems unbeatable!
And I already created a document and placed my book text into it (it’s so exciting!). You are correct that your book is still tremendously helpful even with a different program. I’m like, “How come only page 1 is here?” but then I remembered something about “flowing” from your book, so I was able to figure it out quickly. Your excellent book will be by my side as I continue through the whole process!
I hired a professional designer to lay out my first book, but I wasn’t totally happy with the result (not her fault), and I can’t afford to pay someone again. I love having complete control and look forward to the challenge of learning the whole process myself. I don’t have professional training in layout and design, but besides a (long-ago) background in typesetting and copyediting, I have a great deal of patience!
Thanks again,
Nancy
Hi again Nancy,
This is wonderful news, so thanks for sharing it. I hope your experience will encourage others who are in the same situation. And it’s great to have it confirmed that our book can help you get through the design and layout process even using a different layout program. (Luckily for us all, they use very similar methods to get to the same destination.)
So good luck and enjoy the process. If you run into trouble along the way, just write to us again.
Glenna
Very intriguing Glenna, looks like it’s well worth checking out so thanks for the review. This could also be a big help to the many folks who might want to do their own high-quality books, but can’t afford InDesign. I’m curious whether the text variables will import without any intervention since we have so many embedded in our book files.
Hi Joel,
Hi Joel,
Thanks for your question about transferring text variables from InDesign templates to Publisher. I tried a simple experiment, and unfortunately the variables did not work in Publisher after the transfer. However, one of your tech-savvy colleagues might be able to finagle something.
I do recommend trying Publisher, at least the 90-day trial version. I really like it and once my cranky old computer dies and I don’t have access to InDesign any more, I will be very happy to use Publisher exclusively. The other 2 programs, Photo and Designer, are equally good.
Glenna