Let’s get technical

Import

• Adobe^® Indesign^® IDML
• PDF
• Adobe^® Photoshop^® PSD
• Adobe^® Illustrator^® AI (containing PDF stream)

Easy Setup with New Document dialog (for desktop only)

• Thumbnail-based
• Presets for different types of output, e.g. Press Ready
• Create your own custom page presets
• Choose number of pages, facing pages and bleed
• Arrange facing pages vertically/horizontally
• Access Publisher templates (.aftemplate)

Spread Setup

• For current, specific or all spreads
• Override document dimensions and margins
• Scale content when resizing documents
• Lanczos 3, Bicubic, Bilinear and Nearest Neighbor resampling methods
• Mixed spread orientations

Master Pages

• Share page elements across many pages
• Editing master page elements updates all pages simultaneously
• Created pages are auto-linked to default master page
• Edit frame content independently of master page
• Smart master pages preserve edited master frame content when replacing master pages
• Detach text and picture frames from master to independently resize/format
• Transform master page content to spread
• Edit master page from any publication page
• Hierarchical master-on-master page support
• Multiple master pages per page

Sections

• Split publications into logical ‘chapter’ sections
• Create new sections from targeted pages
• Different page numbering styles per section
• Name sections for chapter identification on headers/footers
• Control starting page number
• Reference last page in section or at publication end

Page Navigation and Viewing

• Ultra responsive page scrolling
• Pages panel scrolls with page scrolling
• Page locator
• Instantly switch between favorite zoom levels
• Zoom to Spread
• Navigator Panel for pan/zoom control
• Save favourite view settings in the Panel
• Preview Mode

Text Frame Setup

• Multi-column support with column rules
• Dedicated Text Frame Panel for advanced frame setup
• Control insets, gutter and vertical alignment
• Variable column and gutter widths
• Change column widths by dragging
• Set same gutter values on ≥3-columns simultaneously
• Link text frames to flow text through
• Unlink/delete frames in frame sequence
• Frame sequences intelligently reflow on frame deletion/detachment
• Align to baseline grid
• Initial baseline text advance (sets vertical distance on first line of frame text)

Placeholder Text

• Autofit to frame (non-editable) or normal text behaviour
• Use your own custom filler text
• Language specific

Adding Text to Text Frames

• Place external file directly into new or existing text frame
• Import Word DOCX and RTF files
• Copy/paste from InDesign, Word, RTF and most other text editors
• Paste as unformatted text
• Scale or reflow text directly from text frame
• Vertically align frame text
• AutoFlow creates new ‘framed’ pages from overflowing frame text
• Fit text frame to contained text
• Create text frames from shapes

Artistic Text

• Perfect for a front page headline or chapter title
• Text always scales
• Takes layer effects (blurs, shadows and glows)

Text-on-a-Path

• Type text along a custom curve
• Control start and end points
• Set text on both or either side of lines
• Convert shapes to text paths
• Control all the normal text attributes including baseline
• Path text overflow control

Placing Content

• Images (PNG, JPG, TIFF, SVG)
• PDF
• PDF passthrough for absolute output fidelity (for desktop only)
• Microsoft^® Word^® DOCX, RTF and plain text
• Spreadsheet data (XLSX) - Microsoft^® Excel^®, Apple Numbers, LibreOffice
• Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher documents
• Adobe^® InDesign^® IDML
• Adobe^® Photoshop^® PSD
• PSD flattened image representation
• Import multiple images into Place Images panel then place click-by-click
• Choose page to view for placed documents
• Convert pixel layers to image layers
• DPI/scaling control for placed images and documents
• New
  Alt/Option-dragging files gives placement options via Place Images panel

Preview and Place Stock Imagery

• Search for Stock images within Affinity Publisher
• Stock Panel to access free and royalty-free image resources

Picture Frames

• Picture Frame Rectangle and Ellipse tools
• Intelligent image fitting to frame (Scale to Max/Min Fit)
• Create from shapes (geometric or pen drawn)
• Use presets or customize your own frames
• Size picture frame to content
• On-page pan, zoom and rotate controls
• Clear picture frame fills on population
• Convert pixel layers to picture frames

Tables

• Present data in tabular form
• Add, remove and resize columns and rows directly from table
• Autofit/distribute rows and columns
• Comprehensive cell formatting and merging
• Create custom table formats
• Save any table for later use
• Align to baseline grid

