I have no connection to Affinity other than as a sometimes user of their software. Anyway, the company is having a half-price spring sale on everything, including Designer, Publisher, and Photo.
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Sadly no sign of a native Linux version 
Fixed it for ya:
I use Affinity partly since 2015 and fully since 2019
With the exception of Acrobat Pro I work free from Adobe products.
If you are on a very tight budget keep in mind that Affinity suite is on version 1.10.5 right now and
2.0 will be the first non free update. It can come out next month or not until next year, I don’t know.
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This is where they’ll start getting you suckered in at higher prices… or a subscription model!
It’s coming…
I beta tested most of the products with Affinity back in the day when they were first coming out.
I helped analyse several features and enhancements for publisher.
But haven’t really got into using it.
I might go back to it someday.
I would be surprised if Affinity switches to a subscription model any time soon. That is one of their key differentiators and selling points. The videos showcasing the features of their products all stress no subscription. Raising their prices seems reasonable, IMO. especially considering you can buy all 3 without the Spring sale for less than $250 US and that Designer, Photo and Publisher can generally replace Adobe’s Illustrator, PhotoShop and InDesign. Even at twice the price it would be pretty reasonable IMO.
Well I was a bit tongue in cheek about the subscription…
I left Adobe
1
because my CS upgrade every two years were about 700€. Subscription was about twice that price.
2
Access to my own intellectual property depends on Adobe #Venezuela
Between that and Affinity today is a lot of room for years of price hikes.
Well there’s no reason Affinity couldn’t lock down their products and cease trading
A risk in all software.
Anyway. I liked affinity a lot.
Publisher is just not there yet.
And to add. People will crack affinity and distribute it for free. Even though it’s a low price. And once their revenue streams are hurting due to saturation and pirate then prices will naturally go up.
Maybe adobe will buy them out who knows
I’ve used Publisher for a couple of big projects and liked it. My biggest annoyance was that it began to bog down on a 100-plus-page full-color book with lots of placed items. I’d sometimes need to close the file and open it up again to free up memory. This was on a Mac loaded with 16 GB of memory and lots of scratch space. Perhaps it would have performed better with 32 GB. I’m not sure, but honestly, that was my only complaint about Publisher — at least after I got used to it.
I don’t know how Affinity (well, Serif) makes money on their software. The cost is a small fraction of what Adobe charges, yet their apps are arguably comparable in most ways and better in some — especially integration between the products. Either Adobe is overcharging, or Affinity is undercharging. Their lack of an Acrobat equivalent is a pretty big Achilles heel. I’m not even sure they could develop a viable competitor to Acrobat since Adobe essentially owns the technology and all the patents associated with it.
I still prefer Adobe’s CC suite, but a lot of that is due to habit — sort of like my preference for the macOS over Windows. If the Affinity products mature a little more, I’d probably be tempted to save some money and abandon my CC subscription, even if the cost of the software doubles. Then again, I’m so entrenched in the Adobe ecosystem that I’m probably underestimating how difficult it might be to extract myself from it.
Yeh they likely may not have their own version of acrobat maybe they will who knows. As you know adobe is the author of pdf so is there a point in recreating a software that may or may not adhere to all the pdf modules? We all know 3rd party pdf reader (non adobe) are all pretty iffy.
Dont forget with cc sub you get more than 3 apps even if you never touch them, plus access to thousands of fonts and an integrated stock library, share for reviews, publish online and lots more shite.
Yes I too just want ps ai and Id
I didn’t really get involved with ai or ps version of affinity as I can accomplish 99.9999 percent of what I need with PS1 a f ai version 1.
I don’t use all the guff in ps and ai to actually contribute.
But I could with publisher. What I saw was amazing.
One of the features was the images automatically embedded.
And it’s now a feature to optionally link images.
Just wondering did this embeding vs linking affect the performance.
I don’t know if I can take credit for this feature there was a few looking for it.
But Affinity team responded swiftly and applied the update, which was nice.
There’s just something that does not sit with me with Publisher.
I went from Quark to Corel Publisher to InDesign .
And each step felt like a huge improvement.
I didn’t get that with Affinity Publisher.
I might be tempted to try again.
Maybe it’s the lack of long doc features which put me off. I think it would be it as that would be my personal specialty.
You still can buy a perpetual license for Acrobat
and
a lot of the stuff inside Acrobat is actually licensed from Callas who has a similar product:
All the preflight functionality is very similar
Both come at a price around 500€
Adobe notoriously license add ONS and also purchase 3rd party plugins.
It’s adobe plugin program is a key features in it’s success.
Yes, that’s true. I’d miss access to the Adobe font library. For people who depend on After Effects or Premiere or whatever, Affinity is a non-starter. For me, though, it’s primarily Id, Ai, Ps, and Acrobat.
