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Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

finance.yahoo.com

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Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#141

Post by upsuper »

Daub wrote: post #31

This is bad news. The Affinity offers a genuine and very high class alternative to the Adobe suite. Its HDRI workflow is league ahead of anything else. As for Canva, all I can say is that I downgrade any student who makes their research slides using this dumb service. The slides are template-driven horror with each exported pdf slide being rasterized pngs: stupidly large files with text that is impossible to select a…

Hello, I'm an engineer in Canva's editing team, which is also responsible for rendering of designs.

Text in our PDF export should generally be selectable and copyable. I just tested one presentation template I recently used, and it is indeed so.

I know there were bugs forcing text to be rasterized in certain cases, mostly related to text effects. To my knowledge, they should have been worked around by adding a layer of transparent text on top.

If you know any design that produces PDF file where text becomes not selectable, that might be a bug, and it would be appreciated if you can provide more details so that we can investigate and possibly fix.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#144

Post by upsuper »

ttoinou wrote: post #46
hhh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you downgrade a student based on the tool they use to create their presentations instead of the content itself?

Because they made a bad tool choice for their own convenience ? That leads here to big images and unselectable text, no accessibility.

In Canva we do care about accessibility. While I admit our editor may still have a long way to go on providing an accessible editing experience, unselectable text in export result is more likely an overlooked bug than anything intentional.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#145

Post by omnimus »

lstamour wrote: post #86
omnimus wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quark is trash but Affinity Publisher is pretty great imho if they added third party scripting/plugins pro market would start moving off Adobe.

I’m less convinced. The text features and even how frames resize images were either annoying or lacking when I last used Publisher. Yes, I used it, and yes, it worked. But it’s no contest that in the details, InDesign has more features that are (in some cases) better thought out or for text rendering, just really good. At the moment the two best ways I know of to render text are (1) any Adobe product with their text…

Are you sure this is not just learning inertia? Because frames in Affinity work more like css object-fit and are "live". In Indesign you have to "recalculate" fit/fill every time with action. I would argue if you didn't know Indesign way the Affinity way is superior.

Text rendering algorithms are quite known quantity and lifted from LaTeX. Indesign has paragraph (multi-line) composer which in latex equivalent is microtype package. Affinity doesn't have that but paragraph composer is not really used that much in professional setting because when you do final manual fixes/adjustment of typography then with paragraph composer your changes could affect previous changes in paragraph (so people go by line by line). Paradoxically paragraph composer is pretty good for quickly getting OK enough results especially in more budget/non-pro setting.

Other than that i don't think the typography output (for print) is different I've seen some tests and it seems kinda exactly the same. Affinity might render type on screen a bit differently but the output is solid. I was more afraid of the quality of .pdf itself but even highend offset printers didn't see a difference/complained.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#146

Post by omnimus »

phinnaeus wrote: post #91
omnimus wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indesign is the main graphic software after Photoshop. Basically anything that gets printed uses Indesign. Photoshop is more well known because people love photography as a hobby but in professional print setting photos are just smaller component.

Affinity has an InDesign competitor, so this would seem to be a point in favor of the argument for Affinity being able to compete with Adobe if InDesign is in the top 3 Adobe products.

I think they are serious competitor and probably that's why they were able to have payday and sell the product.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#147

Post by jsjohnst »

soapdog wrote: post #125

Why every product I like ends up being bought... argh, we can't have nice things.

Because not everyone can or should IPO. Once you get to a certain point in size, your investors will start pushing for an exit (where you have two main options, IPO or sell).

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#148

Post by jwells89 »

Disappointing, because this likely spells the end of one-time-purchase Affinity products, and as mentioned in the article up until now that has been a big selling point for them.

I hope I’m wrong, but if I’m not it doesn’t fare well for Affinity’s future growth and popularity. People are likely to go back to Adobe because there’s no point giving up the compatibility, instructional material, etc that comes with Adobe stuff if they’re stuck with subscriptions either way.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#149

Post by hollander »

paxys wrote: post #142
soapdog wrote: post #125

Why every product I like ends up being bought... argh, we can't have nice things.

Because no one wants to pay for products they like.

We don't want to pay for software? Look at the Appstore! Good products for reasonable prices are worth the money. Affinity offers a good product for a reasonable price. Adobe offers a better product but the subscription model is hated by many. For me Affinity products are good enough. Let's hope the current versions keep on working on Apple Silicon and Windows 11/12/etc. The current 2 version is good enough for me and for the next ten years. If I really need AI tools for image editing, I'll take a one month subscription to some tool.
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