walt.farrell

Thank you @walt.farrell you've nailed it 😄
 

If anyone is interested in the approach using zero-width spaces, I figured out the issues I was having with that approach, and built an improved regular-expression:
Find:  (\w)(?=\w)
Replace: $1\x{200B}
(The \x{200B} is a zero width space. The revised Find string finds a word character followed by another word character, using a positive lookahead process.)

If you're searching in a web browser on a PC or Mac (vs on a tablet or phone) the Search box has a Search Scope pull-down on the right. When you search from within a Topic, it defaults to "This topic". You want to choose Everywhere, instead, for this search.

That sounds like you have enabled 2FA (Two Factor Authentication) in the forum's Account Settings, which uses Google Authenticator (but which could probably also use iCloud Passwords & Keychain on iPadOS if you've set that up properly).
This is what the setting looks like in Account Settings for the forum:

Have you tried the suggestion made by @carl123 above?

Note, though, that Resources is not really the place to have long discussions and ask questions (as you did in your initial post). The place for that is Questions, if appropriate in these forums at all.
And as these forums are for discussions about Affinity products, and things useful in using them, I kind of agree with @PaulEC that discussion of specific frames (just like discussion of specific printers, or specific cameras) is not really relevant in these forums at all. 
I also agree that it would be nice if the Moderators responded to the member who posted the topic, but they do not have much time to spend right now, while the company is closed for holiday break, and may be taking some shortcuts. In any case, William, you should probably consider that if you try posting about certain things, and the posts are deleted, that you should stop posting about that topic  
 

Maybe I should add further, that if you find some calibrated lensfun Canon RF-S 10-18mm XML data on the Lensfun site (...in Blogs or forum comments there, GitHub, etc.) you could then add that manually to APh, so there is no need to wait until the next APh version will update & support that. - See therefor ...
... etc.

Note, though, that Resources is not really the place to have long discussions and ask questions (as you did in your initial post). The place for that is Questions, if appropriate in these forums at all.
And as these forums are for discussions about Affinity products, and things useful in using them, I kind of agree with @PaulEC that discussion of specific frames (just like discussion of specific printers, or specific cameras) is not really relevant in these forums at all. 
I also agree that it would be nice if the Moderators responded to the member who posted the topic, but they do not have much time to spend right now, while the company is closed for holiday break, and may be taking some shortcuts. In any case, William, you should probably consider that if you try posting about certain things, and the posts are deleted, that you should stop posting about that topic  
 

This is a great idea + thank you for providing the RegEx for me to try. GREP is one of those things I know is really useful, but I never seem to be able to get my head around. It might be vital for me if I'm going to carry on doing silly things like this. Much appreciated. 

I just use the File->Print menu option.

@debraspicher  Exactly what are you trying to measure?
I am guessing AA means anti-alias?
And I assume this is related to your other post in the thread about poor image output.
The rendering clarity of the fonts on Windows is going to be affected by hinting in the font.
Brusher has no hinting at all.
Arial has both standard TrueType hinting and MS ClearType hinting.
Those will affect the gridfitting, grayscale, and smoothing.
Palatino Linotype (which comes with Windows) includes standard TrueType hinting for gridfitting and grayscale.
Georgia (which comes with Windows) includes standard TrueType hinting for gridfitting and grayscale, and ClearType gridfitting and smoothing.
If the rasterizer is using the hints, those fonts with hinting will look better.
The design of the fonts can affect the gridfitting.
The Inter font you are reading here was designed with a 2816 UPM so it will fit better in various interface grids.
The icons you see here are from the FontAwesome font which has a 1792 UPM.
These were decisions they made for drawing and gridfitting.
All fonts will fit the grid better at some sizes rather than other sizes.
So you should test a mini-waterfall of sizes - 8pt, 10pt, 12pt, 14pt, 18pt, 24pt, etc., etc.
Some lines/pt sizes will look better than others (if the hinting is working).
Fira Code is designed with a 1950 UPM and has the hinting to optimize it for best display at 13pt.
That is for a display, but the same thing applies for output images.
Hinting can be optimized for specific sizes, and often is.
Gabriola (which comes with Windows) is designed with a UPM of 4096 to accommodate the fine lines and details in the font. When printed/exported at 300dpi, some of those lines can be only one or two dots.
If those are then anti-aliased, or resampled, it can become a mess.
So what exactly are you trying to measure?
If you are trying to compare the effects of various output settings from different applications, you may want to have a more controlled font selection.
Noto Sans and Noto Serif both have multiple versions available.
OTF unhinted, TTF unhinted, and TTF auto-hinted.
I would expect each of those to look different when output to images from different applications, with different settings.
The fonts could be renamed so all of them could be installed and tested at once.
We could also remove the hinting from any font that looks good, to see if that has any effect. Would take about a minute to remove the hinting from a font.
Open Sans (the current version from Google Fonts) has extensive manual hinting done by an expert (who did some of the Microsoft fonts).
This font, Open Sans, should look good in many different output situations.
Segoe UI is designed to look good at small sizes and is well hinted.
Any of the Microsoft ClearType Collection have extensive manual hinting.
Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, Corbel.
Gabriola has curves galore, and standard TrueType and ClearType hinting.
Always going to be more difficult to render fonts at smaller sizes.
And curvy fonts are even more difficult.
Have to take font hinting into consideration on Windows.
All of this assumes the rasterizer is actually using the hinting.
If it is not, then none of this matters (and the rasterizer is kinda dumb).

