Image rights: Serif.I
t’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 handlingof 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 fromscratch 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,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
Reviews
42 SEP 2019 maclife.com