I am so tired and disgusted. I just found out tonight that Adobe has raised the subscription price for its Acrobat Pro DC software by nearly $9.00 a month, to $21.19 with tax. If I were selling a thousand books a month that might not matter. But I'm not. Moreover, I use the software to convert my files to PDF/X-1a:2001 maybe once or twice a year. The price was bad enough already. Now I feel like I'm being bled out. I've Googled alternative PDF/X-1a:2001 converters. There seem to be a few, but I have no idea if any them work. Does anyone here have any experience with non-Adobe converters? Their whole subscription model is making me sick.
Affinity Publisher, $69.99 one time for Mac or Windows, $18.49 for iPad, will do a lot of what Adobe InDesign does. Or so I hear. I've never used InDesign, nor would I for the cost. But 9 out of 10 certified experts agree, Affinity Publisher does "a lot." It supports output to PDF/X-1a:2003, PDF/X-3:2003, and PDF/X-4. Will any of those help? I bought Affinity Publisher, Photo, and Designer (InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator wanna-be's) on a half price sale. $150 for all three, free updates, no subscription. Version 1 had quirks. The current Version 2 is pretty solid. The data merge function developed an oddity in Version 2 that's supposedly fixed in the upcoming Version 3. In a merge, newlines are stripped out in Affinity Pubisher. Bummer. Did I mention I paid $50, one time, no subscription, for Affinity Publisher? There is something you might find a deal breaker with Affinity Publisher. It doesn't support ePub export. I was initially shocked, then realized ePub formatting probably doesn't often require actual desktop publishing. The reader does most of the layout and formatting and I suspect there are other low cost ways to produce ePub output.
I've heard about this, but I think it does more than I need it to. I don't need a formatter, just a converter.
You're right. Affinity is a replacement for Adobe. I'm a fan because it does everything I need for brochures and pamphlets without Adobe's subscription cost, and major reports are always publication ready. Trusting unknown actors with my work is generally negatively thrilling, but I see there are online PDF to PDF/X converters. Here's one - https://www.pdffiller.com/en/functionality/convert-pdf-to-x-online.htm . Good luck with your hunt!
I just use scrivener. It has an option to output your work as pdf. For me, a single program for creating and outputting work is much easier.
Interesting sidelight on Affinity, apropos for older Macs. If you experience crashes, there may be an easy fix. Affinity released a new version recently. My first impression was it looked nice with incremental but numerous improvements. After five minutes of playing with features like data merge, I found several ways to trigger a crash. It didn't lose data, as if that's really justification for bugs, and I looked for alternatives. Then I discovered there are known problems with Metal compute acceleration on older Macs and Affinity. I turned that off, didn't notice a speed difference, and have had zero crashes since. In my earlier post I referenced Affinity version 3. It's not 3, it's 2.1. I should respect numeric values more. Who knows, maybe all the world's a simulation and we are merely numbers.
I guess a browser could be a writing tool. After years (decades, probably) using mostly Firefox, when YouTubeTV stopped working in that browser, I switched to Chrome and discovered that it's better than Firefox in every possible way. Mea culpa, Google. Mea maxima culpa.
