Compositor K

Thanks again, fde101! That is valuable clarification for those occasions where baseline grid is a desirable tool. I'll put it in my notes. As for me, though, it is more important to eliminate any chances of it popping up unexpectedly, overriding my styles and specs, and making me exclaim "WTF!" until I remember that baseline grid is always lurking. I have eliminated it from all my default styles, and turned it off globally. On the very rare occasions when I might need to enable it, I would take the not very great trouble to do so with a special style, also enabling it locally within frames as needed. I still think that Affinity would be well advised to not make it a default even within styles. In InDesign (and in Quark, for whatever that's worth, at last up to v. 7), you can't get baseline grid unless you consciously enable it. (As for MS Word, I don't know if it even offers baseline grid.) And in the thousands of InDesign and Quark files I've worked on, in many different environments, that were created by someone else, I don't actually remember ever seeing it used, though it presumably was in a few cases.

@Catshill I can see that that would work for body text in a magazine, especially one without technical oddities in the text--and also maybe a magazine or book with many TALL technical oddities in the text, like mathematical equations. But even in the former case, my inclination would be to work out the specs for any cross-heads so that the total lead between the last text baseline above the head and the first text baseline below the head is always a multiple of the text lead. (If that doesn't work, perhaps because of multiple-line run-ons in smaller cross-heads following larger ones, I'd go for a multiple of half the text lead, and manually add that value to the space above larger heads as needed to make the columns base-align.) But for a magazine where the text has to base-align with pre-sized content, like ads, in neighboring columns, or where the text is frequently changing even after typesetting begins, it might be more convenient to leave cross-heads to the baseline grid, too (especially if the magazine is a weekly!).

Thanks Walt--I didn't know about this setting. I see it's at View > Baseline Grid (NOT the "Show Baseline Grid" setting, but much farther down on the menu). I must say, though, that the View menu is not the place I'd look for a setting affecting the appearance of printing elements. As to the origin of the baseline grids I encountered, I can't guess. I would NEVER have turned baseline grid on knowingly. And thanks, Old Bruce. I'll do that.

I still think that the rigidity of a baseline grid is a high price to pay for something I can get at the price of just a little learning, thought, and time. I'm always running into exceptions that have to be made that can only be made by local formatting that would fight the baseline grid. And the sort of well-planned specs and stylesheets needed to provide for alignment are good for many other things as well. For example, the constant need, in many production environments, to change layouts and repurpose documents. Perhaps most important is that, when you want fine control over vertical spacing between elements, baseline grid isn't an option.

@Callum Hitting the Tab key does indeed make the page previews update. Thank you Callum! I just heard from Lee D in another thread that Affinity is stuck with a whole print UI from Apple. That explains many things that have bothered me about the Print panel.

@Lee D Thanks very much for that information. Knowing that Affinity is stuck with a complete Apple print UI explains a lot. I've seen that sort of thing from Apple over the years. Unfortunately, there's no point in me writing to them. (Or to Adobe, of course. The fact that I get cogent and helpful responses from Affinity staff is quite impressive.) I see that InDesign CC on my Mac has the "pages to print" range separated from the fit and orientation settings. But Adobe is big enough and influential enough to do things that smaller companies can't. Such as the notorious subscriptions, and turning their applications into bloatware by trying to turn them into a complete cloud workflow technology. At which, I believe, they will fail, because a cluster---k is not a workflow. Onward, Affinity!

I brought in "No style" only as a means of demonstrating that baseline grid on does indeed seem to be the default. I never had any notion of using to control future styles. For that, as you say, dependent styles are the way to go.

It sounds like you're looking for what is called "hanging punctuation". There's a thread about it in the V1 section. It looks like optical alignment is the solution, as PaulEC suggested. I haven't looked into it in Publisher yet. It's an advanced refinement for text settings, and a valuable one, but it can be overdone. It looks like Optical Alignment will allow you to do what is called "half hanging"--having the punctation mark extend only partly outside the text block, so that, while there's no notch (so to speak) of white space under the punctuation mark that is prominent enough to disturb the impression of an even margin, neither is there a black blotch extending into the margin prominent enough to do the same.

I often need to print odd pages in a given page range, and then even pages in the same range. When doing so, it seems necessary to select Range And Scale > Range > Entire Document (quite counter-intuitive, since the choices include odd/even) and select odd or even pages with Paper Handling > Sheets With two places offering the odd/even choice, it took me quite a bit of experimentation to figure out that one had to be ignored, and which one that was. I can see now that, in Range and Scale, the Range choices presumably apply only to the Fit Type and Orientation settings. But that same Pages setting controls which pages are to be printed (as well as, perhaps, which pages are affected by the Fit and Orientation settings). It would be much clearer if the "Range and Scale" section were renamed "Fit and Orientation", under which the Pages settings would only apply to those settings. The pages to print setting should be moved elsewhere, perhaps below the Copies setting.

