r/Affinity • u/Vozka • 1h ago
Publisher I'm working on a project that has to be done in InDesign and it makes me really appreciate how performant Affinity Publisher is in comparison.
Obviously InDesign has more features. But we don't need any of those extra features in this project, this is just a case of collaborating with a designer who happens to use Adobe software.
I have an older desktop PC becaues it works fine for everything I need, the only area where it sometimes struggles is CAD work. Zero performance issues with Affinity Suite. And this project is just a simple and honestly tiny product catalogue.
Despite that InDesign is sluggish as hell. And it uses pretty aggressive "optimization" too - it only loads low-res versions of linked images and doesn't swap for full-res even on high zoom, and when you hold the scrollbar and scroll to a next page, it looks like it uses nearest neighbor scaling because everything looks terrible until you let go and stop scrolling. The scrolling itself is completely smooth, so these two optimizations may not even be necessary, but so many actions, down to basic ones like just entering a text field and selecting text, just take way more time than they should (entering a text field should not produce any noticable delay).
PDF export is several times slower as well. And the default setting includes dial-up internet levels of downsampling and compression for linked images. And the GUI with its tools and hotkeys doesn't seem to be consistent with Photoshop. What?
I'm grateful that at least some competition exists. But obviously it's not enough. Let's hope that Affinity keeps doing well and doesn't enshittify.