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Comment by simondotau | Hacker News Reader

I must say that as someone who is a very occasional user of vector drawing tools (and mainly uses them for prepping SVG for web) I’m sufficiently impressed by the latest version of Affinity Designer as an Illustrator replacement. I was able to open an .ai file, modify it, and export an .svg which was a perfect drop-in replacement for an .svg previously exported by Illustrator.

It’s still too expensive for me at full price but I nabbed a Mac App Store license when it was on sale a few weeks ago.

I haven’t tried Inkscape recently, but last time I did it failed horribly at the most basic tasks of path editing and SVG prep.

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At $25 on sale (which it currently is), a permanent license for Affinity Designer is cheaper than one month of Adobe Illustrator.

Adobe likes to advertise it as $20.99/month, but that's only with a 12 month commitment, and you can't cancel early without paying. Renting Illustrator for a single month will really cost you $31.41.

Even at full price ($50), Affinity Designer costs less than two months of Illustrator.

Not a professional artist and don't use it often, but it's enough of a value that hobbyists like me can actually use it. Any of Adobe's products, not so much.

I bought all of their products the minute I found out they were still pursuing that oh so old fashioned idea of allowing you to OWN the software you buy from them.

same reason I just bought my 8th(?) copy of photoimpact first one around 2005(?). (two of those for other people's machines so they can use it without worrying about license failures or/and recurring billing)

I don't mind paying for a new license for each new box I want to use it on - because it still works on my xp machine, and each other one - with or without internet connectivity - no license check needed- it just works.

Affinity Photo and Designer are brilliant. I'd second their recommendation.

Also, the Apple Photos integration for Affinity Photo is pretty damned handy :)

Moved over to affinity a while back and the only thing I miss is line trace from illustrator.

Bunch of great little products.

use inkscape for that!

i find affinity to be lacking but very very good value for money. so no complaints

> I was able to open a .ai file,

Actually it doesn't, Affinity open the embbded pdf in Ai file, some metadata like textframe/alignment does not exist in pdf.

Good to know, this probably explained why the notionally transparent artwork was imported with a white background. But the fact that it’s not a true .ai import I don't think this is ever going to be a concern to me because I never use SVG to typeset flowing blocks of text. The main things I'm concerned about are:

1) Path and style integrity

2) Artboard dimensional integrity

3) Export file quality

In my testing, I was able to open a file I had edited and saved in Illustrator, export it as an SVG, it was an utterly pixel-perfect drop-in replacement for a previously exported SVG. I was also able to confirm that all of the SVG files I care about can be opened directly, edited and exported with no errors. That's enough for me to confidently say goodbye to Illustrator forever. It's robust enough that I know I can deal with the occasional import glitch if it ever does happen.

There are some really annoying things about Designer, though - like how it insists on rasterizing Gaussian blurs, even though SVG supports them as a vector operation...

affinity artboard support is newish, and not great. you may want to deep dive into it to be sure their implementation is good for you

Yes, I did. My files are simple. Around 15 or so assets. One file per asset, no elaborate effects used.

Not commenting on Affinity's quality, but being closed-sourced and Linux support will (and probably should) turn off a lot of the HN community.

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