Laganama

Hi @Laganama,
Thanks for raising this up. Somehow it fell off our radar. I will make sure this gets fixed.

This topic I'd like to describe is maybe for Feedback & Suggestions part of this forum, but when there is a discussion about improving the transform panel, I would also (and more) prefer the ability to override the Link option for maintaining the object aspect ratio. For example when unlinked (do not aspect ratio) and typing some value in one field, hiting Enter together with for example Cmd/Ctrl or some other modifier key would override the curent link setting and make the size change constrained. And vice versa...

Over on the very long footnotes thread, we got a little sidetracked when we got to discussing word processors versus layout apps, of which the main element of our discussion focused on justification quality. Finally, it was proposed to move that discussion on justification elsewhere, and as this existing thread already focuses on the very question, I have suggested continuing in this thread.
For historical reference, the discussion on the other thread where we began this off-topic discussion starts with this post and continues onto the next page (along with the usual influx of new users adding “must have footnotes” mixed in):
So, continuing the discussion here…
For anyone who is even a little interested in justification quality, I would like to recommend this very fine article (probably many of you already read it when the current site existed as Indesign Secrets):
https://creativepro.com/abcs-hj/
It is an excellent overview of how to get good results of justification, going beyond what the average word processor can do. This article has value for the present discussion in two regards. First, until you get near the end of the first page, just about everything it says are principles that can be applied in Publisher in its existing form, so you get an immediate win there. Secondly, starting with the image of the yellow highlighting, three additional features are briefly mentioned that help with still better justification results that are not in available in Publisher (all of which have been discussed at different times on this forum, including some in this thread):
H&J Violations highlighting Glyph scaling Paragraph (multiline) composer As this is a feature request thread, I think it is good to point out both what is good about Publisher and what else can be done to take it further. Any one of these three features would be welcome toward the end goal of better justification. A multiline composer is my favorite, but until that comes, I think I would most appreciate H&J violations highlighting to help make manual adjustments go faster. Perhaps that is easier to implement?
[Side rant: The formatting of the article I just recommended is terrible for a site promoting good layout. If I had to guess, I would suppose it happened this way when the rather old article was brought over to the new website design. The entire article is encoded as a single paragraph (<p>), so there is no way to delineate paragraphs with either spacing or text indents. Edit: I contacted the website about this, and I got a kind response explaining it is the result of a migration and combining two different sites into one. There are many older posts (this one from 2009) that suffer from this problem, and they require being fixed individually. But they did fix this one up for us.]

I have been meaning to comment on this for a few days since the idea occurred to me from another thread. I am posting my thoughts in this thread because this is where the feature is being discussed.
There seems to be a misconception among some that a paragraph composer only benefits justified text, but this is not true. In fact, it smoothes out the ragged right even in left-aligned text. To illustrate, consider the screenshot below, where I have made a text box in InDesign with filler text and duplicated it (so that it is the same size, same format). In the box on the right, I changed the composer from the default "Adobe Paragraph Composer" to the "Adobe Single-line Composer" (roughly similar to output in Publisher).

I highlighted the ragged section in each specimen with red dashed lines, where I have aligned them to the shortest and longest lines of text. This illustrates how ragged each approach is.
Now to be fair, I do want to admit that one could find examples where the difference is less pronounced (or even more pronounced)—or even examples where the result is identical. The paragraph composer considers several options and attempts to choose the one that is least ragged, while the single line composer just fits as much text on each line as possible and lets the text fall where it may. Sometimes the natural flow is in fact the best choice. The point is that the paragraph composer on average has better (narrower) gaps, as it tries to give the best results possible given the column width and text formatting.
The results can be improved by turning on hyphenation when it is appropriate to the design, and this is equally true whether text is left-aligned or justified. But there is a difference between left-aligned and justified text in this: justified text suffers particularly in narrow columns. The wider the column, the more room there is to average out the extra space across the whole line, to a point where it looks quite acceptable. But on left-aligned text, the entire space is kept at the end of the line rather than averaged out across the whole line, to the effect that the absolute width of the ragged gaps (the portions I highlighted) can appear just as drastic on wide columns as on narrow columns.
I hope by this example to point out that the benefit of a multiline/paragraph composer has broader application than narrow-column justified text.

I’m surprised how little discussion there has been around the forum about this. This is not exactly a workflow problem is as it is a more fundamental issue of quality of output. In cases where paragraph justification is required, InDesign and others like it will simply produce superior results in this regard than software that does not have some sort of multiline composer.
I’m surprised more people haven’t requested this feature. For me, as I do plenty of justified text, often in narrower columns with nonbreaking spaces (that is, where a basic single line composer shows its weaknesses), I could not recommend taking such a step backward from what we are able to do now in InDesign.
I would have thought that this kind of thing would be priority for professional layout software: naturally the first version of any software will have fewer features, but one would hope that it would do its few things well. As far as justification, it is more like Word than InDesign**. However, I can be patient with the developers in this: whereas I would think this to be a core feature when starting a new app of its kind from scratch, I suppose the reality is that Publisher is not truly starting from scratch: it is building on the foundation of Affinity Designer and perhaps to a lesser extent Affinity Photo, and clearly a multiline composer is far from a priority in those apps. With those as its foundation, I can understand that a multiline composer might not come right away. I just hope Serif understands how important it is for the quality to truly shine. Without it, I don’t think I could use Publisher for work requiring significant amounts of justification.
**To be fair, Publisher does currently handle justification at least somewhat better than Word, in that it has customizable word spacing and letter-spacing, so it’s got at least part of the solution, but the gappy spacing still remains.