Pinned Objects

• Pinned objects move as text reflows
• Intelligent pinning to nearest text
• Float or inline (as character)
• Position by eye or via Pinning Panel (for precision)
• Float in relation to pin, frame, column, margin or page edge

Text wrapping

• Flow frame text around picture frames, text frames, images and tables
• Change distance to text (separate directions or uniformly)
• Edit the wrap outline to tailor wrapping

Interactive links for digital publishing

• Hyperlinks (to page, web address, file or email)
• Create in-document anchors for hyperlinks to target
• Table of contents and Index entries automatically hyperlink
• Anchors panel to create/manage anchors
• Include PDF bookmarks for TOC entries and anchors

Fields

• Insert document information (Author, Title, Date/Time)
• Add document statistics
• Section fields for headers and footers
• Continued on/from text frame references

Merge Publisher documents

• Import your choice of pages
• Import sections
• Choose page insertion point
• Text style merging
• Import master page(s)
• Import index marks

Table of Contents

• Dedicated Panel for TOC management
• Multiple Tables of Contents
• Create for document or section
• Choose text styles to generate content
• Create different text style sets
• Ignore line breaks and Include inline images options

Index

• Generate index from inserted index marks
• Dedicated Panel for index management
• Find and index additional matching words from panel
• Create cross references

Data Merge

• Merge text and image links from external data sources
• XLSX spreadsheet, TSV, CSV and JSON data sources
• Merge direct to page (certificates, letters, greetings cards)
• Merge into a repeating grid layout (business cards, mailing labels, badges, passes)
• Data Merge Layout Tool for grid layouts
• Repeat same data record or different record per grid cell
• Filter data records

Pro Font Support

• Create elegant text with OpenType, True Type and Type 1 fonts
• Use OpenType features (ligatures, swashes, stylistic alternates and sets)
• Insert placeholder text while constructing designs
• Insert special characters and symbols
• Copy and paste style between objects
• Font fallbacks
• New
  Improved IME text editing for Japanese and Simplified Chinese languages
• New
  Added support for emojis
• New
  Implemented OpenType character variant samples and parameter names

Live Font Previews

• Fonts are previewed instantly while creating or customizing text
• Access fonts by collection for efficiency
• Browse recent, used or favourite fonts (previously set as favourites)

Live OpenType Feature Previews

• Typography panel shows live feature previews
• Easily select the right Stylistic Set every time
• Preview Ligatures, Contextual Alternates, Swashes and more

Glyph Browser

• Quickly insert special characters into your text
• Display in glyph or Unicode order
• Browser will track current font selection
• Filter by font subset, e.g. Cyrillic
• Search by glyph name, glyph index or Unicode value

Characters and Paragraphs

• Style text with on-screen panels you can dock, move, and resize
• Adjust kerning, tracking, shear, baseline and other character attributes
• Easily set leading, indents, tab stops and justification
• Multi-language auto-hyphenation
• Optical character alignment (hanging punctuation)
• Paragraph spacing
• Bullets and numbering
• Initial words formatting
• Add decorations (paragraph rules)

Text Ruler

• Visually set tabs and indents
• Displays above any selected text frame
• Use alongside Paragraph Panel
• Reposition ruler vertically onto ‘target’ paragraphs

Checking your work

• Spell checking on the fly, or on demand, and customize the dictionary
• Check against any dictionary installed
• Autocorrect (uses replacement and abbreviation lists)

Text Styles

• Ensure text appears consistent
• Apply character and paragraph styles
• Pre-supplied styles
• Easily update styles cross-document
• Design from scratch or from text selection
• Style hierarchies
• Style groups
• Multi-level numbering schemas
• Import styles from target document
• Delete unused styles
• Delete all styles and create your own

Find and Replace

• Fonts, traits, attributes or text formatting
• Character or paragraph styles
• Search for ‘No style’
• Special characters
• Regular expressions support (Locale Aware)
• Locate found text on page

Resource Management

• Missing resource alert on document load
• Linked/embedded placed image policy at document setup
• Dedicated Resource Manager for image/document management
• Display placed image or document status
• Convert resources from embedded to linked (and vice versa)
• Linked image use offers much reduced file sizes
• Relative resource links are honored
• Collect linked resources into a ‘sidecar‘ folder for project portability

Resource Manager improvements

• New
  Relink multiple missing ‘same folder‘ images in one operation
• New
  Switch on/off columns
• New
  New File Type column
• New
  EPS files can be linked
• New
  Improvements when managing placed documents

