![]() So with this Affinity family, and Apple bring out FileMaker again at an affordable price, I think there is hope for amateurs, with limited budgets, in this microcomputer world. ![]() Sadly Ashton Tate sold out to Borland, all for the dBase family of products, all other Ashton Tate products were shelved and not sold off to others that wanted to buy them. It had 3D plotting capabilities that you could rotate (before Excel even had 3D looking 2D plots), I think the first app ever (on Macs or dos/Windoze) to have a ‘ribbon’ or tool bar (all editable), a separate scripting language that was close to Pascal instead of lines of the script being in cells, and a formula format that was readable and concise, like =A&B instead of Excel’s =AND(A,B) (and I think the program fit on a single 1.2 M floppy!)*. That IIsi also has a copy of Full Impact, a spreadsheet program developed by Aston Tate that I thought much better than Excel. My MBP has the SS-HD partitioned, with a small one being Mojave with mostly just the Adobe Suite. I too never went down the subscription rat hole of expense, especially since I had a fully paid for version already, why rent? I differ, I think, from most here in that as I sit, I have both a Mac IIsi (with a 68040 daughter card), and a G5 tower, at arms reach, both fully functional, so yes I still have a working copy of FreeHand, and typing on a 2015 MBP, the wife unit one room over has a M2 MacAir. One program I have seen, I think a database app, only charges you during actual use, seemingly a better subscription model, but the learning time could be expensive. But these comments let me know I am not the only ‘retired’ person that can’t justify the Adobe Suite monthly dues due to only occasional use. I guess the money was just too good for them to sell out (I think the developers are now doing DiskWarrior, at least it’s the same name). We had both FreeHand and Illustrator, and by far FreeHand was more powerful, gave better results, and EASIER to use. I don’t think we ever ran into conflicts. I had a limited budget, so I used some sort of license sharing program that allowed everyone to have all apps installed although we only had a few licensed versions of some it let only that many people run that app simultaneously. Gosh Matt, I thought I was the only one that thought this way! Are you by chance left handed? I was kind of in charge of all the Macs for a group at a Gov’t Installation, we had about 8 Mac users in the early 90’s. And the preflighting has been beefed up, though as you say not yet on a par with Adobe. If they know their job, you’ll be fine.Īdobe can print seps right from the software, and I always thought I was gaining something there because I could see what the prepress operator would see.īut when I think about it, it is a useless function for my end of the work, as I don’t make negatives or plates anyway.Ī prepress house should be providing a proof on high-stakes work in any case, so I feel like I’m covered there. The idea there is you then hand that off to a prepress operator to do separations and plate work. ![]() ![]() Specifically, they are content to give you all the controls for process color, spot colors, spreading and choking, and overprinting but then to depend on PDF as the final output from their software. They’ve gotten quite a bit closer in the v.2 suite, but ultimately Serif does not provide the level of control or even previewing that you get with the Adobe tools. I’ve done way more than my share of producing type and graphics for imagesetters, and I find the Affinity suite frustrating for that purpose. Similarly, when I converted my TidBITS banner ad files from Illustrator to Affinity Designer, I had to do a little work to get the various layers I use for different portions of the ad to work right after the initial conversion, but it was much easier than setting things up from scratch. Exporting it to IDML in InDesign, then opening in Affinity Publisher gave me a document where the previous years weren’t perfect, but it was much easier to create a new year’s page from the old data. I had a full-page race calendar, for instance, that needs to be updated every year. However, nearly all of my old documents are more the sort of thing that I use as starting points for new versions. I’d agree with this if you’re expecting to be able to open an old file, make a small change, and export/print it again with no other work. The Affinity apps are probably fine if you’re starting a new project from scratch, but I wouldn’t rely on them to be able to edit older files made with the Adobe suite.
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