Affinity Publisher V2 Review

[Margaret Sieverding]

Ijust resubscribed to creative cloud, I thought I could finish the project I'm working on with publisher but it's just impossible, too many bugs, too many inconsistencies, too many freezes and crashes, it drives me crazy. I'd rather start from scratch than continue with this software. I just hope there will be improvements in the future, maybe I'll give it a chance again, but for now, it's not a "professional" (as advertised) tool, definitely not.

When Publisher works as expected (10 minutes over an hour) it's really fluid, much more than Indesign - preview mode is horrible - (especially since Indesign does not support hardware acceleration on Windows)

Unfortunately this software is totally unusable when you have to face 50 slowdowns a day, 10 bugs and spending your time closing and opening it to find a functional tool back. Especially in a [pro]ductivity context.

I don't have the time nor the will to investigate and report bugs. It's not my job. We are not talking about a minor bug, but a problem that literally makes the software a pain in the ass to use.

I've recently completed some large projects (including a 264-page catalog with over 700 images) with Publisher 1.10.5 and 1.10.6 on Windows 10, trying to work around the known issues. That worked very well and I was able to complete all projects in a good time. Adobe is not an alternative for me. I work alone and can import templates or third-party work as IDML.

I have to concur with OP. V2 although could be great, it has major stability problems. Never had any crashing issues at any point in V1, but V2 I cannot go 15 mins without it crashing out. I thought it could be a memory issue due to having a 8gb base M1 Mac mini, but other users appear to be having similar issues and in activity monitor memory pressure is green and amber. I'll be going back to V1 on my next job unless there is a major update soon.

And they eat daily at a different restaurant in the future, so you forum veterans should read Patrick's post one more time. This forum has the ideal regular members whose Serif's purpose for it is to scare away new and serious customers.

I do have the impression that someone in Serif is listening, but I don't see that the talent or capacity to deliver is there. A thorough analysis of functionality, usability and algorithms and comparison of results with other products even in a similar price range testifies to a company that has not moved like other companies in the last decades. And does not understand their shortcomings. So invest only when and if the products have one day caught up.

What creates value for us is delivering excellent quality to customers, customers we physically meet and look in the eye (and want to sell to again, thank you), after a process where the tools helped us towards the goal, didn't stand in the way and didn't crash. Not to sit and write thousands of posts on this forum, and not to report in trivial bugs that should have been caught early in a large internal testing process.

3) I was here to report bugs and submit improvement requests for professional work professionally in a large setup and to bring a lot of knowledge from the world, i.e. professional product development, web- and software development, usability, user experience design and accessibility. I actually know what I am talking about!

That's not my intension, to scare away users. Usually I try instead to help people in finding some way to solve their problems with Affinity software (...be it via workarounds or the like...). - But I also tend to say directly how certain things are behaving in their current state and if certain features are not working properly, i.e. are behaving incorrectly and need to be fixed.

I'm not sure in what context you mean that, so what does victim blaming really mean here and to whom. - In general, however, software bugs need to be discovered, verified, and then hopefully fixed as quickly as possible. When some software glitches make users unable to work with this software and they are pressed for time, they have to decide maybe to use another software that might do the task better.

I have been trying to be patient as I know programming isn't an easy task but I am really starting to have the same feeling as the OP (finding something different to use). It has been a nightmare using 2.0 version of affinity. What use to take me a few minutes in version 1.0 is now taking me hours. The program freezes, is very slow and when you try to add an asset it takes forever to add just 1 thing. To create a new sub category takes a long time before the subcategory appears. Then if you try to rename it its take even more minutes. That is just dealing with svg type graphics I create in designer and store as assets in both designer and publisher to use later. Try to swap to a different asset categories and you will wait 3+ minutes or it freezes. Happens in Publisher and Designer. I have lost count of how many times I have had to go to task mahager and END the program.

I recently created my first document in Publishers. It was a 252 page document and I used the master page feature for the firsst time. It was supposed to be simple. It was, it crashed, froze and has been nothing but a headache.

I could go back to 1.0 but have created a lot in version 2.0 so reverting would mean recreating everything again. Talk about more hours to redo things. I have tried all the suggestions of check/unchecking open gl option in settings. Didn't help.

I have been using Affinity for over 5 years and haven't experienced anything like this. I've purchased 3 universal licenses for my business and we can't continue to work like this. I'm coming up on my busy season and I can't create graphics and/or simple projects like bookmarks, round designs to make buttons, etc. as the program is soooo very slow and unstable. The only thing holding me here is I like using the asset features which I just started using heavily. I also just learned how to use master page feature where I can put 1 thing in the master page area and it appears on any page(s) I need it to. It's a great feature I had been sleeping on in version 1. But trying to use it was a nightmare. Crashes, freezing, rebooting was a required every so many hours.

It is strange, because i have desktop ICore i5-7500, GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, and 32 gb, win 10 and i do not feel such grave problems. There are still a few performance issues, but each update seems to fix them.

I would appreciate f you could make copy/paste of the first part of your post (up to and including the System Specs) as this is not normal and we should try to get to the bottom of it in it's own report/thread rather than here. We are still behind with bugs threads, but I would hope that we can find either a work around or a fix.

Comments:I use this to design books and, as I am also the artist, I can switch easily and draw something related to the story and then jump back to my book and keep working.

This allows me to offer more services to my clients who are always consuming services on-demand, and also allows me to create a product on record time.

Affinity Publisher allows you to create a whole set of text styles you can switch from master to master. So, on a single file you can have all different sections of a Magazine and all the different styles and you don't need to work them separately.If you have a one-man-army designer who does it all, this is the best tool as you can switch easily between Photo editing, to vector editing and back to document editing on a mouse-click.You also have the flexibility of a text processor like Word where you can create the table of contents, for example, but you can now add different styles to this so you can have an attractive table of contents.If you buy a set of brushes for Photo or Designer, you have them available also here.

Comments:After a many years of Adobe Indesign QuarkXpress using, we switch to Affinity Suite. Our main products are magazines and catalogues, and other predominantly graphical creations. And we are absolutely happy with our Affinity solution for now. Excellent merge of DTP, photo and vector is came to you with full Affinity suite: Affinit Publisher + Affinity Photo + Affinity Designer. One must have trio.

It is fast - build on game engine in core. You can work with one page document or hundreds of pages with a lot of images and different text styles, but speed will never drop down. It is stabile software and with excellent colour reproduction.

Affinity Publisher lack of some usefull but not mandatory features. There are no classical character and paragraph styles, but there are no combined styles like QuarkXpress have. The are no good indexing and footnote/endnote manipulation.

Comments:The devs are great about helping with anything at all! They also promote addons (created by other users/contributors) at reasonable prices. So, if we need to add new brushes (for example) there are a lot to choose from.I've primarily used Adobe and GIMP before finding Affinity. I still use GIMP for quick or online graphics. But for Print I always use Affinity.

Being a small office (Just myself) it was increasingly a concern that I was paying a monthly subscription fee and some months it wasn't worth the time at all. With Affinity I can work daily or skip a month and I've already paid for the software.

The only inconvenience, is that Affinity software is separated. Publisher (is great for anything, especially Hard Print Quality, Pre-Flight tests, and even online publishing). But, because they are separate products most of us will need to buy all three (Photo, Publisher, and Designer). That said, it is still worth the value compared to the alternatives available.

It allows my team to quickly produce both digital and print creative, including company magazine, has a clear no-nonsense interface, is tightly integrated with Affinity Designer and Photo, allowing to use both programs without having to switch to another app window, and is much more affordable than alternatives

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