[martin_a]

> How relevant is print these days?

Still quite relevant, especially in some areas. Think about packaging and labeling, there's just not really a way around print in these areas.

Besides that, digital print is the future. Print also needs to become clever and data-driven, more personalized and tailored to the recipient, but that's hard work.

Example: Just last week I received a catalogue with the fall/winter collection of a larger clothing brand. I threw it away immediately. Lots of things in it that are not my size, or my style or whatnot. A personalized product would have helped. Pick articles similar to those I own (you got this data from my previous orders), only show articles that are available in XXL or larger (look at the sizes I kept and did not return) and that's it. "Hey Martin, these are _your_ pieces for the winter season, enjoy!" Maybe it's only 16 pages then instead of 50+ but it would have been a much better experience for me. Also cheaper to print and ship for the store but with a much higher value. But yeah, programmatic printing is hard(er) to do then order 100k catalogues from the cheapest shop you'll find.

[kookamamie]

I don't think anyone working in print would use Gimp, though?

[pessimizer]

The reason they didn't use GIMP is because they couldn't use GIMP. It simply didn't have necessary capability. When I was working in prepress, I would have done anything to use GIMP. That desperation to escape Photoshop is why Affinity took off.

If Inkscape could get a UI for precision positioning, something you could e.g. design an entry form in; and Scribus could polish up, I think a lot of people would move to a FOSS workflow.

[martin_a]

Naaah... For better or worse we're all set up with our Adobe Creative Clouds...

[glimshe]

The Affinity suite - now for $80 due to Black Friday - is a viable competitor to Photoshop for many applications. It's much better than Gimp.

[martin_a]

That's true, I got one myself, but as everybody is educated and trained on Adobe products switching is not that easy.

[em-bee]

why is that though? isn't that the bulk of the criticism? bad UX and lack of features needed for print?

[kookamamie]

I guess - of course it's a chicken-egg sort of a problem. No one's going to use it for print, before it has print-related capabilities - the same can be said for much of the UX, in general.