Engineering_text

Currently I use MathMagic, save equations to 600 jpg, then import into Affinity. Since the equation font size is textbook 10 pt quality is adequate. Would prefer to use one of the vector export options, but something always gets crossed up. Would be good to have the plug-in and save time. I found other mentions of this in the forum, surprised your post isn't getting more hits for a feature suggestion.

"with Regular Expressions enabled in the Find options, try \xb7 in the Replace field. Works on iPad, and should work in the desktop versions, too." I did online search trying to find regular expressions for unicode characters. For example, trying to do U+03c1 small greek letter rho. With regular expression enabled, I tried \xc1, \x3c1, and \x03c1, but clearly not a simple pattern to get from unicode to regular expression. Can you provide a link for crossing between unicode and regular expressions? thanks

Non-breaking word list would be a nice feature. Then I wouldn't have to remember keystrokes or go through menus for each instance of the same units of measure with a "/" such as N/m² or lbm/in³ where hyphenation breaks at the "/".

Sorry for the terrible wording of the subject line. After reading my question and seeing the attached screenshot, please let me know how I can word the Topic subject/Title better. In the attached screen shot notice how N/m² got split across two lines of text. I have no space inserted between the / and m². I have other ratios that I want to make sure will not get split. How do I keep the N/m² together? This type thing occurs a lot in my work. Thanks

That worked! Threw me off that I could select regular expressions in the find but not in the replace field -since the \xb7 went in the replace field. Now I know two ways to work the find and replace -but keeping a personal reference for the glyphs I want to use will make this very handy for all the Greek letters.

No luck, but we both know the exact manner in which this is entered matters. I may just be doing it wrong. Review: I was trying to enter the "middle dot" into the "replace with" field in the search and replace feature. I learned from another post I can double click on the middle dot in the glyph chart to inert it into the text frame. From the text frame I can copy and paste it into the "replace with" field and I'm good to go to use find and replace throughout my chapter. Trying what you suggest I tried a few variations: 1. Typing u00b7 and then key stroking the alt (held down) and with alt held down poke the u key. 2. Typing \u00b7 and then key stroking the alt (held down) and with alt held down poke the u key. In both cases it replaced the target text in the frame text with the characters \u00b7 In the past I've used ascii a lot in other Windows programs. One example, I've keyed alt+0178 to get an exponent of 2. With num lock on, hold down alt key while typing in the numerals.

For Windows 10, the best answer above for me was "Or instead place it's Glyph into the frametext and copy/paste it then over from there into the find/replace fields." 1. I could not copy and paste from the glyph table to the find and replace field. (First thing I tried.) 2. Attempts to enter the unicode of glyph code info from the glyph table resulted in only the code showing up in my text -not the glyph. Copied syntax shown in the above posts in my case \u00b7 for "middle dot". I even tried cut and paste from a response here where the unicode worked for the -still just got the unicode. 3. I successfully inserted the glyph into my text frame by double-clicking on the glyph chart, and then copy and paste from text frame into the find and replace field. Big smile. Now I can use find and replace to convert throughout the document. Thanks everyone who contributed.

Solved, sort of. Thanks for all the help. Short answer: My Brother HL-5470DW laser printer doesn't get along well with Affinity Publisher. Spent a lot of time trouble shooting with Brother post script 3 emulator, PCL3, PCL6, saving files to pdf and printing from Adobe Acrobat. Tried a host of setting changes in printer driver and in Affinity. Did use the 16 bit grey scale and E50 something settings in Affinity -no difference. Same fonts in same size look great when printed from Word perfect, or when printing pre-windows 10 files. Not going to buy a new printer just for Affinity, wouldn't know what spec to look for. Turns out a Xerox C60/C70 printer (Staples printing service) is able to print the Affinity documents (exported to pdf) clear and sharp. I always expected the final output to be from a professional printer -so at least I know the files I am creating with Affinity are good. I can continue to use my personal printer for draft copies. I've decided to stick with Affinity Publisher. It's been a learning curve and it has what I believe to be some quirks in the interface, but I am accomplishing what I set out to do and I have found most of the tools I need, if not all the tools I want. Best of all, this community has ben a great source of support.

