Bill Roper's Journal

Ok, that was interesting.

After determining that the Adobe Creative Suite is still annoyingly expensive even when you get it for a not-for-profit via TechSoup, Ken (who had gone to check out the details for me, being more familiar with TechSoup than I am) pointed out that there is something called Affinity Publisher which is supposedly pretty good at this sort of thing.

I went to poke at it and immediately realized that this software was from the same company that made my old friend, PagePlus, which I used *many* years ago to lay out the Chicago in 2000 trading cards. Their entire software suite, including replacements for InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator was on sale for $99. Well, what the heck. I've got $99 for a perpetual license.

So now I have an alternative set of software which is *much* cheaper than the Adobe suite. Further, I was able to export the entire Windycon program book from this year in a format that is readable by Affinity Publisher which meant that I have now imported the entire set of styles into the new software.

Well, heck.

That'll improve life for *somebody*.

(But since I'm most likely doing Windycon publications next year, it's pretty much a push for me. :) )

At least, you're not going to be able to buy it from Adobe any more. They're switching over to a rental model. And at $50 / month, it's way more than I want to be paying.

This means that I'm going to have to start looking for alternatives -- but not until I have to upgrade off Windows 7. And that will be as far in the future as I can manage.

I can't imagine this is going to make Microsoft happy...

Well, no thanks to the folks at Adobe, but I've now got the new version of Creative Suite installed and running. Aside from their crappy copy-protection scheme, they also have a crappy omnibus installer that can't successfully uninstall Acrobat 7 so that Acrobat 8 can be installed.

This wouldn't be so bad, but the omnibus installer simply fails and doesn't tell you why. And, of course, technical support wasn't open last night when I was trying to install the mess, nor would it be open again until Monday.

I finally teased their knowledge base into revealing that you had to run the stand-alone installer for Acrobat 7 to uninstall it. You also have to pull up the Task Manager and kill three processes that load up automatically when you have Acrobat loaded, but at least it tells you which three processes.

If you've been working with PCs for 25 years, this isn't too complex, I suppose...