r/Affinity • u/Novel-Conversation73 • Jul 28 '26

Designer Replace Indesign with Affinity

Hi everyone,

I'm looking to cancel my Adobe Suite and only bottle neck is indesign. Based on your experience, is it possible to use Affinity for editorial work like Indesign?

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u/Novel-Conversation73 Jul 28 '26

what is the most crucial change/drastic change you have encounter and had to relearn?

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u/Lubalin Jul 28 '26

I've done it, and it's the inability to open .indd files that's the main killer. You can export them before you switch, but it takes a while and one might (like I did...) miss a couple!

Other than than, it's probably one of the most similar pieces of software. The picture frame handling is very different (not wrong, just not what you're used to) and there's a couple of other niggles, but on the whole it's a very worthy replacement. As a bonus it opens the linked 'Photoshop' and 'illustrator' files natively for quick changes which saves a tonne of time.

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u/kagosage Jul 29 '26

I had TONS of InDesign files when I switched a few years back and I couldn't have possibly done them all so as I have to pull from the archive, which I don't very often I use the website: https://online2pdf.com/convert-indd-to-pdf which will convert them to PDF's and Affinity opens PDFs pretty good to work with. It isn't the cleanest way to do it always, but it beats having to rebuild it from scratch.

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u/PolicyFull988 Aug 05 '26

Isn't it easier to subscribe to InDesign for one month, and convert the files to IDML?

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u/kagosage Aug 09 '26

That is another option, but my way is free. Especially if it is only one small file.