I actually built my own InDesign clone just before wrapping up with my last employer (inspired by Photopea) given how fed up I was with InDesign and its quirks.
It was a pretty neat little product - ingested all our website stories and automatically laid them out into a newspaper, which could be further edited in the browser or output as print ready PDFs that would go straight to the printers' FTP server.
I'm willing to bet there's a huge market out there that's itching to jump ship from InDesign as soon as Affinity proves its worth. Adobe has squandered their moat. I've already worked with companies that now do all their desktop publishing in Canva - still get an eye twitch from that, but it worked and staff preferred that mess over InDesign.
I wish Adobe stayed the 2004 company version of Adobe. They were good.
Rather than a tool of mass-distributed propaganda, in an internet medium where making digital copies is cheap, masquerading under the guise of the "little man"?
Duanemclemore•1mo ago
edited to add: I am however surprised that Ernie didn't just go for VivaDesigner [1], as it does seem to be a more drop-in InDesign replacement and is Linux native...
[0] https://open.spotify.com/episode/0TG6fsy7cLEkOEj8SIm8ci?si=4...
[1] https://viva.systems/designer/
shortformblog•1mo ago
This project is probably a no-go with it (for kicks, I did try importing a PDF of the final doc) but I will keep it in mind in the future from an analysis standpoint.
The other point I’d make is kind of a tipping-point argument. While VivaDesigner can export into IDML it looks like, Affinity has gone just mainstream enough that it won’t be turned away at print shops, which is a real risk. PDFs can get you most of the way, granted, but some print shops want to edit the file, which makes sense.
shortformblog•1mo ago
Duanemclemore•1mo ago
My partner and I run our design studio on Linux these days and so we're always on the hunt for software to better replace the PC / Mac software we walked away from, so I explored running Affinity a couple years ago and couldn't get it going properly. Then last year I had to put together a big important document, so I had extra motivation to find a replacement.
I tried almost literally everything that was Linux native over a few weeks when I was getting started. I was impressed with VivaDesigner, but decided to just use LaTeX in VSCode - ahich was both awesome and terrifying for what wound up a 390pg document. And would be a huge PITA for this purpose.
Back to your post specifically - I can imagine how insane the old system you helped replace was.
And yes, I think that the "tipping point" is an important consideration. Maybe in Germany where Viva is based they might not think twice if you bring in a live file, but it does seem like Affinity is far and away the leading challenger in the states. I'm sure it's a miniscule share and Adobe is still the 8,000 pound gorilla.
But that's the thing about tipping points right?
LanternLight83•1mo ago
No thanks, I'll use Scribus.
Different mod schemes (ctrl-click and such) than InDesign, but I'm sure I can get used to that, adjust the settings, or patch it. Might have worked for them though, good suggestion!
Duanemclemore•1mo ago