OCTOBER 2019 PCWorld 103publisher with loads of predesigned
templates to create brochures, posters,
greeting cards, invitations, business cards,
and more. It also offers layout and design
templates for books, magazines, and
newspapers. Big plus: Scribus is a cross-
platform application that runs on Windows,
Mac OS X, and Gnu/Linux systems.
- Affinity Publisher
PRICE: $49.99 FROM GO.PCWORLD.COM/AFPB
Another Affinity success story, this desktop
publisher has all the great bells and whistles
of the competition that I have used, but for
less than $50. Familiar features (go.pcworld.
com/fmlr) include text wrap, drop caps,
facing page spreads, tables, advanced
typography, artistic text and text styles, plus
an amazing set of tools. The graphical
interface is user-
friendly, the Help
guides are easy to
understand, and the
menus are quite
intuitive. Check it out
and see for yourself.
Incidentally, you
can buy all three
Affinity programs
(Photo, Design, &
Publisher) for less than
what it costs to rent the
Creative Suite apps for
three months.
THE PLIGHT OF ADOBE
REFUGEES
Adobe’s switch to subscription services left a
particularly large group of user “refugees”
looking for alternatives. For them,
subscriptions can be a trap. Once you
invest time, money, and training, and have
projects created in a specific program, it’s
hard to let go. Then one day, you wake up
and realize that you could have purchased
the program for half the cost of all those
fees (that you are now obligated to pay
in perpetuity).
One aggravation for me is the new
Adobe Acrobat DC. It used to be on my hard
drive, accessible and on demand in a few
seconds. Now, I have to be connected to
the Internet and “signed in” to read or create
a simple PDF file; and it takes forever! After aUsers need to be connected to the internet and signed in to Adobe Acrobat
DC to read or create a simple PDF file.