OT: Affinity Publisher launched

David, me too. I did, however, just purchase On1. I still have Lightroom but I’m starting to sideline it too. It is soooooooo sloooooooow sometimes I just can’t take it. On1 is slow too, but the pace of development is much faster and it is ultimately a much more capable program. As for AP, I agree: it IS powerful, especially when you consider the price vs what you get. Adobe makes you pay through the nose and AP directly competes with InDesign for a fraction of the cost. It’s amazing, really. I did a 70 page program for Easter with the beta and it performed quite admirably, even in beta stage. Unless there’s some earth-shattering breakthrough from Adobe, I don’t think I’ll be looking to them for much of anything any longer. As for computers, I’m also going to need to update soonish. My iMac was relatively well future-proofed when I bought it (SSD and 32gb ram) but the slower clock speeds and fewer cores compared to modern Macs makes me salivate for a new one. My work computer is even more anemic but I don’t have much flexibility there.

I must admit I was peeved when I hired on at my current job last august. I warned them that I was an atypically heavy computer user and would be running programs that required a more powerful machine. The tech person said, “well, I have a new Mac mini that I was going to use as a server but perhaps we can use it for your office instead.” (Great! I thought…) She hemmed and hawed and didn’t get me a computer for literally over a month. I had to bring a personal computer from home (which is inexcusable tbh). Finally get all set up and guess what, navigate to the about my Mac page and discover she dumped me with an old 2014 model that just happens to have more ram than the other computers. Gee, thanks. :angry: Now I’m stuck with a computer that takes over a minute (seriously) just to open up excel. But, I work for a non-profit so there’s little I can do until the thing truly bites the dust.

The new Minis are very capable – they Geekbench score above nearly every previous Mac Pro (2013 and earlier, except 12-cores). This one, 6-core i5, won’t even break into a sweat running Dorico, Logic, Affinity and Creative Suite, plus 10s of Safari pages and Handbrake running in the background!

Good to know - thanks.

I think Affinity Publisher is really great, even if some core functions are still missing (footnotes, endnotes). In the end it’s the very first version…
But yes, it doesn’t have a PDF passthrough feature.
I wrote on the forum and contacted support about it and they confirmed that the implementation of this functionality is not trivial but it will come, sooner or later.
However benwiggy has kindly provided the code which is a viable workaround (at least for Automator + GhostScript) until the function is integrated.

But yes, it doesn’t have a PDF passthrough feature.
I wrote on the forum and contacted support about it and they confirmed that the implementation of this functionality is not trivial but it will come, sooner or later.

Affinity publisher beta 1.8 is out now. Does anyone know if the passthrough feature has been implemented or if there is any improvement in rendering pdfs?

Ben

Publisher 1.8 is still in beta. They have not listed any improvement to PDF handling.

However, even the current release, 1.7.3, seems to be better with Dorico PDFs since I last checked. There are still some issues: hyphens are liable to move, and some glyphs in Figurato can squish about. Ligatures in text, like fi or fl, appear as question marks.

The trouble is: once confidence is lost, you’ve got to check the entire thing very thoroughly to be sure nothing’s been messed with.

Thank you so much, it helped me a lot! Affinity was doing very weird things to my text (like not recognizing them as right-justified or creating a text field for every line), and now I can go and make some final edits to my score!
So appreciated!

AP is on sale for half off right now thru tomorrow for anyone who might be interested. ($25 vs $50)

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But are there still problems with PDF import into Affinity Publisher?

I’m not encountering anything too severe, but my scores aren’t über complicated.

If you want to import a PDF into Publisher, for use as an illustration in a book, say, then it works very well, as you can now do “Passthrough”, which just displays the PDF properly without ‘re-interpreting’ it.

However, if you want to edit a PDF in Designer, to add graphical elements, fine-tune the position of items, adjust slurs, etc, then that is STILL unreliable, unless you outline the fonts first. (i.e. turn into vector drawings instead of fonts).

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Thanks, Ben. “Passthrough” is what I would need.