First, quick note, IngramSpark is sending me replacements of those books that shipped to the wrong address. The response I received about my shipping choice appears to have been related to my issue with their printing speed. That, of course, makes no sense, but someone else responded on the shipping issue today.
So a full month after “express” printing my copies I may see them sometime this week. So I deleted my last post. I am tired of being annoyed by bad customer service everywhere.
Now on to the topic of this post, Affinity 2.0.
As you may know, I’ve written some books about Affinity Publisher. And, of course, because I have impeccable timing, shortly after I published those books and their related video courses, Affinity came out with a new version of their software, Affinity 2.0.
I went ahead and bought it when they released it because I wanted to support them and value their product, but I was not going to deal with learning a new version of a software in December when I was trying to finalize nine books with hundreds of images.
And good thing. Because it threw me for a bit of a loop when I finally downloaded it today.
They committed what I personally consider the cardinal sin. They moved things around.
I went to recreate my studio presets because they didn’t transfer over and…studios weren’t there anymore. I found them, though, under the Window tab.
And then, not all of my studios were listed. That’s because they decided to use secondary dropdowns for some of the studios I use such as Fields, Index, Table of Contents, Character, Paragraph, Text Styles, and the Glyph Browser studios.
And then, horror of horrors, they also moved the Resource Manager which is what I prefer to use when swapping out images.
It is also now under the Window tab.
And there’s some weird error message now in Preflight for my print interiors that says I’m using a color profile that’s unsuitable for PDF/X even though it’s the same one as before that had no error message like that.
I think it might be because I’m doing a greyscale profile. From what I can tell (?) the books generated as a PDF just fine. I tried to find an explanation of what the issue is and couldn’t. So fingers crossed it’s okay.
On a positive note, though, I absolutely frickin’ love the new Style Picker Tool. My text styles transferred over like ten versions of each one and none of them were the one I wanted in one section of my document, but I was able to just select text already formatted the way I wanted it and then just click and drag across the text I needed formatted that same way and it worked like a charm.
So, yay for that. That was one of the other reasons I chose to upgrade because I love that function in Word and was hoping for something similar here and they delivered.
Also, be warned that they’ve decided to go the Vellum, TechSmith, etc. route and make files moved to the new version of Affinity incompatible with the old version of Affinity. So looks like I will be running both versions for the foreseeable future. Joy.
Other than those issues, I don’t think I ran into anything else that didn’t work the same. I used it to format a new paperback that’s fiction, so mostly text, and to create a new print cover, but I was copying over from an existing cover so it wasn’t completely from scratch.
Which means I kicked the tires a bit, but haven’t fully taken it through all of the possible ways I would use it quite yet.
So a bit of adjustment, but I’d say the books I wrote are still 90%-95% useful. It’s just that the stuff that comes right at the start has changed and they update their icons to look different. Sigh.
M.L. Humphrey 