Affinity Suite version 2

[benwiggy]

Not strictly notation software, but many here use Affinity Suite to alter/add graphical elements to PDFs of notation; or to create prelim pages, etc.

Serif have just released 'version 2' of their Affinity Suite. There's a major overhaul of the UI, and lots of new features -- for example Publisher now has very sophisticated Footnotes, Endnotes, and even Sidenotes. It also has a "Book" tool, allowing you to manage separate documents into one project, with consistent styles, page numbers, etc.

Version 2 is a new purchase: the new apps are called e.g. "Affinity Publisher 2", so they are separate from version 1 apps. There's currently 40% off, and if you buy the whole suite (£90), you can use it on Windows, Mac and iPad.

If Affinity is your first-choice of DTP app, then I'd suggest it's an essential purchase (especially while the discount is on), as there are swathes of new features and improvements. There are some nice 'shape' editing features in Designer.

As 'version 1' has been going for between 3 and 8 years (Publisher last), you should get another 5 years or so before 'version 3'; so the price is a very reasonable one, particularly compared to Adobe's subscription.

[OCTO]

As a Publisher user it sounds interesting. As I have purchased earlier version I guess it is not free of charge.
The only thing I had problem with was embedding fonts, they were missing from PDFs generated in Finale.

[John Ruggero]

Does Affinity Publisher now do cross-references?

[benwiggy]

What sort of thing?

It can do Indexes, ToC, and Foot/End/Sidenotes.

[John Ruggero]

Cross references like "See Figure 31 on Page 55" and it updates those two numbers automatically if you make changes.

[benwiggy]

Not sure. It seems to have some cross-referencing abilities, according to the help pages, based on fields.

[John Ruggero]

That might be good enough for my uses.

[John Ruggero]

Serious bug alert.

If one imports an InDesign document into Affinity Publisher by way of an .idml file, be prepared for the following:

Any new text frames that you add and link will display the text in a different smaller fractional size like 2.2 pt. and text will flow back into the original frame at a much larger size like 60 pt. According to the Affinity Forum there is no fix except to remove all of the text in the document and insert it afresh. This makes importation of complex InDesign documents into Affinity Publisher something that I will not be doing again.

Affinity import bug.png (445.98 KiB) Viewed 11717 times

[benwiggy]

This is to do with the 'scaled size' of the original text frame being set to a smaller (or is it larger?) value. But yes, it is a bit of a problem when this happens.

However, you shouldn't need to use all those different text frames: you can just use one. You can anchor the images to a specific point in the text, so they will move with the text, and have the text flow around them automatically.

[John Ruggero]

From what I read at the Affinity Forum, it is a bug that affects any imported .idml file. This makes adding a single new linked text frame impossible. The only work-around I can see is to add a non-linked text frame.

I often have difficult spacing and aligning that makes automatic flowing of the text around musical examples impossible or more trouble than it's worth. The example originally had three text frames only, but I broke up the big one below the example to show the Affinity problem.

In any case, a page layout program is supposed to be able to do any kind of layout that one wants, be it one text frame or a thousand, but that has no bearing on this problem. AP can't even add one text frame to an imported .idml file.