Here's a better comparison I think. Pages side by side, and better light. All my software not installed yet. No good tool for rotating image. Since both files look great when you print them, at least it narrows it down to nothing in the file itself.

Thanks. Yes I have printed to pdf -no improvement. I did learn to choose "all pages" and not "all spreads" after getting little 8.5 x 11 inch spreads with facing pages! I have attached photos of text printed from Wordperfect file and text printed from Affinity. Taken with cell phone in bad light, and tight crop to emphasize the difference. Same computer, same printer. My crops made one font look larger (I cropped so tight the focus is soft), but the fonts on paper are the same size. The point is, these fonts look great even super big with soft focus -except when I print from Affinity. I know I've got something set wrong, there would have been lots of posts about this if it was a bug in Affinity. Reviews would have been harsh. The export screen, 3rd image below, always confuses me because it has a box for DPI but next to the box says "nothing will be rasterized". It seems there was one more spot that had box for entering DPI -but I don't recall where and not finding it now. Maybe somewhere in one of the document setup locations. Should I be leaving those DPI fields blank? I will have some illustrations that will be raster images (none inserted yet) for which I will want the higher DPI. Thanks for your help.

Summary: Old pdf file prints great, nice sharp font. New rewrite in Affinity publisher, same font, same printer, comes out rasterized. Not sure where I am telling Affinity to do that. Stumped. Files attached below. Problem only shows when printing. Long version with more details. The laser printer When I print my old pdf file from the year 2000 or so, the font is perfectly sharp even when viewed with 3.25x cheater glasses. When I print the new document from Affinity, essentially a rewrite of the same document, same font, the font is rasterized. I'm printing both files on the same laser printer. The OS. The original document was created in Windows 95. The new document using Windows 10. The software. The original document was created in Pagemaker 5.0 and is long gone. All I have from that is the pdf file made from Pagemaker. That is the file that prints great even when viewed with 3.25x power reading glasses from inches away. The current version is in Affinity. I cut and pasted the pdf text into WordPerfect. I converted the first section in Wordperfect into plain text. I imported the plain text file into Affinity and learned to never do that again. (Find and replace all those extra carriage returns after each line.) Ultimately went with select and paste into Affinity. Within Affinity I setup paragraph styles and switched all the text to new paragraph style with Cambria font. I've also printed from the WordPerfect file mentioned as the intermediate step between the old pdf and Affinity. The font looks perfectly sharp both in Times New Roman and in Cambria. The font: The original document used Times New Roman, regular, 10 pt provided with Windows 95. In the new document in Affinity I am using Cambria, regular, 10 pt font provided with Windows 10. I experimented by changing the text to Times New Roman -it came out just as bad. The low quality is obvious even without reading glasses. The resolution: I used 600 dpi resolution in creating the original document in the late 90's. I recall it made the book look much better, but I don't recall if it only affected the graphics, or if it affected the text also. At that time I had not heard of pdf files. I printed from PageMaker. In the new file with Affinity I've selected 600 DPI everywhere I can. The option comes up in at least three places. I print from within Affinity. Onscreen looks great. I can zoom in until the 10 pt font looks 6 inches high, and it's still perfectly sharp -onscreen. I haven't created any layers, nothing placed behind the font. No artistic stuff. Just regular 10 pt font with subscripts and superscripts. I'm stumped. I cannot figure out why the letters are coming out rasterized. Reminds me of (good) dot matrix printer. I'm attaching the old pdf, which I had been trying to update using Adobe Acrobat DC -but the changes I needed to make were too extensive. I only mention that to explain why the file date is now 2020. (See page 5) I am also attaching the Affinity file. The rasterization appears most clearly in the subscripts. I want to work out the font problem before placing equations and illustrations. Yes, it's back to Cambria, because changing to Times New Roman didn't help. (See page 6) Hopefully you can find what settings I have wrong, or even find where I am telling the software to rasterize without realizing it. thanks test_Chap14.doc HSE_Chap14_part1b.afpub