Like everyone else, I am absolutely thrilled about the beta, and can't wait to see how it develops.
One of the key reasons to use LaTeX or InDesign over Microsoft Word is their superior type composition. While Word simply dumps in text as it occurs, without regard to spacing or line breaks, these other programs look at an entire paragraph to remove rivers of type, reduce the need for hyphenation, and so forth, just as human type compositors do. In TeX, this is the Knuth-Plass Line Breaking Algorithm; InDesign has the Adobe Paragraph Composer (which it uses by default, but also has an option to turn this off with a single-line composer). Implementing this in Affinity Publisher would make it far easier to produce professionally typeset documents.

I forgot to finish my previous post, sorry.
Otherwise, we will have unfinished tools like Tables which is, practically, useless -- no text <=> table, no multipage capability, no tablenotes...

Transform origin does not work similarly also when marking two or more objects. The document does not even need to be multi-page.
I'm not at all familiar with what it takes to fix such bugs and what's involved in Affinity code, but with every version of Affinity there are bugs in tools that worked in the past and suddenly their are broken. Despite the fact that I love Affinity and always look forward to new features, there's always a disappointment, because again, there will be also a bug in such a basic thing that used to work properly and the fix will take a very long time.

Honestly, I'd much rather Serif focus on fixing the many new and long-standing bugs in 2.2 before adding anymore features. Having a shiny new blend tool {or insert your feature request here} which will probably add new bugs, while still having to deal with countless existing bugs and workarounds doesn't exactly fill me with anticipation. As it is I keep seeing comments around social media, the forums, and the web on how folks are getting increasingly frustrated with the bugginess of the Affinity suite. You really don't want "buggy" to be the first thing that comes to mind when somebody mentions Affinity.
Serif please focus on getting the next few upcoming 2.x releases into a stable suite of apps that new and existing users can rely on for years to come.

Apps: Publisher and Designer
Platforms: All
In the layers panel if you alt-click add new layer when you have a selection, all items in that selection are moved to the new layer created. In other words this behaves similar to grouping, but rather than creating a group it puts your selection into a new layer.
Additionally for desktop versions you will find a new option in the right click menu for "Move Selection to New Layer" which achieves the same thing.
 


This makes it far easier to organise your work into layers, without having to create an empty layer first and drag the items you want into it.

THIS TOPIC STARTED IN 2018???!!!  AND STILL IT DOES NOT WORK PROPERLY!!! ???
I have copied and pasted from many table types into many other table types with no issues whatsoever
I have copied csv and pasted into tables, html into tables, excel into sheets, open office into excel, vice versa
I have manipulated tables extensively
AP is the most cumbersome to work with tables i have ever seen.
C'mon! Get this fixed already!
The only way I can get data pasted into tables is to paste it into some text format in AP first, then copy it and paste it into a table by selecting the exact columns and rows for the data. Takes a lot of extra time. It's almost like I have gone back into the 1990's.
 

Hi @Laganama
Thanks for your report, I've passed this along to the devs for investigation.

This problem occurs in virtually all modal windows, such as the New Document Settings window or the Preferences window. Sometimes also within the Transform panel fields. The same scenario: bring up a new window with input fields, double-click in a field and enter a new value. 

Thanks @Laganama.
I'm checking if this is already logged and will do so in case it's not.
EDIT: Already logged and updated now.

Hi folks,
I thought I'd give you a quick progress update and let you see some of things we've been working on at Serif Labs.  We now have a scripting core that we're reasonably happy with and have put together a little test area where we can run Javascript code, so I thought I'd show you some of that. Things to note:
This is all VERY early, like pre-pre-pre-alpha. The JS API is extremely fluid and is constantly changing. This is not how the Affinity suite will run scripts and plugins; it is just a sandbox window for internal testing. There is still a huge amount of work to be done. I can't provide any timescales for when scripting will be publicly released, for Beta or Retail. Constructive feedback is welcomed, but I won't be able to answer all questions - see previous points. I'm not claiming any of these examples are particularly useful on their own; they're just to demonstrate some basic scripting functionality. Re Javascript async - yes, we support it, I've just not recorded anything yet. The sleep calls are there for screen-recording purposes only. Here are some demos as low-res gifs. If you want to take a closer look, movs are attached.
Create a Mandelbrot image

Some dodgy physics

Insert a dragon curve

"Emojification" (translation?) of text

Create a grid of colours
 
Select and hide based on hue

Replay a document's edit history

mandelbrot.mov
balls.mov
dragon.mov
grid.mov
hue.mov
replay.mov
emoji.mov

Even when unchecked the "Select Hidden Objects" option the Select Same or Select Object command still selects objects, which are hidden. I noticed that this only applies if the object is set to visible, but its parent group or layer is set to hidden. For me as a user the object is in fact hidden, but Affinity maintain it as if it is still visible. Perhaps it would be better if the object in question was also perceived as hidden by Affinity.

