Yeah! I have reached the famous David Blatner, ID guru extraordanire, precisely the person I wanted to tell about my discovery.

Affinity Photo is almost as feature-rich as Adobe’s Photoshop, which means it is far more than a pixel editor. Like Photoshop, you can place text that is resizable and movable (not just pixels) any place you want on the screen. To use either as a equation editor, you simply place that text in a blank document of the appropriate size. You can change the characters. You can resize them. You can reposition them just right. Everything is intuitive. Just create and place. No new app to learn.

You could do the same with Photoshop and that would make round-trip editing easier, but Affinity Photo comes with something that, although I have tried, I’ve yet to get Adobe to include in its font offerings much less ship with its products. That’s the STIX font set, an entire dozen of them. That includes the often bizarre characters you need for math and science.

And I’m not sure about the ‘ton of equations” bit either. If you had a long series of just equations that might be true. But equations typically come interspersed with writing. That means fiddling with the mechanics of exporting and importing a specialized files from an equation editor. Using Affinity Photo or Photoshop takes advantage of an existing ability to import them. They’s simply graphics, something that ID handles quite easily.

I opted for Affinity Photo over Adobe’s Photoshop because I have CC’s ID-only plan and see no reason to pay Adobe #120+ a year for an app I only occasionally use when I can buy Affinity Photo outright for $50. And Illustrator isn’t under consideration because I’m one of those who avoids it whenever possible, not to mention that using it would cost me an additional $360 a year.

The good news about Afflinity is that Adobe has grown too comfortable with its older products, particularly ID. Affinity is forcing it to become competitive both in features and (we can all hope) in price. For instance, Adobe’s $20 single-app plans need to become duo-plans, ID plus another of a user’s choice. Typically that would be Photoshop. Then the temptation to substitute Affinity Photo would go away.

Alas, that’s a bit likely locking the barn door after the horses have fled. I’ve already upgraded. I suspect an uninstall and reinstall will do as well though.