There are some quirks to the interface of Affinity Publisher V2 that make me think this is not really a tool that can completely replace Adobe InDesign, at least, not yet. For one thing, the most egregious missing feature I’ve come across is a lack of a competent “Step and Repeat” function, but the precision does seem to be there sufficient for professional pre-press work, as far as I can tell.
I have so far found there customer support forums less than optimally helpful, as they seem to be populated mainly by fanboys who don’t actually do professional publishing work and take any criticism of their idol very poorly. Or maybe it’s just that they are a European company, I don’t know.
Step and Repeat is a feature that has been a standard part of design software for over 30 years. I know this, because my experience with professional page layout software goes back to 1991, when I began working for a digital printing service bureau. I was one of the team that produced d8 Magazine in the mid-1990s. When I raised this issue in the support forums, I got dogpiled by men who don’t seem to understand the concept of Step and Repeat, who demanded visual documentation of my workflow so they could judge whether or not I was “doing it right”. This is not really something that I think needs to be explained to anyone who has worked with the industry standard software applications for even a short period of time.
One of the things I do is produce personal organizer products, for personal organizers such as the Filofax system. Step and Repeat is pretty crucial to my workflow, to the point where re-creating my designs, which for the past 15 years have been produced in Adobe InDesign, in Affinity Publisher V2 is far more tedious and time-consuming than it really ought to be, simply because this one feature is inexplicably absent.
There are also some pretty severe user interface problems with the iPadOS version, to the point where I don’t really find it particularly useful for serious work, but I hope the app improves with time to the point where I can more confidently travel with just an iPad, in the event that I need to produce some documents on the road, without having to schlep the MacBook Pro all over Hell and Creation. It’s possible an Apple Pencil would help mitigate some of these issues, but I’m not about to spend $100 on a tool that I really shouldn’t need only to find out it’s only marginally better than using a Bluetooth mouse.
Overall, I think the Affinity suite is a good addition to the marketplace, and I am looking forward to seeing how responsive the developers are in the future to professional users who are looking for an alternative to Adobe’s usury.