Affinity Publisher 2.6.5 for macOS

You've got a stack of product photos and a tight deadline for a trifold brochure. Publisher opens a fresh document and you pick one of the new foldable spreads from the start-up window.

Foldable spread — a single layout that prints as connected panels, like a gatefold or accordion, so you design across the fold instead of guessing.

Image frames — you drag a PSD or PNG straight onto the page. Picture Tools let you wrap body text around the coffee mug in the shot, no clipping paths needed.

Text styles — you set a heading style with a drop cap and a body style with a spot navy. One click updates every matching paragraph on every panel.

Tables — a quick table holds the sizing chart. You format it once, save it as a custom format, and never rebuild it for the next flyer.

Reading Order panel — before you export a PDF/X-4, you drag the layer order to make a screen reader announce the price before the fine print. Bottom line: you go from blank screen to print-ready PDF in a morning, and the panels actually line up when the thing is folded.

Finish a flyer in two days to learn the core tools

Don't try to learn everything at once. Pick a small project — a two‑page menu, a simple flyer — and commit to finishing it within a day or two. That single push forces you to touch text frames, image placement, and export in one go, and the muscle memory sticks faster than watching tutorials.

• Pin the Pages and Layers panels side by side. You'll switch between them constantly.
• Set your default unit to points in Preferences → User Interface. Points are the lingua franca of print, and Publisher's guides speak it natively.
• When you place an image, double‑click inside the frame to reposition the photo itself, not the frame. Took me a week to stop dragging the wrong box.

Turn off automatic widow control for cleaner text

Out of the box, Publisher makes a few assumptions that speed up early drafting but get in the way once you care about precision. Fix these once and they stay fixed for every new document.

Automatic widow/orphan control. It's off by default. Go to Text → Paragraph → Flow and check Prevent widowed last lines. Your book chapters will look instantly more professional.

Baseline grid defaults. The starting grid is 12 pt but your body text is probably 11 pt or 10.5 pt. Set the grid increment to match your leading in View → Baseline Grid Manager. If you don't, text snaps to a rhythm that fights your type size.

Color profile. Preferences → Color lists a default RGB profile that's fine for screen drafts, but if you're headed to a commercial printer, switch the default CMYK to U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2 or whatever your shop uses. Changing it mid‑project is a headache.

A workflow: restaurant take‑out menu from scratch

Let's say you're redoing a greasy tri‑fold menu for a friend's diner. You have a handful of phone photos, a scribbled list of prices, and a logo that exists only as a JPEG the size of a postage stamp.

Open Publisher and pick a trifold spread from the new‑document presets. You've got three panels side by side. Drag a guide to mark the fold lines — the preset does this, but eyeball it anyway so your brain registers where the paper creases.

Place the logo first. It's pixelated at menu size, so switch to the Affinity Photo Persona via StudioLink, upscale it with bicubic resampling, and tweak the sharpening. When you close the persona, the improved version is already sitting on your page. No round‑tripping to another app.

Now frame the food photos. Drop them into circular image frames — draw a circle with the Ellipse tool, then drag the photo inside. Text wrap set to tight pushes the dish names around the curve of the bowl. For the background, sample a warm cream from the pasta shot with the color picker and apply it to a rectangle that sits behind everything on the master page.

Build the menu text with two linked text frames per panel. A character style called Dish handles the bold item names; a paragraph style called Price right‑aligns the numbers with a tab stop. One change to the Dish style updates all sixty‑three menu entries at once.

Finally, open the new Reading Order panel. Drag the logo to the top, then the hours, then the menu items, then the fine print. Export as PDF/X‑4 and hand it to the printer. The screen reader announces the specials before the legal disclaimer, and the folds land exactly where you drew them.

Version 2.6 is about layouts that fold and documents that speak clearly.

• Multiple-page spreads let you build gatefolds, trifolds, and accordion folds as a single canvas.
• The new Reading Order panel lets you set the sequence for screen readers when exporting tagged PDFs.

• macOS 10.15 or newer
• Intel or Apple Silicon processor
• 8 GB RAM recommended
• Up to 2.8 GB of available drive space
• Display 1280×768 or larger
• Interface languages: English, German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese (Simplified), Portuguese, French, Japanese