Features of Affinity Publisher

Power, performance and compatibility

• Grand Central Dispatch (GCD)
• OpenGL
• Core Graphics
• Direct3D
• 64-bit engine
• GPU hardware acceleration (Metal) for integrated, discrete and external GPUs (macOS 10.13 High Sierra and above)
• Hardware GPU acceleration (OpenCL) for integrated, discrete and external GPUs
• Regular, retina and expanded Gamut DCI-P3 displays
• Mac with Apple M1/M1 Pro/M1 Max chip or Intel processor
• OS X Mavericks 10.9 or later (Supported up to macOS Big Sur 11.0)
• Up-to-date tablet support
• Multi-touch support
• Surface Studio with Surface Pen and Surface Dial support
• Force Touch support (Magic Trackpad 2/MacBook/MacBook Pro)
• Touch Bar support (MacBook Pro)
• DirectX 10 compatible
• For Windows 7 (SP1), 8.1 and 10
• Improved performance (from v1.10) with:
  • Heavily layered documents (faster rendering during panning and text reflow)
  • Placed images
  • Embedded documents
  • Low-memory conditions
  • Text entry, insertion and deletion in long stories
  • Placed PDFs set to Passthrough

Solid DTP features

• Easy Document Setup with preset thumbnails and template support
• Master pages
  • Master on master
  • Migrate frame contents when replacing master pages
• Sections
• Merge documents together with selectable page import, text style mapping, index merging and master page control
• Merge sections into document
• Spread control
• Page numbering
• Picture frames
• Tables
• Initial baseline advance on Tables
• Index
• Table of contents
• Assets for object storage
• Sort assets by date in Assets panel
• Pinned (anchored) objects
• Hyperlinks and anchors
• PDF bookmarks for TOC entries and anchors
• Data merge for personalised publishing

Powerful layer management

• Drag and drop layers
• Non-destructive adjustment layers
• Apply adjustments and blend modes at the stack, layer, group, selection or object level
• Precise node control in Curves adjustment
• High quality layer effects
• Use global colours in Gradient Map adjustments
• Layer effects work with global colours
• Clipping within layers
• Blend modes
• Divide blend mode
• Layer and object Blend ranges (linear and non-linear)
• Per object Blend gamma control
• Lock child layer positions
• Convert pixel layers to image layers/picture frames

External resource management

• Linked resources
• Set embedded/linked resource policy on new document creation
• Resource Manager
• Resource Manager improvements (from v1.10):
  • Relink multiple missing 'same folder' images in one operation
  • Switch on/off columns
  • New File Type column
  • EPS files can be linked
  • Improvements when managing placed documents
• Font Manager
• Collect linked resources
• Packaging of resources for project portability

Text and typography

• Frame text
• Initial baseline advance on Text frames
• Character and Paragraph panels
• Text styles
• Artistic text
• Text on a path
• Path text overflow control
• Shape text
• Flowing text
• Linked frames
• Autoflow text content
• Spellchecking
• Spell check as you type
• Customise dictionary
• Find and Replace
• Swap text styles
• Regular expressions
• Advanced typography including ligatures
• OpenType font features
• Decorations (rules) and initial words
• Column rules
• Improved IME text editing for Japanese and Simplified Chinese languages (from v1.10)
• Added support for emojis (from v1.10)
• Implemented OpenType character variant samples and parameter names (from v1.10)

User Interface

• Persona task-orientated workspaces
• Multiple document views
• Windowed, Full Screen, and Separated modes
• Docked or floating panels
• Comprehensive keyboard shortcuts and modifiers
• Customisable keyboard shortcuts
• Customisable toolbars
• Saveable Studio panel presets

Design aids

• Intuitive panning
• Rotate document view
• Rotate document view (canvas) with mouse scroll wheel and modifiers
• Incredible zoom range
• Saveable zoom viewpoints
• Customisable margin colours
• Customisable bleed colours
• Pixel-accurate alignment
• Multi-object alignment and distribution
• Powerful snapping control
• Constraints for intelligent object scaling/anchoring
• Dynamic snapping guides
• Grids
• Ruler and column guides
• Managers for Snapping, Guides, Grids and Baseline Grids
• Automatic and fixed grids (with colour/opacity control)
• Movable spread origin which recalculates guide positions
• Fluid document History <8192 steps
• Save History With Document (multi-session)
• Keyboard modifiers for on-the-fly tool changes
• Added 'Limit Initial Zoom to 100%' preferences option (from v1.10)

Vector essentials

• Precise Pen Tool
• Precision straight line length and rotation angle via Transform panel
• Move Tool moves, scales, transforms
• Rotate from movable origin
• Node Tool for fine tuning vectors
• Customisable nudge distances
• Smooth gradients
• Add opacity/noise to fill and stroke as solid fill/gradient
• Customisable geometric shapes

Professional colour support

• 16-bits per pixel colour depth
• CMYK, Lab, Greyscale and RGB colour modes
• Colour panel (RGB, HSL, LAB, CMYK, Greyscale)
• Swatches panel (Apple, System, Web Safe colours, Crayons)
• Swatches panel
• Colour Picker Tool (colour mode aware, pick from anywhere on screen)
• Global colours
• Colour tints
• PANTONE® colour support
• ICC colour profiling
• Import Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE) colour palettes (including spot colours)

Interoperability:

• Affinity Publisher files can be opened in other Affinity products and vice versa
• iCloud sync and merge
• In-app registration
• Content sync of Affinity Store purchases

Open, import and place

• Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, Affinity Publisher file placement
• Scaling control for placed documents (PDFs, PSDs and Affinity documents)
• Artboard-based Designer files open directly as documents without conversion to spreads
• Adobe InDesign (IDML) import and place
• Import keyboard shortcuts from IDML files (from v1.10)
• High-quality Adobe® Photoshop® PSD import and place
• Placed PSD files show as their flattened image representations
• Adobe Illustrator (.ai) import and place
• PDF import
• PDF passthrough for absolute display/output fidelity
• Place Microsoft Word DOCX and RTF
• Place spreadsheet data as tables from Microsoft Excel (XLSX), Apple Numbers, LibreOffice
• Place images (PNG, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, SVG, EPS, EXR, HDR)

Printing and publishing

• Desktop printing
• Soft Proof Adjustment
• Live Preflight checking
• Web-ready PDFs (Acrobat)
• Pro PDF/X printing (CMYK)
• Overprint
• Spot colours
• Bleed (with preview) and printers marks
• Smaller PDF export file sizes when multiple copies of the same passthrough PDFs are present (from v1.10)
• Better output of placed PDFs set to Passthrough to targets not supporting Passthrough (from v1.10)