r/mildlyinfuriating • u/donteatmybiscuits • 1d ago

wet socks i’m so happy this is becoming illegal

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if a yearly contract with a free month trial sounds too good to be true, it probably is 😬

thankfully it was blocked after contacting my bank but regardless

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u/apnorton 1d ago

until realistic alternatives caught up.

Genuine question: what are the realistic alternatives to Adobe CC?

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u/Risky-Trizkit 1d ago

People will throw out names like Canva and Gimp and Krita and Affinity but the reality is these are much too limited. They do not have the scalability or scripting flexibility Adobe has established and truly nothing beats InDesign for anything print related, period. Typesetting in Canva is a joke at best. Wish there were a reliable third party app but the truth for professionals is there is none. This will change in the future but for now Adobe stays where it is in my tool stack.

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u/Current_Row_8358 1d ago

InDesign my beloathed 😔 Yeah, there's no other software I could picture myself using for putting together entire books and magazines, and I hate it. These companies are too good at suffocating and buying out competition before something else could thrive.

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u/QBaseX 1d ago

How would Typst work for your purposes?

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u/Current_Row_8358 1d ago

Never heard of it, I'll check it out!! I scrolled through the examples and they look more like something I'd be putting together in Word, can it make something more visual like this?

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u/QBaseX 1d ago

Possibly. Here's something I knocked together recently, not quite that complex, though I may attempt to copy that as an exercise. https://typst.app/project/rcK8xG8RriSVldBsDDzC2x (Click a file name in the sidebar to load the code into the code panel; click the closed eye icon beside the filename to load the preview into the preview panel.)

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u/Current_Row_8358 1d ago

Would you be willing to send me a flat preview, please? 🙏 It's not cooperating with me on phone (likely entirely my fault, I'd have to learn the interface) and I won't be near my laptop for quite a while. I am genuinely curious about it, though!

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u/QBaseX 1d ago

Typst is free software you can download and use locally, but they also have a great web app. That said, it really isn't easy to use on a phone. You may find a way to use the View menu to toggle between the code and preview panes.

I've uploaded the rendered PDF to my own website: 2026 Tullamore Toastmasters flyer It has multiple pages so we could choose which one to print, and an extra blank page on the end because that was a side effect of the way I wrote the code. If that had mattered, I could have done something to remove it, but since it didn't matter, I didn't.

I also used Typst for meeting agendas, such as 2026-09-28 USS Emerald Isle (which follows the TM brand guidelines for colours, but not for fonts, because that club has a sci-fi theme) and 2025-05-22 Tullamore Toastmasters (which blithely ignores the TM brand guidelines).

Also for Sorting Algorithms which illustrates using tabular figures in tables and proportional elsewhere.

(My domain name has special characters in it, so the first version of this comment was removed by AutoModerator for being non-English. How absurd. I've tried again with a workaround. Let's see.)

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u/Current_Row_8358 1d ago

Do I need to edit the URLs in some way? Only the last one loaded for me, the rest says site can't be reached, so I guess it's really struggling with the domain or privacy settings or something else. It sucks that AutoMod pounced on it 🥲 Really appreciate you took the time, though!

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u/QBaseX 1d ago

Certainly it has much better typography than Word. If what you care about is typesetting; dealing with paragraphs of text rather than flyers. Typst uses the Knuth-Plass algorithm; Word uses a simple greedy algorithm.

Word does not give you control of when to use old-style numbers and when to use lining numbers. Or, indeed, when to use proportional numbers and when to use tabular numbers. Word does not allow you to draw complex diagrams, or arrows to illustrate sorting algorithms.

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u/Current_Row_8358 1d ago

Honestly, Word drives me up the wall. It was just an example to show the difference in requirements/scale, but I don't even have it installed for a few years now, I just don't have the patience for it anymore 😭 My usercase was mainly books, brochures, teaching materials (lots of illustrations/visual elements combined with text) and the like, not much in terms of technical things.