Affinity Publisher, Designrr, or What Software for Making Great PDFs?
I write books as well as websites. When I upload the books to the various places they go, in many cases they need to be in PDF format.
I tend to write my books in a great writing program called Scrivener, and you can export in PDF format right from it. For the first three memoirs I've written, I have put the text from Scrivener into a Mac-only program called Vellum and then added the photos in Vellum. I can center the pictures or make them left- or right-justified. They look nice. So far, so good.
But now I am working on a memoir about my father, who was a science fiction author of some repute. I have so many family photos, plus some photos showing science fiction magazines that featured one of his stories on their covers.
It's time to raise my game. I want to make this book and future ones in the series more visually interesting than the first ones. (I Fell in Love with a Hippie comes next.)
InDesign is an obvious choice, but I'm such a tightwad that I didn't want to spend the ongoing money, since I expect to be doing PDFs for years to come. So I found a program called Affinity Publisher, part of a trio of programs that work together. The other two are Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer. I got all three and I got the bound manuals for two of them. At very reasonable one-time prices, I was happy. But once I started working with them, I did discover that they are meant for people with better design skills than I currently have.
Being the former reference librarian that I am, I dug around on the internet. I found a simpler program called Designrr. The basic program is inexpensive, or you can add more features for a modest monthly fee. I tried this program and thought I was going to use it. But then I discovered that images can only be 72dpi (dots per inch) because they think of their program as being internet-only. But I always do my books as physical books also, and good images really should be 300dpi. Also, there was no way to put an image in a shape (like a triangle or whatever) and have it move along with everything as the text lengthened. Okay, back to the drawing board.
So now I am writing the book in Scrivener, and I still have months of work on it. In the meantime, I'm spending time now and then learning more features of Affinity Publisher, pretty sure I will master it enough.
Ah, software!
Recent Comments
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Well i am a certified user of Adobe but i also work wit affinity with is just as good as Adobe and much more sheaper so i would say use affinity low in price and you have a great program for the future
The learning curve is not as difficult as it seems amd if you are getting stuck You Tube has some good video's also
I never used any of those. I write my books in Focus Writer, then edit them in MS Word and save or export them to pdf when needed. Amazon Kindle has its own editor app for the final touches and most online publishers do.
You've given me loads to think about
I've recently bought Designrr but I've not used it as yet
I will check out the other programs
Thank you for sharing
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I’ve been using Designrr for years now and love it. You can even pull videos from YouTube - keep them as they are or get a transcript using their speech to text software.
Thanks for your points. It just doesn't meet my exact needs, but from what I saw it was nicely put together.