Company: SerifPrice: $49.99Rating: 5Hot: Pantone support; end-to-end CMYK
and ICC color management; opens,
edits, and outputs PDF/X files; long-
document functionality; table design
capabilities; publishing of PDFs for web
with hyperlinksNot:Review by Erik VlietinckFull-Scale Professional Publishing Software
Affinity
Publisher
Serif, the developers of Affinity Photo and Designer, has released
its publishing app, Affinity Publisher. It comes with a good deal of
unique and very clever features, including StudioLink, a seamless
integration system between Publisher and the company’s other
two apps, Designer and Photo. The young company held a live
event to launch Affinity Publisher at which the managing director
communicated some usage figures. It appears Publisher has been
beta-tested by more than 200,000 people and the company’s user
base has grown to two million. Among the reasons for this success
are that the company listens to its users, keeps its products lean
with lots of innovative features that make users’ lives easier, and it
uses a no-subscription model.
StudioLink is the most timesaving feature of Affinity Publisher.
Instead of allowing an image in Publisher to launch Photo, for
example, when a placed image needs to be edited, StudioLink
simply replaces the tools of Publisher with those of Photo. It’s
based on Serif’s use of “personas” that obviously enables a very
fast workflow.
Of course, a layout artist’s basic needs are all catered to, includ-
ing double-page spreads; live master pages; nested master pages;
image frames with intelligent scaling options; text wrapping with
fine padding control; custom-shape text frames; advanced guides,
grids, and snapping; tables and custom table formats; etc. It’s
brilliant in that you get a lot of efficiently and beautifully visual-
ized feedback about sizes, positions, and more.
I also found that Publisher offers very intuitive tools: Table cus-
tomization is one example; another is the fonts list with the font
under the cursor previewed live in your design on the page. In
addition, Publisher places PSD, AI, PDF, JPG, TIFF, PNG, and Affinity
files with the ability to pin graphics to float or be placed inline with
text in a user-friendly way. nREVIEWS › ›> PHOTOSHOP USER>^ AUGUST 2019[ 112 ]