Layer Management

• Each page has its own layers
• Organize using layers, groups and layer naming
• Isolate, rename, lock and hide layers with easy shortcuts
• Unlock all locked objects simultaneously
• Show all hidden objects simultaneously
• Limit the effect of adjustments by drag and drop
• Drag and drop layers from one document to another (Windows only; floated and side by side)

Font Management

• Missing font alert on document load
• Dedicated Font Manager for your document’s fonts
• Displays fonts used and font status
• Show and replace missing fonts
• Locate any fonts used

Packaging

• Share projects easily
• Original document remains unaffected
• Include fonts and linked images
• Show restricted fonts on package opening

Powerful Snapping

• Snap text frames, picture frames, shapes and curves
• Snap to grids, baseline grids, guides, column guides, canvas edges, margins, gaps and more
• Snapping candidate control (last six selected or layer based)
• Dynamic alignment works smoothly on snapping candidates
• Save favorite snapping settings as new presets
• Exclude objects from snapping

Ruler, Ruler Guides and Column Guides

• Switch on vertical/horizontal rulers that use document measurement units
• Spread (ruler) origin repositioned from ruler intersection
• Create ruler guides in any measurement unit or by percentage
• Reposition guides from ruler area when using multiple tools
• Multi-column guides with gutter control
• Customizable bleed and margin colors

Baseline Grids

• Vertically align text baselines for more appealing layouts
• For entire document or specific frames or tables
• Control grid positioning relative to spread/page/margin
• Precision object snapping to grid
• Display grid only at a configurable zoom level
• Set grid color

Layout Grids

• Create standard square and rectangular grids
• Change grid color and opacity
• Snap to grid for accurate layout

Constraints

• Scale and/or anchor objects in relation to the containing shape or picture frame
• Select object edges to be constrained
• Dedicated Constraints Panel for scale/anchor control
• Max/min fit for fixed aspect ratios

Rotate document view

• Rotate the page for easier editing of vertical text and packaging designs
• Maps to popular graphics tablet and keyboard controls

Misc Design Aids

• Inter-object measurement guides
• Switch on pasteboard for off-page storage

Assets for easy access to stored page elements

• Dedicated panel for asset storage
• Store text frames, picture frames, and tables
• Store any object to a custom subcategory
• Easy drag and drop onto the page
• Import/export assets

Pen and Node Tool

• Instinctively and quickly create what you want in a few clicks
• Change node types on the fly without interrupting your flow
• Switch between Pen and Node tools with a key press
• Multi-node selection, alignment and transform
• Apply pressure, scaling, drawing, miter and line end settings for organic strokes
• Create custom saveable pressure profiles
• Arrowheads

Tool and Mode Switching

• One tool flexibly selects, moves, rotates, scales, and skews
• Switch to the Move tool any time with a key press
• Toggle between popular tools and temporarily change modes
• Intuitively edit objects within groups without ungrouping
• Optionally move parent objects without their child layers

Editable Shapes

• Regular shapes are naturally smart with unique editing nodes
• Easily customize shapes, achieve neat results with snapping geometry
• Create perfect squares and circles by constraining primitives
• Apply special and rounded corners as absolute or % values
• Customize cogs, stars, arrows, pies, and 14 other smart shapes
• Presets for shapes or save your own shapes

Live Gradient Fills and Transparencies

• Draw gradients live in your design, instantly and smoothly
• Apply color and transparency gradients to fills and outlines
• Easily adjust the nodes and rates of change for gradients
• Use solid, linear, elliptical, radial, conical gradients and apply bitmaps
• Aspect ratio control (bitmap fill/transparency only)
• Linear and radial gradients respond to object scaling/shearing with skewed fill handle editing

Power Duplicate

• Duplicate objects and repeat transforms all in one go
• Create geometric patterns or repeating, scaling, rotating designs

Aligning and Distributing

• Align to left, center, right, top, middle, bottom
• Works to selection bounds, spread (artboard), margins, first/last selected
• Automatically distribute objects horizontally or vertically
• Distribute to your choice of spacing
• Alignment handles for precise alignment of a selection to a position on page
• Change object Z-order

Transforms

• Accurately position and scale objects to specific values
• Use functions like +50% to scale objects relatively
• Apply transforms about an anchor point selected in the Transform panel
• Rotate using dedicated lollipop or from outside corner handles
• Transform Panel is aware of object’s custom transform origin (anchor point will override)
• Set a custom center of rotation
• Reposition objects by their custom transform origin
• Skew using on-screen controls or the Transform panel
• Flip objects with handy buttons

