Dave Harris

There are some bugs in the Typography panel affecting which features are enabled or displayed. These should be fixed next week sometime. Then you should find our OpenType support pretty comprehensive and usable.

Well, yes, you're the first person I'm aware of who has asked for it. 2003 is 13 years ago, so I'm surprised your printing service cannot handle it. We'll consider adding it in future.

Fill modes should be available in the main menu Layer > Fill Mode. That's where they are for Mac; if Windows is different that would be a bug.

Then don't use PSD. Use SVG or EPS as VIPStephan suggested, or PDF. These export formats support text.

It is working on Mac and not on Windows. I've passed it on to my Windows colleagues.

Hi Eddie, welcome to the Affinity forums. It sounds like you sheared the shape. You can do this by moving the mouse to just outside the middle handles so that the cursor changes into a pair of arrows, and this may have happened by accident. You can also do it with a field at the bottom-right of the Transform Studio page. The latter is probably the easiest way to reset the shear back to zero.

Thanks. I'll take a look tomorrow.

I'm afraid we don't support RTL scripts currently. We will probably add it eventually, but not for a long while.

Yes, we can handle some multi-byte sequences but not all. It's not as simple as straight UTF, because FontBook gives us RTF text which adds its own layers of encoding. We were failing for two cases. The first is Unicode characters above U+FFFF. FontBook encodes them as surrogate pairs, which we weren't expecting. The second case is for glyphs that have no Unicode equivalent at all. For this FontBook uses an Apple-specific extension to the RTF specification, \glid, which I hadn't been aware of. Both of these should be working in the next beta.

I am wondering now if this is something that works on macOS but not Windows. If you can make the font available, I'll look into it. (The link I quoted goes to a BBC page, not a font download.)

Typography options are disabled when they'd made no difference to the current selection. Does that explain what you are seeing? (I'm assuming you have Show all font features checked, else they'd be hidden completely.)

I've no plans to improve them. We use the metrics from the font file. It looks like the values Arial Black returns are simply wrong. For example, 4cm/x does not give an 'x' that is 4cm high. There's not a lot we can do about that. As with our other fields, the maths is done in the input field, so it uses the metrics of the first selected font. If you have a mix of fonts you'll have to select them individually.

I'm afraid that's unlikely to happen. We did consider it, but without visible codes it seemed like it would be too hard to make the user interface clear. We don't use embedded codes internally, so there'd be a fundamental ambiguity between, say, <red><blue>text</blue></red> and <blue><red>text</red></blue> which we couldn't resolve without actually having the <red> and <blue> codes in some order Text styles are now included in the current macOS beta, and probably won't be changing much for Publisher.

Paolo, could you explain a bit more? If you want to clip the text, so you sometimes get just the top halves of characters, you can do that with a vector clip. If you just want text that fits the frame, you can use filler text - that expands itself dynamically.

If you forget, you should be able to Select All and then change it.

Because even a paragraph style can have formatting that may be useful for ranges of characters. And for example, you might have a style called "Caption" that you apply to paragraphs that are captions to illustrations, and then when you refer to one of those illustrations in the body of your document, you can use the same style for the referring text. Or a style based on that style. You don't have to use it if you don't want to. We've tried to make it so it doesn't get in the way if you don't use it. The Typography > Figures page of the Edit Text Style dialog refers to the OpenType features. Normally in our main Typography panel we only expose OpenType features that the current font and selection supports. For text styles, we may not know what the font or selection will be, so we have to expose everything possible. Which turns out to be quite a lot.

Incidentally, it might be worth spelling out how the test style font traits are supposed to work. If the style sets the Font family, then you can use the Font traits control to set the font used exactly. In this case Affinity will offer the list of named traits from the font file, and there should be no font matching (as long as the font is installed). If the style does not set the Font family, then the other controls for Font weight, Font width and Italic attributes become available. These provide generic names that are not specific to the font, and they do do font matching. For example, if you set the Font weight to Black, and apply the style to Arial, you will actually get Arial Bold because Arial does not have a Black variant. These generic traits are how the Strong and Emphasis styles in the default style sheet work. You can change the Font family in the Base style, and Emphasis will still give you a slanted variant (if the font family has one), even if the new font calls it Oblique or something else rather than Italic. So this approach allows the style sheet to be more flexible and fluid. The downside is that the font matching might not always do what you want, which is why we also let you specify the font exactly by setting both Font family and Font Traits in every style that changes the font. This leads to a more rigid style sheet, in that if you change your mind about the font you'll have to edit all the styles that set it, but it also gives you complete control.

Gladly. In some apps there is a strong difference between paragraph styles and character styles, and they never mix. In Affinity, they are virtually the same, and you can apply paragraph styles to characters and character styles to paragraphs. You can also have character styles that are based on paragraph styles, and vice versa. The Type in the Edit Text Style dialog merely sets how the style is applied by default. So if Paragraph is checked, then a single click in the Text Styles tab will apply the style to paragraphs, and you will need to use the menus to apply it to characters. The type also affects which quick lists the style appears in. There are lists of text styles in the Paragraph Studio tab, the Character tab, and two lists in the text context toolbar. The idea is that some people will hide the Text Styles tab when they are not actively editing styles, to save screen space, but they will still apply text styles via one of the lists. So, to answer your questions, the Group type means the style is neither paragraph nor character. It appears in none of the quick lists, and the only way to get to it is via the Text Styles tab. Nothing happens when you single-click it. The idea is that you use it to help manage your other styles, by basing other styles on it. For example, in the default style sheet, there is a group style called Base that contains all the default formatting, and then the other paragraph styles are based on that and just set what they need. Base provides a single place to set attributes that applied to all the styles, such as language and colour, but you aren't expected to apply it to text directly. Instead you apply a style based on it, such as Body or Heading 2. For that reason, you probably don't want Base listed in the text context toolbar, and it won't be. The burger menu at the Text Styles tab top-right has an option to Show Heirachical (sic - we'll fix the spelling). When checked, it shows the based-on tree structure. With this mode you can use group styles for, well, grouping. That's why they have that name. It's off by default because I didn't like having to expand styles to find the one I wanted, especially when the default style sheet is so short, but it may be useful when you have more styles. We don't have any other mechanism for categorising text styles. The Show in both panels checkbox causes the style to be appear both in lists of paragraph styles, and in lists of character styles. So it's kind of the oppose of the Group type. It's for when you have a style that you commonly use both ways. This is all a bit experimental. We welcome feedback on how well it works in practice. It might be a good idea for us to rename the old Style tab to Object Styles.

It doesn't crash for me, but it also doesn't update. As a workaround, you can also update styles from the text selection using the buttons at the bottom of the Style Page.

That will be a Affinity Publisher feature.

Not really; it's the issue I mentioned, of embedded documents always being rasterised. This should be fixed in 1.5, when that comes out.

I'm one of the developers. Tony has more authority but he is currently in America, at WWDC, and may not be reading this thread. I replied because I thought it should get some answer, but really there's nothing new to say on the subject (and it's kinda off-topic for this thread).

We do realise that. We are firmly against subscription models and Apple's recent discount does not change that.

Any shape can be used as an Artboard. You might want round ones for DVDs, CDs or records, for example.

I'm afraid there isn't, yet.