A_B_C

So it’s probably a slightly different problem than the one of the OP. Please split this thread if useful.

Ahh … I see what the problem is. Publisher 2.2 seems to open at the external screen’s resolution and does not understand that it plays now on a smaller field. When I grab the corner of the window frame and resize it, everything gets back to normal. Thank goodness there is a workaround, but the bug is still mildly annoying.

Similar problem here. Whenever I plug out my external 4k monitor (BenQ Design Vue PD Series, Thunderbolt to MacBook Pro 16'', 2019, macOS Ventura 13.6 build 22G120) and relaunch Publisher 2.2 on my internal MBP screen, my workspace looks like this. This is really a problem. Please fix.

Congratulations to the new versions! The new features are awesome! It feels like everything is coming together. Keep up the great work, and grant yourself a little break now! You deserve it. 😀

Thank you, Nathan. :)

Hi there, please take a look at this. When I double click a panel to reduce it to the tab header, and double click it again to restore it, it always opens at minimal height: Panel-Height.mov This is very inconvenient, and I have the impression it hadn’t been that way in earlier versions. The panel should remember its previous height and be restored to this height when it is restored. Thanks for correcting.

Is there a point in my reply where I spoke about glyph widths? Or where I said that the glyph substitution would be responsible for the problem we see? Neither the first nor the second. 🙂 Rather, the only detail I meant to address was the following: Since you are aware of the distinction between characters (codepoints) and glyphs, you will understand that this way of speaking can be misleading. In OpenType Layout, we do not substitute characters for characters, but glyphs for glyphs. Hence, it does not make much sense to speak of “substituted characters” and properties such “characters” would “inherit.” This is likely to lead to a confusion between characters and glyphs and to paint a wrong picture of OpenType Layout processing. But as I said, the way of expression in the quote above does not invalidate your diagnosis (and there’s certainly no need to put every word under close scrutiny, if the underlying distinctions are clear – so no offense). As you noted, the application seems to lose track of which glyph corresponds to which character (with its particular line breaking property) when glyph substitution occurs. It does not retrace the text shaping process correctly before entering the stage where the output of the text shaper is distributed to paragraph lines.

I think this is basically the correct explanation, although there are some details I would rephrase somewhat differently. The problem is that we are talking about two different levels in text processing here. Being assigned to a Line Breaking Class is a property of a Unicode character, while the kind of substitutions we are talking about in this thread is a substitution that happens on the glyph level. A character is an abstract entity (a location in an encoding space), while a glyph is, basically, a set of drawing rules that, when applied, result in a visual object, such as a letter or symbol. In order to turn a sequence of Unicode characters into something visible, the codepoints belonging to this sequence must be mapped to the corresponding glyphs of the font that is selected for text rendering, and these glyphs must be positioned correctly in relation to each other. This mapping and positioning process is performed by a text shaping engine. If the selected font is an OpenType font, it may also include OpenType Layout (GSUB, GPOS) lookups that must be applied by the text shaping engine, either by default (e.g. depending on script and language settings for the Unicode input sequence) or based on user choices. Such a user choice would be enabling the GSUB feature ss05 in Dave’s font that replaces the /space/ glyph by the /space.alt/ glyph. Now, a text shaping engine is typically not concerned with problems of line-breaking, hyphenation or justification. The output of a text shaper is usually a data stream that can be visualised as a glyph sequence laid out on a single, indefinitely long line. To find out where potential word, sentence or line break points are in this line, you will have to apply another process that iterates over the output of the text shaper and remembers the shaping process, starting from the Unicode input sequence. In Dave’s example, this process will have to retrace the character-to-glyph mapping from the codepoint U+0020 to the glyph /space/ (GID 3), and then the glyph-to-glyph substitution from /space/ (GID 3) to /space.alt/ (GID 1011). And by retracing, the process might be able to identify the position in the glyph sequence where an instance of the /space.alt/ glyph occurs as a potential break point for line breaking. So since we are not substituting characters by characters (that is, codepoints by codepoints) when applying an OpenType Layout rule (the /space.alt/ glyph is not encoded anyway), but glyphs by glyphs, there is a slight conceptual problem in saying that “the solution is for the substituted character to inherit the Line Breaking Class characteristics of the character it is replacing”, but apart from that, I think you are right.

Please fix this oversight. It creates really awkward situations to resolve when you work with a lot of cropped objects that are overlaid. ☹️

To expand on what @Oufti said, the zero-width space (U+200B) can be used in scripts like Thai where words are not visually separated within a phrase. You can insert a zero-width space there to fine-tune word-boundary detection.

Hi Dave, it will be interesting to see how this is sorted out in the Affinity apps. Some background information can be gathered from this thread on the FontLab forum. Adam Twardoch and John Hudson suggested different ways to put alternative spaces into the font or adjust the width of the space glyph depending on the selected script and language parameters, but as I said, especially in web browsers, none of these methods worked really well. I can see whether I can find my test fonts in the archive to give you some more information. Regarding interpolation, you are right: one has to distinguish between the capabilities of font editors and the OpenType specification. When you have a variable font setup in a font editor like FontLab or Glyphs, any glyph substitution or positioning rule that you define in the FEA syntax will apply to all masters in your font. Hence, you cannot do any useful positioning using the FEA syntax in a variable font setup. On the other hand, the OpenType specification clearly provides the means for varying positioning data along design axes. For GPOS data the variation deltas are stored in an Item Variation Store table in the GDEF table (see here and here). The problem is that there is no easy way to set up these variation deltas, given the current way in which font editors operate. So what is technically possible, according to the specification, is not really feasible at the moment, from the font developers perspective. (Hence, there are probably not many, if any, variable fonts out there that use GPOS other than for kerning and mark attachment.)

Dave, I’ve tested various approaches to implement different spaces for different scripts in the same font (GSUB-based as well as GPOS-based ones), but I couldn’t find a solution that would have worked across the range of standard design applications and web browsers. This is very unfortunate, from a font developers perspective, but I fear this it is something we will have to live with. Just saying this to emphasize that the Affinity suite is not the only app that doesn’t work as one might hope in this respect. 🙂

This is fantastic! Everything is coming together! 😀

Confirmed, this issue is not fixed in version 2.1.1. And it is indeed a huge problem when you work with text frames placed above other shapes. In other words: always. 🫤 It simply does not make sense that the “active” area for selecting objects is derived from the vertical metrics of the used font, rather than from the boundaries of the text frame. I cannot remember I would have seen a setup like this anywhere else. It’s indeed a nightmare. Please, please fix this as soon as possible. 🫤 Selection-nightmare.mov

Awesome news, Ash! Take the time you need … 😀