Affinity Publisher is a desktop publishing application developed by Serif for macOS and Microsoft Windows, with an iPadOS version planned for release in 2020. It is a part of the Affinity product line along with Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer. Affinity Publisher is a great, affordable alternative to Adobe InDesign. It’s a great desktop publishing app that helps you easily create professional-looking documents, brochures, flyers, and more with just a. 'Affinity Publisher to be the Desktop Publishing Application of Choice within five years' Patrick Marchese, CEO of Markzware.That is the prediction Patrick.
September 29, 2020
AFFINITY PUBLISHER
by Brad Schmidt – Colour Technical Support Specialist
After evaluating the other programs in the Affinity lineup, it is time to examine the final program in this collection from Serif. Affinity Publisher is the long-anticipated program in the Affinity family. The introduction of Affinity Designer in October 2014 was an interesting addition to the market, but on its own not considered an alternative to the long-standing players in this space. Then in July 2015, Serif released Affinity Photo, which brought together a duo of programs for drawing and photo workflows. The one missing piece to this puzzle was a page layout program to bring these together into a compelling package. Without a program for building pages, it would be difficult to consider this offering as an alternative workflow. With Designer and Photo being released within less than a year, there was some expectation that a page layout program would follow shortly after. This turned out not to be the case. There was speculation online that Affinity Publisher would flounder in beta forever and might never be released as a full-fledged software package. Then, after nearly four years, in June 2019, Affinity Publisher was released to the public, completing the triad.
Depending on the type of publications you create, there will be different tools that are critical to consider in a page layout program as a possible alternative to your current software suite. These are the main elements of a page layout program that I consider essential.
Page management is an important aspect of any book. I was encouraged to see support for multiple page sizes, including configurations for single pages or facing pages layouts. The program has support for Master Pages, providing the ability to define common layouts to maintain consistency. Placeholders such as page numbers can be inserted into text boxes on the Master Pages. When inserting new pages, a Master Page can be selected as a base for any new page.
Paragraph Styles is an area that is critical in order to create consistency within a document. Another tool that works alongside Paragraph Styles is Character Styles. These are often used together when forming an overall look for a piece of work. Affinity Publisher offers a full set of options when using Paragraph Styles. Options include next style, font family, font weight, paragraph alignment, indents, tab stops, and drop caps. Character Styles can be used to create overrides to Paragraph Styles.
Affinity Publisher also utilizes text frames. Text frames support the ability to create a multiple column frame with an option to set the space between columns. A feature that I was surprised to find was the ability to change an individual column width so the columns could be custom widths. I did not find any options to create headings that would stretch across two or more columns. This could only be achieved by using a separate text box for the heading. This is something to consider for an improvement to future releases of Affinity Publisher. Text frames can also be linked to flow text from one text frame to another.
Support for image placement is also another area that needs to be solid in a page layout program. Affinity Publisher offers standard tools for working with images. Images can be placed, rotated, cropped, and scaled. There is also an option for how to handle the interaction of images and text. Wrap options allow for various ways to flow text around images. Drop shadows and other transparency effects can be applied to images. For image management, there is a Resource Manager that contains a listing of all the images that have been placed in the document. Here images can be updated, embedded, or replaced. Image resolution is also displayed in a column to quickly identify low resolution images found in the document.
Affinity Publisher, like the other programs in the collection, has support for multiple colour models. These include options for RGB, CMYK, LAB, and Grayscale. Along with these colours there is also support for the various PANTONE colours for spot colour selection. These can be defined in the Swatches palette.
Desktop Publishing App
Another feature that is consistent with other programs in the collection is the History panel. History is presented as a slider and list of edits. The slider is used to quickly perform multiple undos or slide forward to bring the document back to the original state. The history can even be saved with the document so that undos can be performed on a previously saved document.
Affinity Desktop Publishing
Affinity Publisher shares the same document format with Photo and Designer, so it is actually possible to open a document in any of the programs. This speaks to the tight integration of these applications. In fact, Affinity Publisher has a feature called Persona that fully integrates the other programs into the application. This integration allows you to select a picture in Publisher, and then switch the Photo Persona to make colour adjustment using Levels, Curves, or other Photo tools, all without even leaving the application. This is one of the hidden strengths of this software collection.