Embedding might have had something to do with it. I’m not sure. Either that or inefficient memory management built on the assumption that no one would build a book with hundreds of images. If they’ve fixed the problem, that would be great. I haven’t run into it since that book. If you were instrumental in them fixing it, that’s even better. 
I grew to dislike Quark, the company. I could easily go off on a tangent about them, but that’s for another time.
When InDesign was released, I eagerly began using it. I missed several things about Quark that InDesign just didn’t do.
For example, Quark had an obscure feature that could import tagged data and automatically apply custom Quark styles to the data. I used it extensively when I worked at a newspaper.
Each day, we needed to assemble a color weather forecast map from weather data supplied to us by the Associated Press (AP). Putting it together each day would take one of the artists about 90 minutes to extract the information and build the map in Illustrator or (before that, Aldus FreeHand).
The AP data was highly structured, which lent itself to automation. Using AppleScript and regular expressions, I figured out a way to extract the right information, tag it with XPress tags and import it into Quark as a fully formatted map saved as an EPS file which was automatically exported into the paper’s pagination system.
It cut the entire process down from 90 minutes to zero time. I expected similar features in InDesign, but they weren’t there. In many ways, I think Quark XPress is still the better product for some purposes, but I haven’t used it in years, so my thinking is probably 20 years out of date on that.
I know very little about the inner working of these companies, but at its core PDF is a proprietary Adobe product that would require a license from Adobe to integrate into another company’s software. Since the Affinity suite is a direct competitor to Creative Cloud and not a partner (of sorts), like Callas, I suspect Adobe wouldn’t go along with the idea.
Re-engineering a PDF substitute from the ground up that wouldn’t tread on Adobe’s patents would be a pretty big undertaking. I really don’t know, though. I suppose it’s possible.
As you said, though, buying a copy of Acrobat plus the Affinity Suite is still considerably cheaper than using Creative Cloud. In Venezuela, you’re at a real disadvantage with Adobe. If I remember right, didn’t Adobe discontinue directly selling and supporting Creative Cloud in Venezuela due to US-imposed sanctions on your country? I suppose that doesn’t apply to the Affinity suite since Serif is a British company.
Pretty much the same sentiment as you on the apps in use, ai, ps, id, Acrobat.
One thing I do miss from Quark is quick and dirty photo edits you used to be able to do through Quark. It wasn’t amazing or anything but useful.
Something that Affinity has done quite well with - app integration across their suites called Personas.
Something Adobe users have been asking for at least two decades.
And Affinity inserting PDFs is far better integrated than Adobe have done so.
Horses for courses I guess. Affinity are doing some pretty amazing things.
Half price for a fully functioning suite of apps - it’s pretty sweet deal.
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it is only wikipedia but still
“PDF was a proprietary format controlled by Adobe until it was released as an open standard on July 1, 2008, and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 32000-1:2008,[6][7] at which time control of the specification passed to an ISO Committee of volunteer industry experts. In 2008, Adobe published a Public Patent License to ISO 32000-1 granting royalty-free rights for all patents owned by Adobe that are necessary to make, use, sell, and distribute PDF-compliant implementations.”
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That’s interesting and good to know. Thanks for digging it up. Maybe there’s hope. 
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Yes - Adobe authored the PDF - but they made it open standard.
Reason for this - and interesting in 2008 - as it was around the time PDFs really became centric to workflows.
Up to 2005 I was running prepress and outputing Quark files as .epsf for the RIP which was tailored to this Quark workflow.
Problem back in those days that there was no PDF workflow - when you packaged a file and sent the files to a designer or print shop - they got all the fonts for FREE.
And they kept them and used them. Along with any nice stock imagery or custom photography.
Underhanded - but free is FREE, right?
Adobe helped the font foundries in battling theft of fonts by introducing a workflow for embedding subsets of fonts into PDFs.
And thus a PDF centric workflow was born.
No more packaging gb’s of data/fonts/photos.
Export to PDF - hand off to printer.
Most of it is aluded to center around protecting font foundries and their fonts from being ‘taken’ and used anywhere.
But it changed everything.
So yes - Adobe authored the PDF - battled the piracy side of things (with a subscription model) [I don’t know if you know this, but back in the day - there were print/design/hobbyists etc. with pirated copies of software/fonts/images/music/etc. anything that could be downloaded from an unmoderated internet was stolen.]
In essence in the early days of the internet, it was the Dark Web. There literally sites about anything - and I mean ANYTHING!
At the end of the day PDF is an open format - and that’s why there’s so many bad PDF readers and if there are PDF readers - there are bad PDF generators.
That’s why - as Adobe authored the PDF - I only really fully trust the Adobe software I use daily in corporate/business/work based.
There’s just too many things that can go wrong by using 3rd Party PDF readers/creation tools.
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