– Affinity Publisher
Layout for less
$49.99 From Serif, affinity.serif.com
Needs OS X 10.9 or later, Intel 64–bit Core 2 Duo or better, 4GB RAM, 1280x768 or larger display
It’s hard to express just how significant it is to see a brand new desktop publishing app for the Mac. QuarkXPress has been slugging it out with Adobe InDesign, and before that PageMaker, since the 1980s. Cheaper alternatives have come and gone, all with obvious limitations and little print industry credibility — a crucial factor when a web offset press the size of a house is waiting for your files to process without errors.
Even just to put together pages to print yourself, there’s been a lack of good options. While Apple’s Pages offers a page layout mode, its handling
of basics like facing pages (spreads) is questionable, and it lacks precision and depth of features for serious design work. You can create posters and simple brochures in a drawing app such as Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW or Affinity’s Designer, but it’s unwieldy compared to true DTP packages.
So it’s brilliant to be able to report that Serif has cracked it. The company is relatively new to the Mac, having surprised us in 2015 with Photoshop rival Affinity Photo, and its PagePlus app for Windows was one of the best attempts at budget desktop publishing. Serif’s Affinity series — developed from scratch for both Mac and PC, with Publisher expected to join the others on iPad too — was originally conceived with a page layout function at its heart, tying the whole creative process together neatly.
That’s exactly what Publisher now does. If you buy all three apps (optional, but still over 50% cheaper than an annual subscription for InDesign alone) the StudioLink feature lets you switch to Photo or Designer tools while working in Publisher. To tweak a picture to better match other elements on a spread, for example, you can apply adjustments to it right there,
instead of switching to an image editing app and trying to guess color and placement without the page in view. It’s something Adobe and Quark have tried to an extent, but here it really works. You can even open Publisher files in the other apps to edit relevant items.
Serif’s modern code base uses Apple’s Metal 2 to deliver exceptionally smooth performance on the latest Macs and iPads in Photo and Designer, as well as supporting Retina and DCI–P3 screens. But layout is less processor–intensive, and Publisher shows off even on older machines. On an ageing iMac that’s regularly used here for magazine pages, it put InDesign to shame, zooming smoothly in and out to further extremes than Adobe allows, and reflowing text around objects as we moved them.
The user interface matches the other Affinity apps, but will also feel quite familiar to those who’ve used InDesign or QuarkXPress. For file compatibility across the Affinity suite, it treats every item as its own layer, which makes for a lot of layers, but is ultimately logical.
Based on our all–too intimate knowledge of commercial publishing requirements and pitfalls, we fully expected to run up against limitations, but a long public beta programme seems to have ensured all the core features are both present and correct. An exception is digital publishing: there’s no ability to add interactivity other than hyperlinks, no delivery platform, and no EPUB export. But we’re OK with that. A page layout app isn’t the best choice for regular EPUBs, fixed–layout ebooks are a small market, and interactive app publishing never really took off.
We did miss InDesign’s access to Adobe Fonts (formerly Typekit): beyond the fonts supplied with macOS, you’ll need to buy your own to use with Publisher. And Affinity’s docked panel interface is a mixed blessing, making some settings visible that rivals hide in modular dialog boxes, but in other cases doing the reverse, splitting up status info that should be in one place, and lacking clear labelling for sets of options that aren’t easily distinguished. Many InDesign key shortcuts are reproduced, but some important ones aren’t, and there are minor failings like being unable to detach individual items from master pages.
But with full typographical controls, grids and guides, columns and text flow, transparency effects, effectively infinite undo (with history saving) and more, this is a real DTP rival at last — and at a fraction of the price.
the bottom liNe. Minor glitches and omissions are inevitable in an app this ambitious, but it’s streets ahead of any other desktop publishing contender, and an absolute bargain. The iPad version should be another milestone.