designchris

If there was a global app-wide setting for that, I'd be happy!
Anyway, thanks everyone for joing this truly hot discussion!

Sounds like Adobe CC is too far away from reality to be used in professional environments. But Affinity products for sure are far ahead of Adobe. 

Leading (in paragraph settings) should default to 120% rather than 103% - like in other design software.
Apart from 120% being the standard in other software like Adobe CS. 120% leading is known to be best practice in graphics design in general. It's just a better starting point that does not even have to be changed in most cases.
Moreover a leading value of 120% has even been the default in the successors of Affinity products.
If you don't want to change the default of 103%, please make the default leading value configurable in the settings dialog!
 

120% is a standard in graphics design in general. This is explained in any good book about graphics design/typography.
Haha, yes, 120% can not be suitable, that's why you can change the value if needed. But in the majority of all cases 120% is the way to go - or at least to start with.
A deafult of 103% just makes no sense - unless you want documents with a lack of leading to become a synonym for being "made with affinity". Even PagePlus did it right - like the rest of the world.
 

Still, 103% leading currently is the default in affinity products - and it's just plain stupid.
And it's totally out of question that the person in front of the machine still needs to think.
It's also out of question that a default is just needed as a starting point. Or would you really like to show a popup to ask the user for the desired leading when inserting text? LOL
Moreover, it's causing unnecessary pain when coming from any other competing product. 120% leading is the standard default value - like it or not.

Expect never. Hope for earlier than that.

The fact that this topic is still open and Serif hasn't added this basic function is sad + laughable.   Many, many programs have this function - including many free programs...

I had to do an internet search for this today.
Very sad to see something like this still isn't possible yet.

This is sad, really. Earlier this year I went ahead and purchased all the Affinity products thinking that, come September, I could cancel my Adobe CC subscription and move to Affinity.
All I can say is, thank god I didn't cancel my Adobe CC.
With a simple feature like this missing, I think that Affinity Photo is way behind in even being considered as a Photoshop alternative. Probably on the level of Paint or Paint.NET or something. Sad but kinda true.
Anyway, hopefully they'll pick up and move with feature parity.

OMG, yes, finding this thread is shocking me too!

OMG, yes, finding this thread is shocking me too!

Sorry, but if you read about typography and calligraphy, you'll understand that Words "standard" 120% parameter is not a recommendation, and each font need different settings depending of its design (that's the whole purpose of these different designs, in fact: to combine purpose, lisibility and economy (economy: or how much text by page depending of the parchment/paper cost and selling price you want to achieve)).
Usually, you'll use the font's settings, done by the designer, or you'll accentuate it a little bit depending of  your design, if you have room or not in your page.
It's hard to teach not to use those 120%, since people trust too much "default parameters" instead of thinking and analysing their work, but usually 120% is too much and lines will look like independent lines in a title, or it'll be a pain to read a long text.
Reading good books or typographers’ blogs can help, for example:
http://paris.blog.lemonde.fr/
http://www.typogabor.com/
Here he talks more about "gris typo" and justification parameters since it's a reccurrent problem with ours apps, giving tip to be carefull of leading in the same way
 

I would recommend to set leading for each style in pt. None of this default stuff.

No, it's not, at least in Publisher. The default leading is taken from the font metrics. For example, for Arial it's 103%, but for Calibri it's about 122%.

For Gabriola it’s 170% (to allow for the optional swashes, some of which are huge).

I think Dave means if you want 120% to be the default then feel free to set that as the default.
I would try it with some text selected in the No Style for Paragraph and Character then go to the Paragraph Studio. Select the leading and set to % and choose 120% and then go to Edit > Defaults > Synchronize from Selection and then Edit > Defaults > Save. I would not advise doing this because I think it is a foolish choice but if anyone wants to they can try. 
Again I would strongly advise to NOT do this.
I did it for my Space After Paragraph setting it to 0 points and that has stuck. I am happy with that.

Yes, and since I use a grid for body text, I adjust leading accordingly for body text, and play around for titles and headers, etc. I don't need a popup, when the text feel right, I set the grid, the leading of paragraphs, and voilà!

Kinda like I mentioned in the first response...

What problem would that be?
 
By this do you mean ignoring the values provided by the font and using an arbitrary number that is unlikely to have anything to do with reality?

Define in your text style text size and leading. No suffering. 
First thing in creating a publication should be setting styles. (Well, first is setting document size.. but after that.)

Publisher is out and suffers from the same problem. It's just incredible.
PagePlus, Adobe CS, ... and even Word do it right - but Affinity people seem to persist on knowing it better.
As much as I like Affinity products and the idea of breaking Adobe's monopoly - such basic stupid decisions almost make the product a no-go.