Hi Laganama,
Welcome to the forums
Thank you for making us aware of this I have logged this with our developers to be fixed in a future version. I'll update this thread once I have more info.
Thanks
C

No. The length of time since it has been requested unfortunately does not have anything to do with it. For one thing, there are many hundreds of requests (many of them good ones that I too would like to see eventually), and Serif can't get to them all right away. Furthermore, so far as I know, Serif has not yet given any indication that they do intend to make changes in regard to further underline options.

I'm seeing the same thing on Ventura. It's the Place dialog opening from any panel, not just Text Frame. And it's just Place, not any similar windows like Open, Export, Import Content, Print, Save as Package. I never work with undocked panels so I'd never encountered it before.
To replicate it:
Open an undocked panel Choose File > Place - it opens centred as it should Move the undocked panel a bit Choose File > Place - it opens from the undocked panel instead of the document window @Laganama Your signature needs to be updated for v2 now
Cheers

Thanks for that. I tested that myself before I posted, and it did not work. It would seem I got tripped up by the “Match case” issue myself. 

Affinity Publisher uses the Hunspell Engine for spell checking and it also allows for additional Hunspell dictionaries to be added. You can download additional dictionaries from LibreOffice's GitHub page here but you can find direct links in the below post. 

Once you've downloaded the correct file(s), you can use them in Affinity Publisher by following the below instructions:
Please note: There are some differences between how you install Hunspell dictionaries for macOS/Windows, since we use the default spelling dictionaries available within macOS but it's also possible to add custom Hunspell dictionaries too.
macOS
You may already have Spelling dictionaries available but not active within macOS. To check, go to:
System Preferences >  Keyboard > Text and select Set up... from the Spelling drop down menu. Please check the required language if available. If it is, check the required language and restart Affinity Publisher for the dictionary to appear within the app.
If the required language is not available within macOS, you can install standard Hunspell dictionaries for use with Affinity Publisher. Hunspell dictionaries consist of two files, xx_XX.dic and xx_XX.aff. Copy both the .dic and .aff files to: ~/Library/Spelling
Once you have done this the language should become available to select from the Spelling drop down menu in System Preferences >  Keyboard > Text. Once you've checked the required language, restart Affinity Publisher for the dictionary to appear within the app.
Hyphenation dictionaries can also be installed in a similar way but they must be installed into a subfolder. Navigate to ~/Library/Spelling/ as above and create a subfolder with a name in the format of xx-XX ( substituting xx-XX for the locale id ). The dictionary comes as a single file with a name in the format hyph_xx_XX.dic - this file should be copied to the subfolder. Now restart Affinity Publisher for the dictionary to appear within the app.
Windows
You can add additional dictionaries and hyphenation dictionaries by going to Edit > Preferences > Tools. The default Additional dictionary folder used by the app is C:\ProgramData\Affinity\Common\1.0\Dictionaries but you can change this location by clicking Browse... - Please make sure that you specify a folder that holds all subfolders for each locale and not one specific locale folder as this will not work!

To copy any downloaded dictionaries and hyphenation dictionaries to the Additional dictionary folder click Open... but before copying your files to this folder you will need to create a subfolder with its name in the format of xx_XX ( substituting xx_XX for the locale id ). Once you’ve done this you can copy your xx_XX.dic, xx_XX.aff and hyph_xx_XX.dic files to the subfolder. Now restart Affinity Publisher for the dictionaries to appear within the app.

Please note: Any changes to dictionaries require that you restart Affinity Publisher

Hi there,
here you can download files suitable for Slovak and Czech hyphenation. Copy them to the directory according to https://affinity.help/publisher/en-US.lproj/pages/Text/hyphenation.html.
hyph_cs_CZ.dic
hyph_sk_SK.dic

Unfortunately the mesh issue is also still broken.
Screen Recording 2021-08-17 at 12.20.04.mov

Hi folks,
What's the situation with this bug?
It's still present on the last Designer version.
 
This is BTW just a workaround, which is sadly not complete. As any attempts to set back pressure profile —onto the solid style— will end up with the brush texture applied again.
Note that clicking the "properties…" button on the Stroke panel, keeps displaying Texture related content, even if you are in solid style.
The only workaround I've found to really switch back to solid style is the following:
Create a filled rectangle that will frame your buggy stroke Move it under the stroke layer Intersect the two layers Switch back the result curve from fill to stroke Open it if needed (cause the curve fill be close by the operation) Set your solid style pressure Voilà! --> but this is quite some time loss.

FontLab has something called Tunni Lines which make this imaginary connection real. Makes it easy to manipulate both handles at once.