- Affinity Publisher From books, magazines and marketing materials, to social media templates, website mock-ups and other projects, this next-generation publishing app gives you the power to combine your images, graphics and text to make beautiful layouts ready for publication. Was $49.99 Now only $24.99.
- Affinity Publisher for desktop tutorials. Basic Operations. StudioLink - interworking with Designer and Photo. Publishing and Sharing.
Designers working with desktop publishing may want to take a look at Affinity Publisher. The tool, which is now available for Mac and Windows platforms, is emerging as a powerful and flexible design option.
The tool is part of the Serif line of graphic design products, which also includes Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer, both super-capable platforms in their own right.
Affinity Publisher is professional-level design software from Serif, which includes a growing portfolio of creative tools. Affinity Publisher, which offers many of the same features as Adobe InDesign, is fast and light and works in Mac and Windows environments.
Here’s a look at Affinity Publisher and how it compares to a tool you may already be familiar with – Adobe InDesign.
What Is Affinity Publisher For
What is Affinity Publisher?
Affinity Publisher is a professional design software package. It’s made for desktop publishing, including books, magazines, marketing collateral but can also be used for digital materials as well.
The app allows you to manipulate and work with images, graphics, and text to create almost endless layout possibilities with workflow boosts to make large documents easy to work with and manage.
It works with other Serif products as well as native Adobe files and has the power to handle complex vector elements without losing functionality or speed.
The biggest reason Affinity Publisher may be growing in the marketplace is cost. It does not include a subscription model and runs off your local machine. It works on Mac or Windows computers and the download is $49.99 with a free trial available. (You can get it directly from the Affinity Publisher website or in the Mac App Store.)
Affinity Publisher Basics
Affinity Publisher makes it easy to try this tool with a great price and single app download pricing model. It’s robust and includes everything you would want in a desktop publishing app.
The only downsides are that it can feel unfamiliar and a little clunky if you are used to InDesign. Some of that is likely because it is different or maybe because the tool is a little newer and they are still working out some of the finer details.
The Affinity package of tools has a neat feature – StudioLink – that lets you hop between tools in the same app. If you are planning to switch to all Affinity products for design tasks, this is a time-saving option that’s highly functional.
When you get into the software itself, everything is there – you can see some of these key features in the next section – although some things work a little differently than what you may be accustomed to with Adobe products.
Key differences include lack of document setup presets on launch – although you can find third-party templates on design marketplaces – and master pages and layers that require a little more thought until you get used to us.
Designers working on laptops may love this: The software is light and fast without losing render or image quality.
Affinity Publisher Key Features
So, what can Affinity Publisher do? That’s always the big question when it comes to using or switching to a new tool.
Key features include:
- Layout functionality for double page spreads, live master pages, custom shaped frames (including for text), frame linking, tables, and ability to share across apps or devices
- Tons of text manipulation options and control with decorations, drop caps, paths, artistic options, baseline grid, and flow features
- Pixel-perfect graphics that you can link or embed, plus non-destructive layer adjustments
- Pen and node tools, boolean operations, layer effects, and fill options
- Ability to package and export files
- Data merge tools for complex documents with an external data element (supports text/CSV, JSON, and Excel files)
- Live preflight checks
- Color control with end to end CMYK, spot color support, Pantone library, and ICC color profiles
- Asset management tools to help you keep most-used elements at hand
- Preview mode for grids, guides, bleed, and margins
Affinity Publisher vs. Adobe InDesign
The biggest tool comparison is Affinity Publisher vs. Adobe InDesign when it comes to desktop and print publishing. For those not working with either tool on a daily basis, they may seem almost identical at a glance.
They are pretty stiff competitors with the edge going to InDesign because of time on the market and familiarity for so many users. But cost and function could negate that advantage.
Affinity Publisher has all the layout tools regularly use including master pages, spreads, grids, tables, typography options, text flow, presentation or print output settings, and more. You can import IDML files, use the preflight checker, create smart master pages, and work with OpenType fonts. Linking or embedding graphics files is a non-issue.
There are plenty of other similarities as well.
- Works on Mac and Windows desktops
- Have fairly intuitive interfaces
- Allows you to work with native Adobe files
- Ability to create pro quality documents for print or digital publishing
- Plenty of tutorials and templates available
- Include free trials (Affinity Publisher’s is 30 days, compared to 7 for Adobe InDesign)
- Core tools and publishing functionality are similar
- Excellent export capability in a number of file formats
The most obvious difference between Publisher and InDesign is probably price and pricing structure.