Suggestion to Affintiy Publisher -please make the print options more clear. I wondered why I had to choose what pages to print twice. I sorted out the options below in a way that seems to match what I am used to seeing: First box should be "pages" -as in which pages to print. No drop down box, but right underneath provide a syntax examples for non-consective pages and consecutive pages. (Usually that would be 3,8 for individual pages 3 and 8, and 3-8 for all pages from 3 to 8, but some programs invent their own syntax.) Second box should be "Print current page", a check box or radio button. No drop down box. Third box should be "Print selection" with a small graphic representation of a selected area of the page to print. Fourth box should be options for printing double sided or multiple pages per print page. This should have small illustrations and radio buttons. This should include an illustration for printing facing pages on one page as a spread. That option would be called "booklet". Take a look at how Adobe Acrobat and many opther programs handle this. Having "all pages" in the area dropdown list doesn't make sense to me when the very next drop down list is asking which pages to print. All spreads seems the same as "all pages". Current page is typically a standalone choice with radio button right next to "pages" entry box. I would only think of "area" as applying to a selection on a given page. Are there people who choose a particular section of a page and choose multiple pages? I am really glad for this forum. It makes up for what is a very awkward software interface. I was stunned that my pdf file was printed two pages side by side and then I couldn't make any sense of these options. I've been using PC's since 1990. No interface has been this awkward for doing some of the most basic things. Once I get used to it, it will all seem easy, but here's two feature suggestions: 1. Right mouse click on any menu item, and the help info for that menu item appears. Maybe it just opens the pdf "book" to the relevant section. 2. When exporting the file -provide a preview, so no surprises when we get printing in booklet mode.

A lot of the replies here seem to miss the point of the problem. This is a software or interface bug. I have noticed using Affinity Publisher in Windows 10, if I tell publisher to learn a word where the word is capitalized, instances of the same word not capitalized will be hi-lited as spelling error. When that occurs, the only choice in the drop down list is "unlearn". This is wrong. "Ignore misspelt word" mentioned above, is a work around, but is also wrong because the word is not misspelt and because that choice is not in the pop-up menu that appears when clicking on the word. Why make the user go off to some other menu and then select a false statement? 1. The obvious bug is that Affinity Publisher recognizes the word has been learned, and then asks to unlearn it. If it recognizes the word is learned -why flag it at all? I certainly don't want it to "unlearn" the word I just taught it minutes before. 2. If the problem is that Affinity publisher thinks a change in the case of the first letter is an error, why offer to "unlearn" the word? Why not still provide the normal option of "learn word" with the change in case of the first letter? 3. I do understand that in German language all nouns have the first letter in capital letter -so it's not irrational if a word unknown to Affinity is learned with a capital letter it would flag a lower case version. But it is still irrational to not have the option to just select "learn word" when that occurs. Since Affinity sees the upper case version and the lower case version as different -learn both. Seriously this is a bug. Simple fix: Always keep the "learn word option" for when Affinity get confused by the first letter being a different case than what it learned. It's now 2022 and this bug still exists. Take a few minutes and fix it please.

Danke. I owe you "ein blond bier".