I don't really use the afphoto file format so I don't have enough files to perform much of a test. While I avoid placing documents in my afpub files due to potential performance reasons, I hadn't really considered whether they'd consume more memory.
As we page through our Publisher documents and come across linked images and documents that we haven't viewed yet this session, Publisher needs to retrieve the image or document and render it at a higher resolution than the low resolution preview stored in the afpub file. If it's just a photo in the afphoto container, i.e., a single pixel layer, the memory required should be about the same as if it were TIFF or PNG, but if the afphoto has a bunch of layers and adjustment layers then Affinity will need to render all of that and it will take more memory than a flat image.

There's no simple support in Publisher for automatically breaking lines in the middle of a word that way, except at hyphenation points. 
I think you could, though, use Find and Replace, with a regular expression, to insert a zero-width space after every character. Then it should flow as you want. 
I'm away from the computer right now, so I can't provide an example.

It's also probably simpler and faster. But yes, it's weird that using Help has that effect.

How does it behave if you eliminate using Help, and simply use File > New Batch Job directly from the Menu?

@debraspicher: Is Mike right that this discussion is about on-screen appearance within the app? Or is it about export to some file type?

These were all exported as PNG from their respective applications for my own uses and then I laid the exports together as a compilation to make it easier to compare. I'll edit the OP.

Edit: I misunderstood "on-screen" as viewing the type from the perspective of working with screens. (Sorry, toddler in the background being demanding)

Wow! That fixes the issue! (but so weird!!)
Still using the mouse ... Eliminate using Help, and simply use File > New Batch Job directly from the Menu This problem would not occur!!
Thanks.

That's for RAW development. Lens correction is also third-party, but would come from Lensfun, instead.

I'm seeing the same behavior on Windows. Edit Hyperlink in the Hyperlinks panel always shows the first anchor in the anchor list. You can right-click on the Hyperlink in the text and choose "Go to Hyperlink Target" and that will put the cursor at the correct anchor, so it's just the Hyperlink Panel that has it wrong.

I'm seeing the same behavior on Windows. Edit Hyperlink in the Hyperlinks panel always shows the first anchor in the anchor list. You can right-click on the Hyperlink in the text and choose "Go to Hyperlink Target" and that will put the cursor at the correct anchor, so it's just the Hyperlink Panel that has it wrong.

Thanks for replying, Walt, and best wishes!
Changing file format for images is for me not real; it would require weeks and this is for me just an hobby. But I hope that in time all these bugs will be corrected. Having the aphoto file directly included avoids lot of errors and makes maintenance/correction very fast. I insist that a trace file of what Publisher does could be a big help for both the users and the developers; in the worst case, you could try to decode where the catastrophe happened.
In the meantime, I wish a long life to my 64G Mac...
Thanks for all the help you gave me in 2023 and a wonderful 2024 to you and everybody here!
Gianni

A possible additional issue here could be that your document units are in Points (see the Transform Panel) but you are exporting with dimensions measured in Pixels (see the Export Dialog).
If you know you want pixel-perfect exports then I would recommend using a document UOM of Pixels so you can more easily make sure that everything is nicely aligned to the pixel grid.
See attached example where my line is aligned to integer points and is of an integer point width but, when I show the Pixel Grid and view the document in Pixel View Mode, you can see that nothing is ‘nicely aligned’.

When launched, the export panel initially adjusts the artwork preview size so it will fit in it's own window. Something like "Zoom to fit" but in preview space.

More details are found:
When I use the mouse to launch the app: this problem occurs.
When I use the touch pad to launch the app: this problem would not occur.
 
More details:
Scenario A:
Make sure "Affinity Photo" is not opened. Click "Affinity Photo" using the mouse to launch this app. In "Help" - "Search" textbox - input "batch". Select "New Batch Job..." In the "New Batch Job" UI, all objects cannot be clicked (no matter using the mouse or touch pad) Scenario B:
Make sure "Affinity Photo" is not opened. Click "Affinity Photo" using the touch pad to launch this app. In "Help" - "Search" textbox - input "batch". Select "New Batch Job..." In the "New Batch Job" UI, all objects can be clicked (using the mouse or touch pad)