Affinity Publisher offers multiple options when exporting to PDF, including options for down-sampling images, and ICC profile conversion, including bleeds and printer marks. Fonts can be embedded in the PDF, which is critical for a print environment. During testing, I found that some fonts were problematic when using the Subset fonts option. We had good success with documents that did not subset fonts.
It will take time to become familiar with the location of various tools and functions, but I found the program very intuitive to use. Each company’s software has a different layout and different ways of approaching tasks. The learning curve is not very steep if you are proficient in other programs in this space.
One area that did not work as expected was how documents were handled. I loaded a second document while an unsaved document was open. The unsaved document closed without providing an option to save it. This is likely a bug that needs to be fixed.
The challenge when considering any new program is all the legacy documents that exist in the old format. I remember when InDesign was first released, the ability to open QuarkXPress documents was helpful in accelerating this transition. When Affinity Publisher first released, it did not open any other desktop publishing file types. This is a factor we thought would make the switch to Affinity Publisher more compelling. I was quite surprised to see that Affinity Publisher has now included the ability to open InDesign IDML documents in the latest update.
The question remains, will publishers use this new set of programs for designing book projects, or will it remain on the peripheral of desktop publishing? As with other programs that are not officially supported by Friesens for book production, there is always the option to provide PDF files. I am aware of at least one project to date that we printed where the designer used Affinity Publisher. When using a new software package, I encourage designers to send a test PDF for verification so we can confirm the document will flow smoothly through production and have good print results.
We’ve published a raft of video tutorials to help you get up to speed with the newest app in our Affinity family.
As our hotly-anticipated desktop publishing app, Affinity Publisher, exits the beta stage and is released for the first time, we’ve published over 45 video tutorials to help you get stuck in!
Each video tutorial has subtitles available for German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese and Japanese which means everyone can learn how to use Affinity Publisher in no time.
Available in the Learn section of affinity.serif.com, the Affinity Publisher section is split into the following 6 categories:
Let’s look at each section in turn and dip into the new tutorial videos…
Learn about basic operations
In the Basic Operations section, you will learn all the basics you need to know about Affinity Publisher. A great place to start is the UI overview:
Other videos in this section include:
Get knowledgeable about page layout
The Page Layout section demystifies the page layout features of the app. In the video below, Andy explains the many features of Master Pages in Affinity Publisher.
You can also learn about how to use Shape Tools, Assets, Pinning, Linking and embedding, Placing content, Picture frame tools, Baseline grids, Rulers, ruler guides and column guides , Page numbers, Sections and Pages in this category.
Become a master of text tools
We’ve also got a section for Text Tools, where you will learn the skills you need to create and manipulate text in Affinity Publisher. One of the most important text tools you will need to learn to get to grips with is the Frame Text Tool.
Other videos in this section include:
Make your designs stand out by learning typography features
In the Typography section, you can learn how to use the typography tools which will give your text another level of polish. Check out our video Characters: Advanced typography for a taster of this category.
Other videos in this section include:
Learn about the advanced features of Affinity Publisher
In the Advanced category, you will learn how to get to grips with Affinity Publisher features such as Indexing, Table of contents and hyperlinks. Get started with these advanced features by watching our tutorial about Tables below:
StudioLink—interwork with Designer and Photo from within Affinity Publisher
StudioLink is a revolutionary feature of Affinity Publisher that allows you to instantly switch to the advanced photo editing features of Affinity Photo and precise vector tools of Affinity Designer without ever leaving the app. We have some video tutorials to show you how this could work for your workflow—dip your toe in by watching our video about how to apply creative live filters in the Photo Persona…
Other videos in this section include:
Export like a pro
The Publishing and Sharing section is where you get the lowdown on how to get your work exported for professional end use. Watch our video on how to publish a PDF for pro print:
Desktop Publishing Pdf
In this category you can also learn about PDF publishing for web, Desktop printing and the Spot PANTONE colours.
These video tutorials all now available from the Welcome screen in Affinity Publisher itself and in our Affinity Publisher learning page on affinity.serif.com. We are adding to our video tutorials all the time so stay tuned!