Boolean Geometry

• Join, intersect, subtract, intersect, divide and combine shape outlines
• Boolean operations are editable (Compound Shapes) without using Undo

Clipping

• Add artwork within shapes and layers using Insert Inside and Paste Inside
• Clip to object below with Move Inside and Move Outside
• Also Insert Behind and Insert Above the current layer

Styles

• Save combinations of fill, line and effects settings for reuse
• Apply styles for design consistency, e.g. your favorite letterpress
• Optionally scale styles with objects
• Search for styles by style name

Textured Noise

• Add noise to object fills and outlines, also as a gradient

Program Defaults

• Apply your preferred object settings as defaults

With Designer Persona

Corner Tool

• Neatly round and soften corners on shapes and lines
• For single corners/nodes, a selection, or all nodes at once

Vector Paint Brushes

• Access Texture and Image brush categories
• Texture brushes include Pen, Paint, Watercolor and Pastel styles
• Complete editability of an already applied stroke’s width, color and opacity
• Stroke stabilization for perfectly smooth brush strokes
• See a live preview at the brush tip before you apply your stroke
• Create custom brushes using your own textures

Pencil Tool

• Draw lines with an intuitive balance of accuracy and smoothing
• Adjust weight automatically based on velocity, pressure, or use fixed width
• Use stabilizer for super smooth pencil strokes
• Sculpt mode for repeating and continuing strokes

Symbols

• Simultaneous and automatic editing of repeating design elements
• Create and store symbols in Symbols Panel
• Replicate symbols as individual symbol instances
• Synchronization across instances by default
• Switch off synchronization for isolated edits
• Edit distinct object properties independently of each other

With Photo Persona

Raster Paint Brushes

• Introduce raster texture and shading to your page
• Many brush categories (natural media, sprays, grunge and more)
• Stroke stabilization for perfectly smooth brush strokes
• Retouch images with Dodge, Burn, Smudge and Sharpen brush tools
• See a live preview at the brush tip before you apply your stroke
• Control size, pressure, and speed interactivity with live brush settings

Pixel Selections

• Confine edits to selected regions only
• Adjustments and effects are masked to selection
• Use regular shapes, pixel-width regions, freehand lasso, and selection brush
• Select regions based on color and tonal ranges
• Grow, shrink, feather, smooth and outline selection

Refine Selections

• Select fine detail like hair and fur with advanced refining
• Set refinement border width, smoothness, mode, and feather size
• Output refinement as a selection, mask, new layer, or new layer with mask

Professional image filters

• Full access to non-destructive Live filters
• Enhance your photos
• Blur, sharpen, distort or add color effects

Custom Brushes

• Create completely custom vector and raster brushes using your own textures
• Choose behavior for pressure and velocity variance, corners, repeating areas and many other controls

Professional Color

• True end-to-end CMYK for professional workflows
• RGB, RGB Hex, LAB, CMYK and Grayscale color models
• PANTONE^® color swatches
• ICC color management profiles supported
• Seamlessly jump between color modes
• Lock to prevent color mode switching

Pantone^® Color Matching

• PANTONE^® Goe^™
• PANTONE^® GoeBridge^™
• PANTONE^®+ Formula Guide Solid (V2)
• PANTONE^®+ CMYK
• PANTONE^®+ Color Bridge (V2)
• PANTONE^®+ Metallic, Neon, and Pastels
• Coated and uncoated variants

Smart Color Picker

• Dedicated Tool for sampling color in your Document View
• Accurately pick color using a magnifier over any part of your display
• Point or color averaged sampling
• Sample from current or all layers
• Grab in the source color space including CMYK, RGB and LAB color
• Simple panel-based Color Picker as alternative

Palettes and Swatches

• Use colors and palettes based on all the available color models
• Automatically create palettes based on document colors
• Import Adobe^® Swatch Exchange (.ase) files
• Create complementary, analogous and other color chords
• Generate palette from any image

Global Colors

• Update objects when their base color changes
• Tint levels are retained when base color updates
• Use as solid colors or in gradients

16-bits per Channel Support

• 16-bits per channel mode for accurate color processing
• Works on all supported hardware and operating systems without limits

Preflight checking

• Live, manual or ‘at export‘ checking
• Dedicated Preflight panel for centralised issue management
• Configurable levels - warning or higher-priority error
• Autofix available for many issues
• Error/warning visual indicators (red/amber)
• Save your own custom preflight profiles

