Features of Affinity Publisher

New in V2.5

• Variable fonts
  • Precise control of individual font attributes, such as weight, width and optical size
  • Many more attributes are supported depending on font design
  • Greater flexibility to adapt a design's typography for different mediums
  • Font appearances are fully preserved in PDF output
• Typography panel
• Visual indication of rescaled text frame
• Native Windows ARM64 support
• QR Code Tool
• Character/Paragraph panels offer easier updating of modified text style
• Set grid preset as default
• DWG polylines import improvements
• Transform by absolute sizes using Transform Objects Separately

Power, performance and compatibility

• Optimised for:
  • Grand Central Dispatch (GCD)
  • OpenGL
  • Core Graphics
  • Direct3D
  • 64-bit engine
  • GPU hardware acceleration (Metal) for integrated, discrete and external GPUs
  • Hardware GPU acceleration (OpenCL) for integrated, discrete and external GPUs
• Display support
  • Regular, Retina and expanded gamut DCI-P3
  • Wide colour gamut (Display P3)
  • HiDPI
  • EDR
  • HDR (Windows; >400 nits recommended)
• Mac with Apple M1/M2/M3 chip or Intel processor
• macOS Catalina 10.15 or later
• 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
• Windows® 11, Windows® 10 May 2020 Update (2004, 20H1, build 19041) or later

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 or sections
• Spread control
• Page numbering
• Picture frames
• Tables
• Index
• Table of contents
• Assets for object storage
• Pinned (anchored) objects
• Hyperlinks and anchors
• PDF bookmarks for TOC entries and anchors
• Data merge

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
• High quality layer effects
• Clipping within layers
• Blend modes
• Layer and object Blend ranges (linear and non-linear)
• Per-object Blend gamma control
• Lock child layer positions
• Coloured layer entry tagging for easy identification

External resource management

• Linked resources
• Embedded/linked resource policy on new document creation
• Resource Manager
• Font Manager
• Collect linked resources
• Packaging of resources for project portability

Text and typography

• Frame text
• Character and Paragraph panels
• Text styles
• Artistic text
• Text on a path
• 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

User Interface

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

Design aids

• Intuitive panning
• Rotate document view
• Incredible zoom range
• Saveable zoom viewpoints
• 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

Vector essentials

• Precise Pen Tool
• 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 licence activation
• Content sync of Affinity Store purchases

Open, import and place

• Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, Affinity Publisher file placement
• Adobe InDesign (IDML) import and place
• Import keyboard shortcuts from IDML files (from v1.10)
• High-quality Adobe® Photoshop® PSD import and place
• 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