Affinity Publisher comes with a one-time fee when you download it, $49.99.
InDesign is part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite of software and comes with a monthly fee, which is based on your plan. The single app price is $20.99 per month.
Conclusion
Affinity Publisher is a powerful design and layout tool that’s highly comparable to Adobe InDesign.
It’s flexible and easy to learn. And the price is hard to beat.
For current Adobe InDesign users, it could be a little tougher to switch software because while it has much of the same functionality and end result, it just feels different to use. Switching will totally depend on your comfort level.
Either way, the download and trial are worth a try!
Affinity Publisher Templates
In this feature, we've covered the basics of Affinity Publisher with tutorials and software comparisons, as well as the best Affinity Publisher templates.
What inspired you to get into software development and how did you get to where you are today?
To be a good software engineer you need to have a passion, and you need to be eager to learn and explore and to innovate and create. This was just as apparent after taking a few initial steps as it is today, and it is the inherent possibilities and opportunities that are as exciting and inspiring as anything else.
How did your work on PagePlus inform your work on Publisher?
PagePlus has been, is, and will continue to be a massive influence on the direction of Affinity Publisher. As a company we have a wealth of experience built up over many years working with PagePlus. It has taught us what to do, what not to do, and years of feedback from our customers and our excellent beta testers is helping us to prioritise current development.
What was it like having the opportunity to develop a brand-new publishing app from scratch?
It’s well publicised that all of the Affinity apps share the same back end and opt into facets of the same document model. Designer and Photo were ahead of us in development, so we had a first-class platform to build on. In the beginning it was a question of creating our roadmap of features and functionality that we knew would be hard requirements to make a ‘Version 1’ genuinely useful to customers.
Affinity Publisher Software Review
What were the challenges of creating the third app in the Affinity suite? That seems like a lot of pressure…
I think it’s a matter of focus. There is a lot of common ground between the apps, but there is just as much that differs. I think identifying necessary differences, whilst not particularly difficult, has caught us out from time to time.
How did it feel when Affinity Publisher finally launched?
Of course it was a great relief. We had had an extended beta period, so there were no real surprises. There was also an acute awareness that we were only just getting started.
“Of course it was a great relief. We had had an extended beta period, so there were no real surprises. There was also an acute awareness that we were only just getting started.”
Is there a feature or other specific part of the app that you feel most proud of?
The text engine is highly performant, and a lot of work has gone into making sure this is the case. We have been caught out with a few cases where a misstep in the surrounding architecture has caused issues, but at the core it is a classy bit of kit. We know there are lots of things that it doesn’t yet handle, but they will come with time.
One thing that really sets Affinity Publisher apart from other apps is its unique StudioLink feature that allows users to instantly switch between Affinity Publisher, Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo all within the same app. How did you go about implementing this game-changing technology?
The concept of StudioLink was designed in from the very start. So when the time came to actually provide an implementation everything pretty much just fell into place.
“The concept of StudioLink was designed in from the very start. So when the time came to actually provide an implementation everything pretty much just fell into place.”
Affinity Publisher was recently named Mac App of the Year by Apple, which is a huge honour—what did this mean to you? It must be nice seeing all your hard work pay off.
It’s an award for the team, the development department and for the company as a whole. I would say everyone here in Software Development is involved in the success of Publisher, the whole company is involved in the success of Publisher.
How do you go about adding new features? And how do you decide which ones to include?
We have a roadmap of future features which is quite a fluid and dynamic thing. It is based on customer feedback, both from the user forums and our corporate clients, insights from our support team, and our long-term strategic vision for the product.
The 1.8 update had some pretty major additions/improvements. What were you most excited to introduce? IDML import seems like a pretty big deal…
The initial release of the IDML importer is quite fully featured, but there are still things that it doesn’t handle. We will continue to improve it. We also made improvements to master page handling and added the facility to merge documents which will help with compilation of the Publisher Workbook.
Where do you see Affinity Publisher in the next few years? Anything you can tell us about Affinity Publisher for iPad?
Our roadmap for Publisher is huge. It’s virtually impossible to cherry-pick features to list here and now. It’s not a secret that Publisher for iPad is in development, and I would say development is going well. In fact, we’re not too far off having a technical preview that we might be able to share outside the team. It’s important to us though to keep a balance between iPad and desktop development, so it’ll be a while longer before we have anything to show publicly.
Affinity Publisher Tutorial
“Our roadmap for Publisher is huge. It’s virtually impossible to cherry-pick features to list here and now. It’s not a secret that Publisher for iPad is in development, and I would say development is going well.”