Adobe Performance...

[kdw75]

I realize Adobe has been pretty busy the past few years, removing support for Pantone Colors and Type 1 Font support, but has anyone heard if they are planning to add multi-core support or improve performance? I am regularly working on catalogs in Indesign that have tons of high res drawing and photographs. While waiting on operations to complete, I will regularly flip over to Task Manager only to find that the CPU load will rarely exceed 12%.

 

[chriscozi]

Affinity . . . . 2019 -Watch the demo . . . . . . 30 minutes but WORTH IT.

 

[chriscozi]

Affinity . . . . 2019 -Watch the demo . . . . . . 30 minutes but WORTH IT.

Just to note - the ONE item still missing for us to move almost completely to Affinity products is a comprehensive font management connection.
We don't use scripting here on the Macs and that is the OTHER complaint from some pro users.
We already use their products as a 'Graphic Office' editing suite - we used to use OLD Quark everywhere - and the users are very happy, as you might guess.

 

[prepressdork]

@chriscozi, what's your experience with exporting a PDF of files created in Affinity? Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe Affinity uses GhostScript for making a PDF? I don't have much experience with GS. How well does Affinity export PDF/X-1a (especially where spot colors are present) and PDF/X-4?

Thanks,
pd

 

[chriscozi]

To the specifics of your question I would see the Affinity-Serif website.
However, remember that the people who bought the company and paid to develop the Affinity software were European based designers fed up with Adobe who knew they could do better even though they weren't software developers.

 

[zoran]

Affinity uses PDFlib library for PDF export.
I haven't played much but I know it supports most versions of PDF/X, with and without transparency.
What is the quality of output PDF, I did not test recently.

 

[michaelejahn]

We ( SmartSoft - developer of PressWise, a Print MIS system ) licence / use PDFLib to generate our Print Ready PDF files. We never get complaints from Customer on the PDF files that this generates ( which they print on customers Xerox, Kodak, HP or any of the RIPs and DFEs that drive offset or wide format type printers )

PDFlib: What's new in PDFlib 10?

www.pdflib.com

 

[Arkansas Catholic]

I encourage EVERYBODY to switch to Affinity, because our newspaper production workflow depends on a plug-in that's only available for InDesign (DocsFlow -- it's wonderful brilliant beautiful) and the developers won't build an Affinity version until there are enough users out there to pay the freight.

 

[wonderings]

There is something to be said for everyone working with the same software. Personally I like Indesign, might even love it. The monthly cost works out to be around the price of upgrading a perpetual license every 2 years, just a little less. Affinity is doing some great things but they are far from perfecting their competing apps (Publisher, Designer, Photos). I have not tried the latest update of Publisher yet, but past versions would really struggle as the page count grew, even if it was just simple black text. They do have some amazing features for the price and have added some since release like data merge. I have played with the data merge a little to try and wrap my head around it, I prefer Indesign a the moment but that is probably because I know how that works.

Depending on the computer you are using, if on a Mac it might be worth checking out the new Apple chips. I hear they scream with photoshop, though less reviews for Illustrator and Indesign. All 3 are native M1 apps though now. I have a MacBook Pro expected to arrive end of month with an M1 Max chip and am very curious to see how Indesign Illustrator and Photoshop run with these new amazing processors.

 

[Puch]

The monthly cost works out to be around the price of upgrading a perpetual license every 2 years, just a little less.

That is, if you're into update. Now it's almost unavoidable to dance as Adobe whistles, but please, be honest: are there ANY new features (since InDesign CS4) which will break your workflow, if removed? I'm doing heavyweight prepress for 32 years now, and:

• I would be more than happy to live with InDesign CS6 and Photoshop CS3 forever (Illustrator CS6 and Acrobat 9 included). There are no real developments since these versions, just the 'intelligent' mumbo-jumbo and the constant, unnecessary tweaking of the user interface.
• Going back in time, if they give me only QuarkXPress 4, Photoshop 4 (NOT CS4, the original 4) and FreeHand 3.1, I would be still able to complete all the publications we produce today.

Why wouldn't I do as I said above? Because Adobe is holding the world in ransome with the constant flow of unnecessary updates. Just last week we had to update InDesign to version 2022, because of the whining of some customers. Now another bunch of customers are whining that we give back processed document in version 2021, because they won't update. What a mess just to generate more profit for Adobe!

 

[chriscozi]

That is, if you're into update. Now it's almost unavoidable to dance as Adobe whistles, but please, be honest: are there ANY new features (since InDesign CS4) which will break your workflow, if removed? I'm doing heavyweight prepress for 32 years now, and:

• I would be more than happy to live with InDesign CS6 and Photoshop CS3 forever (Illustrator CS6 and Acrobat 9 included). There are no real developments since these versions, just the 'intelligent' mumbo-jumbo and the constant, unnecessary tweaking of the user interface.
• Going back in time, if they give me only QuarkXPress 4, Photoshop 4 (NOT CS4, the original 4) and FreeHand 3.1, I would be still able to complete all the publications we produce today.

Why wouldn't I do as I said above? Because Adobe is holding the world in ransome with the constant flow of unnecessary updates. Just last week we had to update InDesign to version 2022, because of the whining of some customers. Now another bunch of customers are whining that we give back processed document in version 2021, because they won't update. What a mess just to generate more profit for Adobe!

Well, not me, but Adobe is going to break your workflow.
No more Type1 fonts.
So there.