John R: I also prefer to create the images to match the final dimensions in the desired dpi. I like a consistent look to line art throughout the chapters: Consistent lines weights, fonts, font sizes, etc. in the illustrations. In this case, I have had bad luck with equations in vector format inserted into desktop publishing software. No problem with line art, but big problems with equations. Not a pro at this, so not going to learn Tex or Latex. Exporting equations as windows metafiles works badly. Exporting as EPS I've had somewhere in the process the thumbnail image (looks like bad 9-pin dot matrix image) get used instead of the postscript info when it prints or the document is converted to pdf. For equations, I get consistent results by converting to jpg. Nothing misinterprets jpg -so far. Unfortunately, the equation editor (only one I found that exports to jpg) has few options when exporting to jpeg and so only provides a limited number of discrete pixel sizes expressed as "dpi" without also referencing dimension. So it's a little clunky to import the equation and then scale by 89% to get the font back to 10pt size, but at least it has me down to just two programs instead of trying to pull the equations through Corel Draw. As I said, I have no problems with importing vector line art, but all the brackets, and special characters, in equations are fonts and they get horked up. So I go with raster images to avoid misinterpretation.

Looked around again and saw where after selecting the object, no need to right click or search through menus. A tool bar near top of the screen displays the pixel size and percent in a cell toward near the left. Clicking the little carrot in that cell, opens a drop down set of options which includes setting the scale. This does exactly what I was requesting. Always obvious, once I know the answer. Helpful that another user's post shared a screenshot that showed the pixel and scale cell while discussing a different scaling issue. This option is not displayed until the image has been selected. Logical. The problem was with me. I would right click on the item to get a menu of properties. When I didn't see what I wanted in that menu, I then left clicked elsewhere on the screen to dismiss that menu -which then made the very feature I was looking for disappear. I'll have to get used to looking everywhere on the screen after I click on something. The lack of questions on using this feature indicates I am an outlier, and not in a good way. I do love the amount of support I get from the kind and patient people here.

I'm importing jpg equations and want to downsize the equations in a repeatable manner. In Scribus, I could place the image into a frame, and then use the properties menu (in Scribus) to resize the image. Within the properties I could specify a scale, such as 20%, and the image would be reduced in size and report a higher DPI -implying the same file pixel resolution, just smaller on the Scribus page. This scaling would not affect the frame the image was placed in. Is there a way to do this in Affinity Publisher? I hoping to not have to edit the equations in a separate graphics program. 1. Resize by entering a number such as percent scale. DPI should change, not number of pixels. 2. Resize independent of the size of the frame I import it into. thanks

First: Here in 2022 right clicking on the style name under "text style" allows not only for editing the style, but has a lot of options for using paragraph style without over-writing your character styles. Second: Big thank you to Cylon Raven! It really never occurred to me to just cut and paste from my original document into Affinity. With other DTP software I would import and then apply styles. If I imported something like rtf or old *doc files it would at least still contain my tabs and if I was lucky, the subscripts and symbol fonts for variable names. With Affinity, I was disappointed that I could only import plain text. I'm not going to import pdf -for various reasons that's a hot mess for me. Importing plain text wouldn't be such a pain if the import text menu (Affinity calls it something else -place?) used the feature that strips out extra carriage returns so the text will wrap correctly. That problem was solved long ago, not sure where Affinity hides the feature to do that. I was about to start using text like [tab] when creating in my word processor, so at least I wouldn't have to manually retype all the tabs (this for numbered lists, and for aligning expressions to the "=" when defining variables in a list. I figured a global search and replace could replace the [tab] with the non-printing tab character. then my styles setting would handle the tab length, and whether its a left, tab, right or center tab. Then I realized I was taking the first steps to creating my own Tex language, or min-HTML and decide to check here to see what others are doing. Cut and past will be tedious for all the pages I'm doing, but not 1/10 as tedious as all the insertion of tabs, getting rid of carriage returns, redoing symbols, etc. Third: I am still trying to figure out what "optical alignment" means. I've seen it in the menus but it makes me wonder what alignments are not optical? I would expect options like vertical alignment, horizontal alignment, top alignment, bottom alignment, align center, . . . This sounds like some sort of display adjustment. Like aligning the photon guns on a CRT monitor. (Cathode Ray Tube -for younger readers who don't recall saner times.)

Progress: I've now created a character style just for subscripts. Not the solution I had envisioned, but it works. Now instead of "ctrl alt -" I'll be applying a character style.

