For ages I’ve had it in mind to write one of those ‘it wasn’t like that when I was young’ pieces about the history of desktop publishing. But when I turned on the TV on Monday afternoon to catch up on the score in the snooker World Championship match between Mark Williams and Ronnie O’Sullivan, I didn’t expect to spend the next hour chundering around the internet. The result was I came across the modern manifestation of a software program which I thought had long bitten the dust.

There above is Ronnie, in all his open-mouthed glory, snapped by me off the telly and sporting a sponsor’s badge proclaiming the word ‘Publisher’. I couldn’t think what that referred to, even though over the years, there have been a number of programs called with that name, the most notable being that belonging to Microsoft. According to this Wikipedia list, Ventura Publisher and Timeworks Publisher have also popped out of the floppy disk drives of history.

But it turns out that Ronnie O’Sullivan is now sponsored by the Nottingham-based firm Serif (Europe) Ltd, makers of a suite of programs called Affinity Publisher, Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo. Priced at around 50 quid each, they offer a reasonable alternative to the gouging subscription-only model now the only option from Adobe and its Creative Suite. (A nightmarish price of €61.49 a month for a single freelance designer.) The About Us page explains that the company goes back to the early 1990s and its original DTP program PagePlus.

As I still have the full Adobe CS4 bundle, and because I don’t do a lot of DTP work anymore, I don’t really need to upgrade my software, but I have to say that Designer does look like an impressive, professional-level program, and I might be tempted if I were still in the market.

It seems as though it has all the bells and whistles a hip young designer would need, just as long as they can tear themselves away from the snooker. And if Ronnie O’Sullivan goes all the way through to a Sunday late-night final session, it will surely have been a sponsorship deal worth making.