Great read. They also talked through the podcast and made specific reference to Ernie and his use of Affinity through Lutris on the recent episode of their podcast. [0] It was a good listen.

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/

Enjoyed this a lot. I, too, spent many years involved in print layout. In my case it was a lot of QuarkXPress. My friend aptly described it as a “very cross program” but it was quite efficient once I learned it.

Very interesting read. Always love learning how new media tackles old media processes, I'll be interested to see how the zine fares long term.

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.