deft hands

Oops, sorry about that. Your examples represent a far more complete examination than my meagre offering. I can see that with the Times New Roman, you get an exact match between AP and ID metrics. Interestingly, I switched the typeface to Gill Sans Light and the differences become apparent. Sorry, I don't know the font version - but your observation in that regard just tells me that kerning is way more idiosyncratic than I had supposed. Thank you for your time, effort and considered responses!

Oh okay. Here are the files - maybe you can point out the error of my ways. But no worries, if this doesn't warrant further attention on your part. Separately, I just noticed by uploading the files, how much smaller the .afpub file is - that's kind of impressive! Unless I'm doing something in InDesign to cause the larger size. kern example.indd kern example.afpub

@garrettm30, that's a super-helpful response - thanks for the time and effort, much appreciated! 'Sum space...': I get it now - and it's actually super-clever. It just requires a slightly different way of thinking. A bit of a shame the Affinity video didn't explain it more fully - since I'm not smart enough to grasp it myself. 'Only at column top': good point! I always used frame positioning on a master to take care of it - again, a different approach and I'm too slow to grasp. 'Ignore before and...': looks like we agree on the desire for explicit spacing between paragraphs of the same style.

@MikeW, thanks for clearing that up. I'm kind of interested to know why there's a difference - I always assumed the kern amounts were absolute values specified by the type designer. But I'm not going to lose any sleep over it! But it'd be nice to see the exact kern amounts, pair-by-pair. Thanks also for the tip about Single Line Composer - I'd quite forgotten about that! Seems InDesign is the only one implementing a Paragraph Composer. Not sure I understand what you are getting at here, is this a tip for future postings? I confess I'm not adept at forum postings and protocol - probably even messed up inserting your quote, above.

@MikeW, thanks for the clarification. I respectfully challenge you on that assertion: two identically sized text frames, identical text copies, with identical formatting, save for kerning, which is indicated in each case. To me, Affinity's 'auto' kerning resembles InDesign's 'optical' kerning regime, while I had to globally apply a slight negative tracking in order to approximate the overall result of 'metrics' kerning. Affinity 'auto' may be targeting InDesign 'metrics', but it hasn't achieved it, I think.

I am a little confused by the paragraph spacing options and the use cases for some of them. For reference, I am coming to Affinity as an ex-InDesign user. 'Space before' and 'Space after' are self evident. The 'Use space before' options threw me a bit, but I got the hang of it with some experimentation. The 'Sum space before and after' check box totally throws me - what's the use case for NOT checking this? The 'Ignore before and after space for same styles' check box seems straight forward, but somewhat incomplete, since checking this obviates any space between paragraphs of the same style. Further, there are functionality overlaps, where certain combinations of selections don't produce unique results. The intuition here is not obvious to me - perhaps someone can give me a clear explanation of how paragraph spacing is supposed to be used here. To me the clear set up would be: Space before Space after Space between same style I don't get the use case for having a 'space before' at the top of a column - I would assume the system would automatically ignore it - but you could have a check box to 'ignore column top' and just leave it unchecked. And that's it -- so simple - what am I not appreciating about the current implementation?

I just started using Affinity Publisher today - coming from InDesign. I'm suitably impressed overall, but I find some areas a little unclear. Kerning is one of those areas. There is no 'metrics' and 'optical' setting, as there is with InDesign - there is merely 'auto', which is what exactly? In a comparison, it looks like auto is closer to 'optical' - it's certainly not 'metrics'. With InDesign, in either kerning mode, I can step the cursor between each character pair and see the exact kerning amount - which clearly varies depending on the character pair. With Affinity, set to auto, it looks like you always get a measurement of zero in parenthesis (indicating auto), so it's not clear how each character pair is being adjusted, if at all. In order for me to replicate the overall effect of 'metrics' - the effect being to fit a particular sentence on one line vs having an orphan word on a second line - I have to apply a slight negative tracking. It's so slight that a casual observer wouldn't notice that every character pair is being uniformly squished, but I know and it feels wrong - maybe I'm just a tad OCD - but if kerning exists at all, should it not be applied in a well-understood way? That brings me to how kerning is implemented in paragraph styles. With InDesign you can only set it to 'optical', 'metrics', or 'none'. With Affinity Publisher, you get to specify an exact number, which rather does the same thing as adjusting the tracking, does it not? None of this should draw overly negative comments, in my humble opinion. That said, and in summary, my feature requests would be to: 1. Constrain the kerning option within a paragraph style definition to be 0 or auto 2. Better define what 'auto' kerning actually means or does 3. With 'auto' kerning selected, display the exact kerning adjustment between character pairs, when the cursor is so positioned 4. Provide a second 'auto' - I guess to mirror InDesign's options, but it could be to reflect some other regime