Bournemouth — Nov 20th 2018

Ten members attended the meeting to hear Euan Williams continue the year’s theme of less mainstream applications. Euan presented the third of Affinity’s promised trio of Mac apps, the document design package Publisher. Publisher is actually still in public Beta testing but the app that Euan demonstrated contains most features in a what is already a high quality and reliable app.

Euan started by describing ‘design’ as bringing out the message from the noise, with the presentation of a document being one contributor to this. He demonstrated many Publisher features and the familiar controls that support this, including:
* Photos can be blended with their background, masked with many different shapes or have shapes blended on top of them
* Typography controls include drop-caps, initial word styling, widow and orphan control
* Text can follow an arbitrarily shaped vector path
* Page layout can zoom out to a double page spread or to multiple spreads
* Objects (eg images) can straddle the gutter between facing pages
* Full control of Printer’s marks and bleeds

Affinity provides many video tutorials of Publisher’s features; Euan suggested some simple ways of controlling the videos to avoid the “how did he do that?” effect.

Euan speculated that Publisher will be priced at the same level as the first two apps so cost less than £50 full price and likely launch with an introductory discount making it around £35. That would, in several people’s view, represent tremendous value.

Comments

Page 1