Affinity Publisher 2 for iPad

Wow, this app is amazing First of all. All three apps are free now which is absolutely outstanding at least for the rest of this month so hurry up you don’t want to miss this completely free trial forever and ever I would like to mention so go go go right now before have to pay again please don’t miss this opportunity. This app is great as well as all three other apps that affinity has published get it so go go go it while you’re at it. You should probably download a 50 follower Designer 2 cause all three of them are $0.00 tax included and for the apps interface epic it’s pretty good. I like it if you have all three apps, unless you use all through the apps features without even having to go to the other app, so download it please it’s awesome.

For 99% of us, 98% of the time, the iPad version of Affinity Publisher will be adequate. It does almost everything the desktop version does. Both do almost everything InDesign does, and usually better—faster and with fewer steps. I'd say the biggest drawback is the learning curve. The UI is initially confusing—everything's hidden behind a mystery icon, and there are more menus hidden within. The Affinity apps are monstrously powerful and it takes some time to learn all they can do. Where the iPad version will disappoint most users, I think, is it lacks data merge. So you can't automate, say, mailing labels or name badges. This means nothing to me but it might ruin it for you. Neither version, to my knowledge, can properly handle long tables. InDesign treats a table like a text frame and you just link your overflowing frame to another to continue the table flow. Publisher requires cumbrous workarounds. Nor does the iPad version work well for large or complex publications. There is no Book Panel. More importantly, say for publishing an indexed paper, there are only limited indexing functions. Any one of these flaws might make Publisher unusable for you. For most of us most of the time it's no big deal. To me it's a life changer. I can do layout on my iPad.

I was in a hurry today. My current iPad Pro apps won't let me do quite what I need to do, at least not quickly. It sounded like Affinity Publisher could. All I needed to do was slant a font that I'm using in a graphic that I made in Procreate, and then rasterize it. Procreate doesn't have a faux italics option. Affinity Publisher theoretically allows you to slant the font though which I really truly needed to do. On-line folks said to go to "View - Studio - Character". Since I couldn't find anything saying it was the "View" Menu, I asked about that and was told to go to "Preferences - Keyboard Shortcuts - View" good grief, this was ridiculously opaque and again unfindable. With time ticking down for me, I asked where "Preferences" was located and was told to go to "Tools - Preferences". KMN because "Tools" proved unfindable also. Eventually I stumbled across a character menu, and found the slant option. I selected my text and tapped the slant box up to 5 degrees, and..... nothing changed. Is it because it's a trial? Well, if so, the developers failed. If they ever decide to offer straightforward menu routes to get to specific places without being psychic, and if the features then work, I'll be first in line to pay. FWIW, I'm a decades-long Painter expert, Photoshop & Lightroom expert, and InDesign expert. But not planning on becoming an Affinity expert until they stop with the "cool" mysterious act - because wow does that get old fast. And yeah, missed my deadline 🤐