Affinity 2.0

Comments

• Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,395

  November 2022

  Too bad. I am sure they had other things to pursue, but that renders Affinity apps pretty useless to me for design work.

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• John Hudson Posts: 2,533

  November 2022

  Any improvement in their non-Latin support yet?

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• Cory Maylett Posts: 235

  November 2022

  I haven't tested that myself, but people on the Affinity forums are complaining about the update's lack of support for right-to-left text, so I suspect nothing's changed regarding non-Latin scripts.
  

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• Dave Crossland Posts: 1,240

  November 2022

  Nothing changed!! Wow, just wow.

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• Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,395

  November 2022

  All about their perception of where the money is.
  
  In 90% of software projects for design purposes, probably including this one, nobody realizes what all is REALLY involved in global text layout until it is far far too late. At that point, they already have their own text engine not built on Harfbuzz, and… everything is integrated into THAT and they are f*cked for real global language support.
  
  It would be noticeably more effort to get it right from the start than to just do it wrong, but also VASTLY less effort than doing it wrong and changing later. The problem is, they don’t know that at the time they make the decision… sigh.
  

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• H James Lucas Posts: 1

  November 2022

  I don’t disagree with the criticisms made above (and I have some of my own), but I think it’s worth noting that with the launch of version 2, Affinity Publisher now has footnotes, which is a more substantial feature improvement than InDesign has received in a decade. Footnotes may be low‐hanging fruit compared to global text layout, but it certainly gives me a sense that real progress is still being made. At a meager $40, investing in continued development feels like the steal of the year to me.
  

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• Mike Wenzloff Posts: 104

  November 2022

  H James Lucas said:

  I don’t disagree with the criticisms made above (and I have some of my own), but I think it’s worth noting that with the launch of version 2, Affinity Publisher now has footnotes, which is a more substantial feature improvement than InDesign has received in a decade. Footnotes may be low‐hanging fruit compared to global text layout, but it certainly gives me a sense that real progress is still being made. At a meager $40, investing in continued development feels like the steal of the year to me.
  

  Yes, footnotes, endnotes and side notes. All of which can be used in conjunction with each other.
  
  However, without the ability to map styles, text import is still a pita. As well, too many reports of footnotes coming in without the original's formatting--for instance, all in small caps, a different font with overrides, etc.
  
  Still no scripting. No tagged text import (which I use a lot).
  
  I still don't believe it's ready for primetime usage.

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• Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,395

  November 2022

  It took InDesign until CS2 (version 4) to get footnotes, so in one sense, that is pretty quick for Affinity!
  
  On the other hand, that was April 2005. InDesign added that function over 17 years ago, so comparing the current speed of progress between the two apps seems a bit wacky. Affinity could progress faster for many years, without catching up.

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• Claudio Piccinini Posts: 645

  January 25

  This is sad… I was considering to upgrade but I think Thomas observations are very solid. :-(

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• Claudio Piccinini Posts: 645

  January 25 edited January 25

  Am I wrong or does it seem like it does not even have support for full numerals OpenType features (i.e. Lining Tabular, Oldstyle Tabular, etc.)?
  EDIT: It's probably me… Things are just sorted differently.

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• Florian Pircher Posts: 155

  January 25

  It does offer the various number styles, style sets, character variant, ligatures, etc.

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• Evie S. Posts: 67

  January 25

  I've been using the Affinity suite as an impulse purchase. It's so confounding that a software can be brilliant in areas, integrating basic features Adobe has never done, while still being so frustrating that I wouldn't ever recommend it as a professional software.
  

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• John Butler Posts: 68

  January 27 edited January 27

  Speaking of low-hanging fruit, does Affinity 2.0 happen to still support Type 1 fonts? I still have a few dozen I bought 30 years ago that would cost over $2,000 to replace with OTF, including an untainted, pre-Hunt Berthold Bodoni Old Face. IIRC Adobe Creative Cloud recently ditched Type 1 support.
  
  I bought Publisher 1.0 as an impulse purchase myself. I had the same mix of success and frustration Evie reports. Eventually I decided Scribus was more worth my time to learn to use, for the kinds of documents I build at least. It has its own frustrations. I still want Affinity Publisher to succeed and grow.
  

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• Mark Simonson Posts: 1,511

  January 27 edited January 27

  FWIW, Illustrator 2023 and InDesign 2023 still appear to support Type 1 fonts (for now), but Photoshop 2023 hasn't since it was released last October. 
  
  It's possible to keep older versions of CC apps installed alongside the current version. But I tried this, installing Photoshop 2021, and it doesn't recognize Type 1 fonts either. Presumably this is because it depends on some low level CC system framework (not part of the Photoshop app itself) that gets removed with the 2023 version install.
  
  I wonder if this presents an opportunity for a third party to make a plug-in for Adobe apps that would restore Type 1 support, assuming that's even possible.

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• John Nolan Posts: 35

  January 27

  John Butler said:

  I still have a few dozen I bought 30 years ago that would cost over $2,000 to replace with OTF, including an untainted, pre-Hunt Berthold Bodoni Old Face. IIRC Adobe Creative Cloud recently ditched Type 1 support.
  

  
  Check your EULAs. I have a very old license for BQ Whittingham. It allows one to "convert and install the FONT SOFTWARE into another format in other environments." But: "the converted FONT SOFTWARE is used only for your own customary internal business or personal use".
  
  

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• Mark Simonson Posts: 1,511

  January 27 edited January 27

  @John Butler To answer your question: Yes, Affinity still supports Type 1 fonts. I think as long as the host OS supports them, Affinity does.
  
  (Which makes me wonder why Adobe didn't use the still-existing OS level Type 1 support instead of completely dropping it. There are probably reasons.)

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• Mark Simonson Posts: 1,511

  January 27 edited January 27

  I notice that kerning doesn't work with some Type 1 fonts in Affinity apps. But the same is true with the same fonts in other apps that use Apple's font rendering (e.g., TextEdit), so probably not something Affinity can fix.

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• John Hudson Posts: 2,533

  January 27

  (Which makes me wonder why Adobe didn't use the still-existing OS level Type 1 support instead of completely dropping it. There are probably reasons.)

  Adobe has avoided OS-reliance for font handling and text rendering for a long time. It is part of their policy of maintaining cross-platform feature compatibility in their software: they don’t want to be dependent on anything that Apple or Microsoft might independently change.

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