Serif Affinity Publisher
The first new professional desktop publishing app for 20 years – and at a tenth of its competition’s price
“I’ve reviewed many budget alternatives to QuarkXPress and InDesign since the 1990s, but this is the first true rival”
SCORE ★★★★★ PRICE £41 (£49 inc VAT) from affinity.serif.com
This is not the first app to compete with Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress in a lower price bracket. But there’s a big gap between basic layout and producing a commercial-quality magazine or brochure ready for offset printing, and ten minutes with a consumer app generally exposes it. Not so here. Colour management and PDF export, master pages, grids and guides, asset management, anchored graphics and typography are all properly handled, never falling too short of the market leaders’ functionality and sometimes exceeding it. Like InDesign, for example, Publisher offers effectively unlimited Undo steps – often a life-saver – but it goes one better by saving history with the document, so you can even undo after re-opening it.
Display efficiency is fundamental to Affinity, and although page layout is generally light on processing, this app still manages to show off. On an ageing 27in iMac that runs InDesign acceptably, Publisher dazzled: it zoomed smoothly from further out to further in than Adobe permits, and with only the tiniest pause for the full resolution to pop in, while text reflowed instantly as I dragged a text-wrapped object around the page. Yowza. Freed from InDesign’s small pasteboard, you can reposition pages in the window at any zoom level.
Affinity’s underlying model treats every object as a layer. It seems strange at first, but makes sense, with layer groups for where you’d conventionally use a layer. The payoff is that its StudioLink tool lets you switch the UI instantly to Affinity Photo or Designer, if installed, and carry out even advanced operations on the page – a huge improvement on dropping
out from InDesign to Photoshop, for example, and having to guess the positions of elements you’re trying to align with. Edits are applied nondestructively. You can even open Publisher documents in the other apps, with compatible items editable.
A long and responsive public beta has left little to complain about for a 1.0. A couple of adjustments glitched. Controls for master page items and links aren’t granular enough. Smart guides and alignment options don’t cater so well for spacing. Default unit display accuracy is too low, and the Guides Manager ignored changes to it. A toolbar acts like InDesign’s Control panel, but it’s a bit sparse; dimensions are hived off in the Transform panel, though they do respond to inserted maths operators. The Studio panel dock avoids a lot of modular dialogs, but with no room for text labels it’s too hard to identify settings. Some options that belong here, such as text wrap, are in dialogs, and time’s wasted by the lack of a keystroke for the Text Frame panel and limited right-click options. Placing images without frames and applying local baseline grid to text frames are bad defaults.
What’s missing? Primarily, digital publishing. There are no interactive or multimedia elements beyond hyperlinks, and no app publishing platform. This is the right decision: it’s a market that never really was. You can always upload PDFs to a service like Zinio. No EPUB export will raise eyebrows, but fixed-layout EPUB is a small platform, and a layout app is the wrong choice for standard (reflow) ebooks. Type is a bigger miss. A few nice display fonts are thrown in, but Creative Cloud comes with Adobe Fonts, a large auto-synced type library. So the cost of even one good text family will exceed Publisher’s price. Not a deal-breaker, but an issue.
InDesign used to sell for £600-odd including VAT, and is now £238 per year, versus £596 for the whole Creative Suite. QuarkXPress starts at £835 for a new licence, with various discounts. These are bigger products, yes, with established plugin and integration ecosystems. But that won’t matter to most users. Those paying for CC for other apps may as well stick with InDesign. Everyone else will welcome the chance to buy everything they need – and nothing they don’t – for £49 to £147. While Adobe includes Mac and Windows in one licence, Serif doesn’t, and £294 is beyond the bargain bin. But that’s a minority concern. Unlike InDesign, Publisher will join its stablemates on the iPad next year, at £16.
I’ve used both QuarkXPress and InDesign since the 1990s, and reviewed many budget alternatives. This is the first true rival I’ve seen, and it’s a doozy.