You can also use the Vector Crop Tool to crop these shapes, or indeed any Publisher object – including text and stroked paths. Use the Donut tool to create donut graphs, right inside Publisher. Use the Callout tools – either rounded rectangle or ellipse – to make speech bubbles, with simple controls for moving anchor points and bubble size. Publisher includes a range of shapes such as stars and donuts, all easily customized numerically or via intuitive on-screen controls. Of course, you can choose your own colors to display here. You can also use it to place precise, numerically-defined guides and you can choose whether column guides are shown as outlines, or as blocks of color. The Guides Manager allows you to set up guides either on a master page or an individual page. This is helpful when preparing double-sided leaflets, as you can see both front and back sides next to each other. There are two novel features: you can retrieve the maximum print size from a connected printer, invaluable for business users and you can choose to start on a left-hand page, rather than a right. The New Document dialog closely resembles that of InDesign, except that there’s no facility for setting the number of columns here – that’s done separately on the Master Page, using the Guides Manager (see below). In the screenshot below, the feather is open in the Photo environment, with all its tools: but you can still see – and manipulate – all the Publisher elements on the page. The same applies if you own Affinity Designer, although the wide range of vector tools built into Publisher means you’re less likely to need to use this for everyday tasks. StudioLink is an astonishingly useful feature: although you’re effectively working in Affinity Photo, you still see the entire page layout, which means you can adapt images perfectly to fit the available space, without any guesswork.

(They have different extensions purely so that when you double-click one on the desktop your computer knows which app to open it with.) This is possible due to the fact that all three programs share the same file format. This doesn’t mean it loads Photo as a separate app: rather, the entire Photo toolset appears right inside Publisher. Select an image and, at the click of a button, the interface switches to that of Affinity Photo. If you own Affinity Photo, then you can make use of a truly extraordinary editing feature within Publisher.

There isn’t room to go through all of Publisher’s tools and menu options instead, we’ll look at some of the more interesting features of this hugely innovative publishing environment. Since then the beta has undergone many updates, and the first shipping version of Affinity Publisher is now available at a one-off, no-subscription price of $49.99.Īs well as being a fully-fledged page layout program, Publisher boasts a huge range of features, with many unique tools not found in InDesign or elsewhere. It generated a lot of comment on CreativePro, with users outlining its pros and cons. In August 2018 Affinity took the unusual decision to launch its page layout program, Publisher, as a public beta.

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