Dave Harris

They set the portion of the table considered to be non-repeating headers and footers. The cells inside them - by default the whole table - will have their cell formatting repeated as the table grows.

You need to set the Leader character used by the tab stop. If you are editing with the text ruler, right-click on the tab stop and select the second option in the second row.

Do you have a Leading override set via the Character panel?

The language used for spell checking is set for each character from the Character panel Languages section. You should be able to use that to set the default in a new document, so that subsequent text uses it. Better is to use text styles and change it in the style.

We're aware of the need for it, and will add it eventually, but almost certainly not for the initial release. We've too much other stuff to do.

The options are useful, but we could change the defaults. The current indents are useful for drawing a tight box around the text. If we change the left and right sides to be Column, then the box is loose on the sides and tight at top and bottom, which looks a bit strange to me. There isn't a good way to make an equal gap at top and bottom because that depends on the indents. So our current defaults may be the best compromise. Playing with it, I notice it doesn't handle first-line indents well.

Yes, this will change in the next beta.

You seem to be saying that Affinity shouldn't fake ligatures for any font, not just broken/incomplete ones. That would change the appearance for fonts which define the "fi" ligature correctly so it can be inserted manually, but don't define the OpenType rule to use it automatically. I am much less concerned about the appearance of documents using broken or incomplete fonts, for the reasons you mention and because their appearance is already wrong. I find it to be quite common. Arial is one example, which happens to be our default font. Others include Georgia, GillSans, Helvetica, LucidaGrande, Tahoma, Times-Roman, Verdana, TrebuchetMS. Even if backwards compatibility wasn't an issue, I think it is a good thing to make standard ligatures available for these fonts. That sounds reasonable. We''ll do that in a future beta.

It is intended as a quick way of switching between linked text styles. It is used by Text > List > Increase Level and by pressing tab at the start of a paragraph. Increase level takes the paragraph's current style, find its Next level style, and applies that to the paragraph. (If one isn't set, then it increases indent instead.) The linked styles can do anything you want. The default text styles use them for three things: Tab at the start of a Bullet 1 paragraph will turn it into a Bullet 2 paragraph. This changes the indent and also the bullet symbol. Similarly Bullet 2 => Bullet 3. Tab at the start of a Numbered 1 paragraph will turn it into a Numbered 2 paragraph. This is a convenient way to get multi-level numbered lists. Similarly Numbered 2 => Numbered 3. Tab at the start of a Header 1 paragraph will turn it into a Header 2 paragraph. Shift-tab does the opposite to tab. For example going from Bullet 3 to Bullet 2.

You should be able to change the current default to something else, eg Arial, then Edit > Defaults > Save to make it the default default. Currently although that changes the defaults for new documents, the Save doesn't affect the current document unless you also do Edit > Defaults > Revert. This should be fixed in the next beta.

Yes, it is language-dependant. The language is set in the Character panel, and defaults to being the same as the spell-check language. I'm not sure which hyphenation dictionaries we currently ship.

It looks like the non-breaking space is between the Drop Cap T and its h, so it wouldn't affect the later T and h. Maybe come back to this after the next beta.

If the font defines U+FB01 but doesn't draw it correctly, the font is broken. I don't want to compromise our handling of correct fonts for the sake of broken ones. This feature has been part of Affinity apps for several years now, and to change it would affect the appearance of existing documents. I am loath to do that without better reason.

You can hide unselected text frames by unticking View > Show Text Flow. They are also hidden by View > Hide All Guides, which is as close as we currently get to a preview/clean view. You can change the colour used for objects on a layer by right-clicking on the layer in the Layers panel.

The Text Style panel has a pair of buttons centre-bottom which update the current style rather than create a new one.