Affinity Publisher on Mac, Ventura 13.3.1. Worth reporting, I think, though it might be a Ventura issue, not an Affinity issue--I gather Ventura has problems with Print controls. Page View / Sheet View display at left of Print Panel: Minor but annoying: When a page range is entered (Range And Scale > Pages), the Page/Sheet View display doesn't update unless you click and show the Range popdown menu above the Pages field. (You don't have to actually change the range in the popdown.) Video below. Not a serious problem. Once I've input the desired range, only that range will be printed if I hit Return or Print. It doesn't matter that the display still shows the entire page range. But it's scary, since I've learned to look to the Page/Sheet display to confirm that I've got the settings right. PrintPanel.mov

Page Orientation settings not preserved in print presets. I have a similar problem. Perhaps this is a Ventura issue, but in case it helps, here it is: Print > Layout > Reverse Page Orientation: On/Off --This setting is not preserved when the settings are saved as a preset (Presets > Save Current Settings As Preset). In other words, presets don't work if this setting is needed. It's a serious problem for this sort of print job, where appropriate settings can save a lot of frustration (and wasted paper).

The problem is not that checking "Align to Baseline Grid" aligns type to the baseline grid. The problem is that it is checked by default so that all your type aligns to the baseline grid unless you specify that it shouldn't (which takes several steps, as noted above). Create a new document. Paste in text from a plain text document, with No Style selected for paragraph and character styles. Create a new paragraph style from the selected type (which was formatted in 12-point Arial under No Style). In the Text Style panel, "Align to Baseline Grid" is checked by default: Aligning to baseline grid simply shouldn't be a default state. In thirty years of digital production using Quark and InDesign, for all sorts of work (advertising, financial, corporate, direct mail, technical documentation, book and magazine text, collateral, signage, packaging, etc.), and for dozens of employers and clients, I have virtually never found a use for aligning type to a baseline grid. It's much too crude for typographic quality in leading and paragraph spacing, and prevents any local tweaking needed. For a complex layout, it's a question of aligning text frames, not type. For simpler work, and within text frames in complex layouts, it's a question of speccing the type for small or very simple runs of text so that it works out the way you want. It's not that hard, and gives you a lot more flexibility. A most, baseline grid is useful for short and simple stretches of text. Equally important, unlike the engaged users who post on these forums, most users never think of looking at settings to change default behavior. If the default behavior doesn't meet their expectations, they either change their expectations or blame it on the application. This is not a path to success for Affinity. I'm thinking in particular of a long-enduring situation caused by the dysfunctional hyphenate-and-justify defaults long used by Quark. Justified text always looked bad in Quark. All it took to fix this was to change a few settings in the defaults. But virtually nobody did this. (Except for a few production specialists like myself.) Quark had plenty of feedback about this that should have led them to change the defaults. (The right H&J defaults would have given vastly better results--H&J settings don't need to be changed constantly.) Designers just accepted that justified type looked terrible, and made everything flush left. There were similar problems with many other Quark defaults. Then InDesign came in and made the defaults what they should be. All of a sudden, justified type looked good--without the users having to do anything. Work done with InDesign just came out looking better than work done with Quark. And Quark looked very bad. Then, and only then, did Quark change their bad defaults. But it was too late for Quark, which had been giving its users the finger for years. This is a large part of the reason that Quark evaporated once InDesign reached professionally usable status. I don't want Affinity to evaporate. I want Affinity to take over the world.

Thanks again, @fde101! A link to a help topic would probably be a very good idea then, since a lot of people other than myself obviously need to know more about this. There a recent thread on the subject that seems to have gotten bogged down:

BAD DEFAULT: BASELINE GRID OVERRIDES TEXT STYLES Any new user, I think, would find it very confusing to have their text styles behaving so strangely. Letting baseline grid idiot-proof one's specifications, if that is the intent, is not something that users of page layout programs (InDesign, Quark) expect to have imposed on them without notice. On the contrary, they expect to be free to use the powerful typographic options without a hitch. Even Microsoft Word doesn't go as far as attempting to enforce a baseline grid on an opt-out basis. Worse, changing that default, as far as I can tell, is not a simple matter: 1) First, select the text box; go to Window > Text > Text Frame, and check “Ignore Baseline Grid”. 2) Then, just below, uncheck “Use Independent Baseline Grid”. 3) Also, the Baseline Grid > Align To Baseline Grid checkbox in each individual style setting must be blank.

DEFAULT TIGHTEN/LOOSEN INCREMENT FOR LETTERSPACING (Text > Spacing > Tighten/Loosen): The default is 10/1000. Thirty years of production experience in desktop typography has, to my mind, validated my long-held opinion that 5/1000 is the best increment for doing the finest work as quickly as possible. In any case, there should be a way to change the default (as there is in InDesign, whose default value is also too coarse). I can see no way to change it in Publisher. I can, of course, go to the Character palette and change it, but that's hardly economical for frequent use.