[shortformblog]

Thanks for pointing out VivaDesigner—I’m surprised in the many obsessive searches to find something like this, it never came up! (I will note that there are a lot of pretty obscure layout programs out there. At my first newspaper, I was brought in to help with the transition to CCI, which was a full-stack publishing tool popular with newspapers of the era. As a result of this, I was introduced to their old system, by Harris, which relied on Windows NT 3.1. Fun times.)

This project is probably a no-go with it (for kicks, I did try importing a PDF of the final doc) but I will keep it in mind in the future from an analysis standpoint.

The other point I’d make is kind of a tipping-point argument. While VivaDesigner can export into IDML it looks like, Affinity has gone just mainstream enough that it won’t be turned away at print shops, which is a real risk. PDFs can get you most of the way, granted, but some print shops want to edit the file, which makes sense.

[Duanemclemore]

Oh my goodness! I - really did not- expect to reach the author himself! Hello sir, your work is rad and am excited to see the zine!

My partner and I run our design studio on Linux these days and so we're always on the hunt for software to better replace the PC / Mac software we walked away from, so I explored running Affinity a couple years ago and couldn't get it going properly. Then last year I had to put together a big important document, so I had extra motivation to find a replacement.

I tried almost literally everything that was Linux native over a few weeks when I was getting started. I was impressed with VivaDesigner, but decided to just use LaTeX in VSCode - ahich was both awesome and terrifying for what wound up a 390pg document. And would be a huge PITA for this purpose.

Back to your post specifically - I can imagine how insane the old system you helped replace was.

And yes, I think that the "tipping point" is an important consideration. Maybe in Germany where Viva is based they might not think twice if you bring in a live file, but it does seem like Affinity is far and away the leading challenger in the states. I'm sure it's a miniscule share and Adobe is still the 8,000 pound gorilla.

But that's the thing about tipping points right?

[shortformblog]

Quick add: I tested VivaDesigner on some old InDesign docs and I found it did not handle color blend modes very well, which is kind of an essential for a risograph project like 404’s. Nonetheless, the fact that it was able to open an InDesign doc more or less intact makes it a useful tool for a switcher.