raphaelmatto

Oh, nope—you're right, Lacerto. It just says "auto," no optical option. I think I got so excited that it might be there, I jumped to conclusions. Kenmcd, true, but I love certain fonts that don't kern well out of the box, like Joanna. & for things like subtitles that are in-between display type & text, I wouldn't want to go back to the days of hand-kerning all that stuff.

Hi there, I'm so happy to see the V2 of Photo and Publisher! After testing for a bit, Photo is still a long way off for me, mostly due to the raw editing tools compared to ACR. But Publisher is getting really close to being a replacement for InDesign! The new book feature looks great! The first deal-breaker I ran into testing out this round is optical kerning. It's there now, but it does a very poor job compared to InDesign. Since this is literally the engine that makes most of the non-display type look good in my books, there is no way I can give up InDesign, until Publisher's auto-kerning algorithm can compete. Any plans to continue working on improving optical kerning? I would love to give up my Adobe subscriptions. Thanks! Raphael

Thanks, @LibreTraining ! I also have Whitman in "PostScript Type 1 outline font," according to my Finder's "kind" property, & that doesn't work either. & heaps & heaps of other fonts of those types that work fine in ID. So I won't be switching to Publisher yet. But worth a shot! Always good to point out blockers for particular users, even if it might be an edge case Cheers, Raphael

@Patrick Connor, of course. To be clear, the purpose of sending my copy of Whitman to Serif is to add support to Publisher for the font tech I already own. I'm under the impression Serif may not have come across the font tech before. Or maybe they don't plan to support the old font tech. Either way, it seems important to pass them the data, so they can reproduce the issue on their end, and decide how to proceed w/product decisions. They shared the Open Type font with me for the same reason—to test/debug & improve their product. I'm happy to participate in a little debugging, if it might help make a product I want to use, usable.

Hi @LibreTraining , I tested both fonts and ligatures do work in both. You didn't include the italic/bold/etc versions of the font, so I can't test those. I'll PM you the version of Whitman I own. There would value added to Publisher if support could be added for whatever font tech I'm using ... since folks may be scared away b/c they'll have to re-purchase fonts that work in ID. Cheers, Raphael

@LibreTraining Yes, I'd love to test, thank you! Please send it my way. I won't be able to test until next Friday fyi.

It's possible it was modified by MacOs when I was adding the InDesign PDF to it in Preview, so I could flip between them. I've outputted the PDF again with File -> Export -> PDF -> PDF (for print) and turned off "include bleed," and attached it here. I'm not sure how to check the PDF Version. upTheHill.pdf

Thanks for the sanity check, Hangman. When I open your upTheHill.afpub file, the ligature is not displayed correctly. Something fishy on my system, maybe the font isn't installed correctly ... but it's working in InDesign. Weird. Will report back if I figure out what it is. Cheers, Raphael

It looks like ligatures for the Whitman font don't work. I've attached two files, the one titled "2016_01_18_trolls.pdf" is from InDesign and you can see the word "field" has correctly combined the f and the i. The second file titled "upTheHill.pdf" is from Affinity Designer with the same font (Whitman / RomanLF / 11pt) and ligatures turned on, but the f and the i are not combined. Cheers, Raphael 2016_01_18_trolls.pdf upTheHill.pdf

Just want to add a vote here. No optical kerning is a hard deal breaker for me, too.

Thanks for following up @v_kyr & @MikeW. I hope Serif decides to add this to AP in the future, I'd love to migrate from Adobe & their subscription plans. I also gave Scribus a shot just now & the beta version seems promising w/recently added support for retina screens, but also no book feature.

That's a great description of a book file, v_kyr. Is it a snip from Afinity Publisher documentation for a feature they plan to add in the future? Current AP documentation? Documentation for InDesign? I combed the menus in the current AP beta again, but I don't see a way to create a book file.

Just wanted to pile on here with another example. I've used InDesign to publish several books of poetry & short stories & the book feature is a godsend. I keep each poem as a separate InDesign document that I can float between books, or remove from one book and add to another (for example if I decide it needs more revision & shouldn't be included in the current book). I can also put together "packets" of poems when submitting work for publication—I just create a new book, reference the poem files I want to include, create a toc document, auto-update the page numbers & away we go. It's incredibly powerful to be able to sync styles across documents, update tocs, page numbers, change the ordering of poems (very dissimilar to a linear chapter setup for fiction/non-fiction) etc. & the most important thing to me is: I never end up with duplication. If I make small edits to a poem or story from any packet or book, I know those edits will carry forward to any other book, packet, submission that I create. I tried out the beta version of Affinity Publisher just now & it seems super promising, but I won't be able to migrate from InDesign (or Quark) without a book feature.