Affinity Publisher is a

desktop publishing Desktop publishing (DTP) is the creation of documents using page layout software on a personal ("desktop") computer. It was first used almost exclusively for print publications, but now it also assists in the creation of various forms of online c ...

application developed by

Serif In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ...

for

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

and

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

(with an

iPadOS iPadOS is a mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc. for its iPad line of tablet computers. It is a rebranded variant of iOS, the operating system used by Apple's iPhones, renamed to reflect the diverging features of the two product l ...

version being developed). It is a part of the Affinity product line along with

Affinity Photo Affinity Photo is a raster graphics editor developed by Serif Ltd. for iOS, macOS, and Windows, alongside Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher. Development of Affinity Photo started in 2009 as a raster graphics editor for macOS. Its first ver ...

and

Affinity Designer Affinity Designer is a vector graphics editor developed by Serif Europe, Serif for macOS, iPadOS, and Microsoft Windows. It is part of the "Affinity trinity" alongside Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher. Affinity Designer is available for purc ...

Overview

Affinity Publisher serves as a successor to Serif's own

PagePlus PagePlus was a desktop publishing (page layout) program developed by Serif for Microsoft Windows. The first version was released in 1991 as the first commercial sub-£100 DTP package for Microsoft Windows. The final release was PagePlus X9, w ...

software, which the company discontinued in August 2017 to focus on the Affinity product range. It has been described as an alternative to

Adobe InDesign Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing and page layout designing software application produced by Adobe Inc. and first released in 1999. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, ...

, due to its primary focus on

workflows for both printed and online media, including common features from this industry, such as master pages,

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark o ...

support, linked text frames, and end-to-end support for the

CMYK color model The CMYK color model (also known as process color, or four color) is a subtractive color model, based on the CMY color model, used in color printing, and is also used to describe the printing process itself. The abbreviation ''CMYK'' refers ...

. Affinity Publisher includes StudioLink technology, developed by Serif, which allows owners of Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo to use the

vector Vector most often refers to: *Euclidean vector, a quantity with a magnitude and a direction *Vector (epidemiology), an agent that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen into another living organism Vector may also refer to: Mathematic ...

and

raster Raster may refer to: * Raster graphics, graphical techniques using arrays of pixel values * Raster graphics editor, a computer program * Raster scan, the pattern of image readout, transmission, storage, and reconstruction in television and compu ...

graphic editing functionality of those applications for editing content directly within Publisher (in addition to its own, smaller set of native vector and raster editing features).

File format support

File formats supported by Affinity Publisher (in addition to the Affinity suite's native file format) include Adobe InDesign Markup Language (IDML), Adobe Photoshop PSD,

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

JPG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image ...

TIFF Tag Image File Format, abbreviated TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is widely supported by scanning, faxing, word processin ...

, PNG, and EPS, with export functionality for the PDF/X-1a, PDF/X-3, PDF/X-4 standards of the

PDF/X PDF/X is a subset of the PDF ISO standard. The purpose of PDF/X is to facilitate graphics exchange, and it therefore has a series of printing-related requirements which do not apply to standard PDF files. For example, in PDF/X-1a all fonts need t ...

file format. The

editions of Affinity Photo and Designer also include support for Affinity Publisher files.

Development

The first promotional video for Affinity Publisher was shown by Serif in December 2017, demonstrating features such as the drag & drop functionality, and text flow between frames. A free public

beta Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; grc, βῆτα, bē̂ta or ell, βήτα, víta) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labiod ...

of the software was made available for both macOS and Windows on August 30, 2018. The first full version of Publisher (using the 1.7 version number, to align with other Affinity products) was first released on June 19, 2019, in conjunction with Serif's 2019 'Affinity Live' event, during which the company also announced the ''StudioLink'' integration features for the first time. Publisher was made available for purchase directly from Serif's website and also available from the

Mac App Store The App Store (also known as the Mac App Store) is a digital distribution platform for macOS apps, often referred to as Mac apps, created and maintained by Apple Inc. The platform was announced on October 20, 2010, at Apple's "Back to the Mac" ...

and

Microsoft Store Microsoft Store (formerly known as Windows Store) is a digital distribution platform operated by Microsoft. It started as an app store for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 as the primary means of distributing Universal Windows Platform apps ...

. Publisher was updated to version 1.8 in February 2020, introducing support for importing Adobe InDesign's IDML file format. Serif stated that an iPadOS version of the software was planned for release in 2020.

Reception

Affinity Publisher received generally favorable reviews following its initial release in 2019, with the application's range of features, its StudioLink integration with Affinity Designer/Photo, and non-subscription pricing model commonly cited as positive areas. Limitations noted by reviewers of the initial release included its lack of support for InDesign's document ( INDD) & markup (IDML) files (although Serif added IDML support in February 2020), for footnotes & endnotes, and for

GREP grep is a command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines that match a regular expression. Its name comes from the ed command ''g/re/p'' (''globally search for a regular expression and print matching lines''), which has the sam ...

-based and nested styles. Many reviews drew comparisons between Publisher and InDesign, often noting that Publisher's first release did not have all of the features required to serve as a full replacement; however, ''CreativePro'' also acknowledged it as having additional tools that are not present in InDesign or other desktop publishing applications. In December 2019, Apple named Publisher the “Mac App of the Year”.

References

External links

* {{Desktop publishing software Desktop publishing software 2019 software Windows graphics-related software MacOS graphics-related software MacOS graphics software