Dave Harris

When you say, "the values of the fonts", which values do you mean? When you say "calculate", what is the calculation that you are doing? I'm also not sure who you are referring to with "we". I get that Arial Black is getting the wrong size, but I don't follow the other points you are making.

What do you mean, "We calculate the same correct result"? Are you reading the font file, such as https://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/os2.htm#ch ?

Mike, you can enter very small numbers already. You can change the precision displayed from Preferences > User Interface. The number will generally be stored precisely even if the display rounds it.

Font files include both the outlines of the individual glyphs and some numbers that describe the characteristics of the font as a whole. These numbers include things like the x-height, which is what the font designer has declared the x-height to be. That's what Affinity uses. If other apps get different results, they must be doing something different. I would guess they are picking specific glyphs and measuring their outline directly instead.

I was hoping for some insight into what it was doing. Because if it gives different results to Affinity, it isn't use the font's own metrics.

Paste text works for me, from WordPad, if I have a text caret showing, and I use Paste Special and RTF or Unicode Text. So the basic mechanism works and there is probably some silly bug like trying to paste it as a metafile or something. We'll get it fixed. If it is creating a new text frame, that means it didn't have a text insertion point, and you need to switch to one of the text tools and click in the text where you want the paste to go.

You said "In other Apps we get the correct results". Which other apps were you referring to?

Our leading is actually pretty sophisticated. We have it as a paragraph attribute, to help ensure leading is consistent over the whole paragraph, but we also have a per-character leading override for the rare occasions that's necessary. In the paragraph panel, you can set leading to an absolute value, or a percentage of the text's pointsize, or a multiple of the "ideal" leading specified by the font designer, or to "at least" an absolute value (where the leading will increase if some text is taller, but won't decrease). It may not work how you are used to (Adobe apps tend to rely on per-character leading override and don't have much at the paragraph level, so most people ignore it, while in Affinity it is key), but if you look into it you should find it is quite capable. That sounds like a bug. This Windows version is a beta so you should expect some teething problems. We'll get them fixed. You can. Layer > Convert to Text Frame should work on any vector object. Text avoidance areas, or wrapping frames, will be a feature of the forthcoming Affinity Publisher. Our approach is to offer a suite of programs, each specialised in different areas, that all work together and share a common file format. No one of our programs is trying to be a jack-of-all-trades.

Which other apps are you comparing with?

Oh, it's no problem. :)

Celliott80, thanks for the report. That's something we did to avoid a worse bug, because unsynced text was crashing. It should be working properly in the next beta. hopefully Tuesday.

The historic thread is still there, still with 1.5.0.2 in the title, it just got unpinned and then quickly pushed down by other new posts so you may have missed it. It's currently on page 3. This forum is crazy busy at the moment.

Yes. The Windows versions are mostly developed by a separate team that has expertise in that platform, and Mac development continues by the Mac team. There's a slight bobble this week with the start of the Windows beta making so much activity and excitement, that we are all trying to help out where we can, but things should be back to normal soon.

I'm afraid that will never be possible. The programs are too different. You will need to export in some format both programs understand, like PDF.

I'm afraid not. Currently our Arrange button (in the top toolbar) only offers aligning to the selection bounds, or the spread.

I don't follow. Are you referring to View > Studio > Symbols, or something else?

Using Save As instead of Save will often reduce file sizes. You can clear a portion of the undo history by changing the limit in Preferences > Performance to the number you want to keep, then changing it back again.

If you find the Affinity Designer on Windows forum, then find the thread pinned to the top of it named Affinity Designer on Windows and a version number, then look at the first message in that thread, at the top it says, Download: Here. The "here" is the link.

This is by design. The same behaviour happens with text frames. We always output at least one character on each line, no matter how narrow the measure is. If you want the first line to be blank, start it with a Return.

Not for the foreseeable future, no.

There's no button. There is the keyboard shortcut, and in the History panel there is a slider and you can just click on the command in the list that you want to undo.

This should be fixed, or at least much improved, in next week's beta.

If you can make the font available to me, I'll look into it and see what is happening. There are so many OT features that listing them all, all the time, would not be practical. For example, we support 100 Character Variant options, which most fonts don't use at all. Currently by default the Typography panel shows only the features that are applicable to the current selection, which is a much shorter and more manageable set. There is an option to show all the features the font supports. The Windows version of Affinity doesn't yet support text styles - they were the last thing added to the Mac version - but when it does, you'll be able to see all the supported OT features there. We have to include them all in the text style, because we don't know what font the style will be applied to.

That loads for me now in today's new 1.5.0.4 beta.

Not directly - that will be a feature of Affinity Publisher. However, you can create text frames of arbitrary shape, by creating the shape as a curve using the Pen tool and then using Layer > Convert to Text Frame. In this case, you could first use the Rectangle tool to create the basic shape, then use Layer > Convert to Curves, then select the Node tool and edit the shape to follow the curvature of the book drawing by hand, and then convert it into a Text frame. You can continue to edit its shape with the Node tool after you have filled it with text.