Affinity or LiberScript for Formatting a Book

The Verdict

Affinity is a free, professional design and page layout app that gives you near-total control over every page, which makes it excellent for illustrated, visual and highly designed books. LiberScript is a book workspace that handles writing, critique, interior design and export, built around flowing text rather than individual page layouts. Choose Affinity if your book is visual or you want to lay out every spread yourself. Choose LiberScript if your book is mostly text and you want a fast route to a clean ebook and print file.

What Each Tool Is

Affinity was for years three separate paid apps: Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher. Since Canva acquired it, the three have been combined into one app that is free to download for Mac and Windows. You need a free Canva account to use it, and some newer AI features require a paid Canva plan. The page layout tools that made Affinity Publisher popular with self-publishers are part of that single app, alongside vector illustration and photo editing.

LiberScript runs in the browser and covers the path from manuscript to publishable files. You write or import your book, run a critique and a grammar check, plan your progress, design the interior with themes and typography controls, and export an EPUB, a print-ready PDF and a DOCX.

At a Glance

Design Control

Affinity gives you the toolkit of a professional designer. You set up master pages for running heads and page numbers, place text in linked frames, wrap text around images, set baseline grids, build paragraph and character styles, and position anything anywhere on the page. Because illustration and photo tools live in the same app, you can edit an image or draw a diagram without leaving your layout.

That freedom is what makes Affinity right for children's picture books, cookbooks, photography books, workbooks, magazines and anything else where each spread is designed individually. For those projects, a text-first formatter will feel limiting.

LiberScript takes a different approach. You choose a theme, then adjust fonts, sizes, spacing, chapter openers, drop caps, scene breaks, headers and page numbering for the whole book. The layout flows automatically from your chapters, and you check it in real paginated spreads at your chosen trim size. You give up free placement, and in exchange your book looks consistent from the first page to the last without manual work on each spread.

Learning Curve and Time

Professional layout software takes time to learn. For a first book in Affinity, expect to learn frames, master pages, text styles, widows and orphans, and export settings before you produce a clean interior. Many authors find tutorials essential. Once you know the app, it is fast and flexible, and the skills carry over to covers, ads and other design work.

LiberScript is designed for authors rather than designers. Importing a manuscript detects chapters and front and back matter, a theme gives you a finished look immediately, and the controls use terms authors already know. Most authors can produce a print interior in an afternoon rather than over several weekends.

Think honestly about how many books you plan to format. If it is one novel, the hours spent mastering a layout app may be better spent writing. If you plan to design many visual books, learning Affinity is an investment that keeps paying off.

Ebook Output

Ebooks are where text-first tools have a natural advantage. A standard ebook is reflowable: the reader changes the font size and the text rewraps to fit the screen, so the careful page layout of a print book does not carry over. Page layout apps are built around fixed pages, so producing a clean reflowable ebook from one usually takes extra steps or a separate tool. Check Affinity's current export options for your edition before relying on it for ebooks.

LiberScript exports a reflowable EPUB from the same manuscript it uses for print, with the table of contents, chapter structure and styling carried across. One source produces both the ebook and the print interior, so a late correction only needs to be made once.

Print Output

Both tools produce print-ready PDFs. Affinity gives you full prepress control: bleed, color profiles, PDF standards and preflight checks that flag problems such as low-resolution images or fonts that are not embedded. If your book has full-bleed images or color pages, that level of control is valuable.

LiberScript exports a print-ready PDF at your trim size, set up for KDP Print, IngramSpark and other print-on-demand services. For a text-based interior, that covers what printers need without asking you to learn prepress settings. Printers still set their own margin and gutter requirements, so check them against your page count before you upload.

Before Formatting

Affinity is a design tool, so the manuscript arrives finished. You draft and edit elsewhere, then place the text. Making edits after layout is possible, but heavy changes can reflow pages you already adjusted by hand, so authors are usually told to lock the text before layout begins.

LiberScript covers the stages before design too. You can draft in its editor, track word goals and story beats in the planner, keep sticky notes beside your chapters, and run a whole-book critique that flags adverbs, passive voice, filler words, clichés, repetition, show-versus-tell moments, pacing and dialogue balance, with a grammar check and a readiness score.

Edits made after design flow through automatically, because the layout is generated from the text. Nonfiction authors get numbered footnotes and an automatic bibliography, and unlimited collaborators can review the book. LiberScript's Cover Studio is rolling out gradually, so plan to make your cover separately for now.

Cost

Affinity's core apps are free, which is remarkable for professional design software. The cost is your time to learn it, plus a paid Canva plan only if you want its AI features.

LiberScript's passes cost $3.99 for a day, $9.99 for a week, $29.99 for a month, $99.99 for a year or $299.99 for Lifetime, with no automatic renewal, and each one includes the writing tools, critique, design and every export.

If budget is the only factor, Affinity wins outright. If your time is limited, a week of LiberScript may be cheaper than the hours needed to learn a layout app for one book. For a wider look at the options, see our guide to choosing a formatting tool by book type.

Using Both

Many authors use the two together. Write, edit and format the text interior in LiberScript and export the EPUB and print PDF there, then use Affinity for the work it does best: the book cover, the illustrations or diagrams inside the book, author website graphics and advertising images.

Who Should Choose Which

Frequently Asked Questions