I've been enjoying the ease of using "ctrl alt -" keys after selecting multiple instances of where I want letters subscripted. It's now fast and easy to get subscripts. Now I'm getting a problem with subscripts that I've never encountered before. Subscripted letters crash into, and even slightly overlap, the tall letters in the following line. I do not want to increase the vertical space for each line, it looks good for the rest of the text. The problem is the subscripts are placed too low. I want to just nudge up the subscripts a little bit. I'm hoping there is a setting somewhere in the style menu that does this as part of the body style. I have used your advice in creating a character style -with that I can select each subscript and apply that style. But would be even better if I could adjust how body style handles subscripts in general. Although I admit this does allow more flexibility. Just see you have replied as i am editing this post.

Thanks. After doing the right click I saw the drop down list which included "Edit Style" which is the most straightforward way of doing what I was trying to do, literally "edit the style" I had created. This is like an Easter Egg hunt. I now see there is also the ability to apply a style without over-writing characters where I have applied subscripts and have some Greek symbols in the text. That is huge for my workflow. Thanks again.

Gary wrote: "4. Not exactly sure what you are doing but look for the “Update Paragraph Style” and “Update Character Style” buttons at the bottom of the “Text Styles” Panel." I am also trying to find out how to edit a style and save the changes to that style the same as the original poster requested. Please post a photo showing where the "update paragraph style" and "update test Styles" buttons are. I am looking at the sidebar with paragraph and text settings for my given style. I scroll to the bottom and do not see such buttons. I see Transform, history and navigator and a tiny trash can at the bottom.

Thank you. I've been searching the Affinity interface trying to find where the ability to make a character subscript or superscript is located. Like you, I have hundreds of subscript and superscript to create. Unfortunate that Affinity places this feature down in a menu somewhere instead of top level where font is selected. You found a way to make this tolerable. Unfortunately, I am using a PC instead of Mac -no "command" key, but the "Ctrl" key does the trick. For others trying to figure out how to apply subscript and superscript, from the main title bar choose "Text", then "Baseline" and you'll see options for subscript and superscript.

Thank you. I'm getting a better understanding of how Affinity "thinks". It took a surprising amount of trial and error to reproduce what you showed, and then to work out how to accomplish my list of variables, where the variable names are left aligned, and longer descriptions wrap around to line up with the tab prior to the description. To reproduce what you did: I had gotten used to (in other software) right aligned tabs being placed in the same spot as left aligned tabs -in this case, before the numeral being tabbed. So just as your screenshot shows a tab symbol before the numeral, I was also placing the right aligned tab before the numeral. I was also adding a tab after the numeral as shown in the illustration. I didn't read your instructions well, instead I tried to follow the picture. Eventually, through trial and error I learned to place the right aligned tab behind the numeral AND (when all else fails read the directions) to not enter the tab after the numeral. I thought Affinity just automatically calculated the length of the tab for aligning to the indent. I didn't realize Affinity also it placed the tab automatically. I am surprised given the overwhelming amount of graphics in the Affinity interface, that the classic representation of a ruler illustrating the placement of indents and tabs is omitted. That classic graphic clarified a lot and shortened the learning curve.

Thanks for the post and the attached file. I can't make the connection between the menu pictures, the numbers you used, and what happened with the text. In other software, to get the results you got, I would have a left tab set to .25, a right tab set to perhaps 0.5, and then there would be marker I could move to set where a second line for the paragraph would begin at 0.5 to line up with the 0.5 tab. In other software, it would show where the wrapped text would start with the little picture showing a second line being indented relative to the first. Those were intuitive enough, that over the last 27 years I didn't even learn the term "hanging indent". So I need a walk through of how Affintiy "thinks". I'm guessing the setting for starting the second line to line up with the tab from the first line (is that called a hanging indent?) is not contained in the circled settings shown in the answer above -but maybe is somewhere else in the default settings for the default list style?