Peeking into Affinity Publisher. 

Positioned as a replacement for Adobe InDesign, Affinity Publisher holds several advantages:

• Much, much less expensive
• Doesn't extend tendrils into every crevice of the operating system
• User interface isn't a laggy shitshow
• Pretty good importing of the IDML format that InDesign happily exports
• Might be coaxed to work in Linux?

The biggest disadvantage I see immediately is that it lacks what InDesign calls "GREP styles" – regular expressions within paragraph styles that automatically apply character styles to matching text. I use these constantly, and they save me an immense amount of work. Doing without means a lot of applying character styles manually, which can be labor intensive but more importantly is very error-prone.

Even so, this might be the software I switch to. I want out of Adobe, and I want out of Windows. At the very least, I want the alternate options to be there, and the sooner I learn them the less painful it'll be if I have to make that move suddenly.

Oh, right, reminder to self to open up all my InDesign files and export 'em to IDML....

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