Open

• Affinity Photo (.afphoto)
• Affinity Designer (.afdesign)

Import

• Adobe^® Indesign^® IDML
• PDF
• Adobe^® Photoshop^® PSD
• Adobe^® Illustrator^® AI (containing PDF stream)
• EPS

Place

• Adobe^® Indesign^® IDML
• Microsoft^® Word^® DOCX, RTF or plain text
• Spreadsheet data (XLSX) - Microsoft^® Excel^®, Apple Numbers, LibreOffice
• Affinity Photo (.afphoto)
• Affinity Designer (.afdesign)
• Affinity Publisher (.afpub)
• Adobe^® Illustrator^® AI (containing PDF stream)
• PDF
• Adobe^® Photoshop^® and Adobe^® FreeHand^® (versions 9 to 11)
• PNG
• TIFF
• JPG
• GIF
• SVG
• EXR (Open EXR)
• HDR (Radiance)
• Extensive RAW import library (auto-process on import)
• DNG
• HEIF with depth map (as separate layer)
• Optional Artboard conversion to spreads (from Affinity Designer)

Export

• PDF
• Affinity template (.aftemplate)
• PNG
• JPG
• GIF
• TIFF
• Adobe^® Photoshop^® PSD
• SVG
• EPS
• EXR (Open EXR)
• HDR (Radiance)

PDF and PDF/X compatible

• Save designs as PDF for sharing
• Edit and save PDFs for round-trip app compatibility
• New
  Smaller PDF export file sizes using multiple copies of the same placed passthrough PDFs
• New
  Better output of placed passthrough PDFs to targets not supporting Passthrough

Desktop Printing/Save as PDF

• Tiled
• N-up (ganged)
• Book printing
• Booklet printing

Professional Printing

• Full CMYK handling and ICC profiles
• Spot colors
• Overprint controls
• Trim, bleed and crop marks
• Bleed preview with bleed setup directly from new document
• K-only grayscale images on CMYK output
• Create CMYK PDF/X files for pro printing
• Compatible with PDF/X-1a, PDF/X-3, and PDF/X-4

Non-Destructive Editing

• Apply to any object, layer, group—whether vector or raster
• See effects, blend modes and adjustments instantly with no lag
• Completely finish designs without switching to another app
• Edit any time—all effects, adjustments, and blend modes are non-destructive
• Set blend modes for strokes, layers, objects and groups
• Selectively recolor artwork and designs without laborious reworking

Live Adjustments

• Levels
• White Balance
• HSL
• Recolor
• Black and White
• Brightness and Contrast
• Posterize
• Vibrance
• Exposure
• Shadows/Highlights
• Threshold
• Curves
• Channel Mixer
• Gradient Map with global color support
• Selective Color
• Color Balance
• Invert
• Soft Proof
• 3D LUT (3D Look Up Table for complex adjustments)
• Lens Filter
• Split Toning

Live Effects

• Gaussian Blur
• Outer Shadow
• Inner Shadow
• Outer Glow
• Inner Glow
• Outline
• 3D
• Bevel/Emboss
• Color Overlay
• Gradient Overlay
• Layer Effects now work with global colors

Live Blend Modes

• Normal
• Darken
• Darker Color
• Multiply
• Color Burn
• Linear Burn
• Lighten
• Lighter Color
• Screen
• Color Dodge
• Add
• Overlay
• Soft Light
• Hard Light
• Vivid Light
• Pin Light
• Linear Light
• Hard Mix
• Difference
• Exclusion
• Subtract
• Divide
• Hue
• Saturation
• Luminosity
• Color
• Average
• Negation
• Reflect
• Glow
• Contrast Negate
• Erase

OS X/macOS

• Pressure-sensitive graphics tablet and pen
• Force Touch and regular Trackpad
• Touch Bar
• Mac keyboards
• Magic Trackpad and Magic Trackpad 2
• Magic Mouse and Magic Mouse 2
• Generic multi-button and wheel mouse
• Dictation offered by OS X

Windows

• DirectX 11 and Direct 2D rendering with Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform (WARP) fallback
• Hardware accelerated for smooth panning/zooming and rendering
• Optimized for Surface Pro 3, Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book (including support for detachable screen)
• Surface Studio with Surface Pen/Surface Dial
• Generic multi-button and wheel mouse
• Wacom (and other WinTab devices) support
• Uses Microsoft Concurrency Runtime to fully utilize/scale across modern CPUs
• High DPI support across multiple monitors