[Affinity Publisher: Microtypography]

A little more on the subject if you wish to dig deeper — Donald Knuth (of TeX fame in the typesetting world) & Michael Plass published an article in 1981 called Breaking Paragraphs into Lines. Here is the Abstract:

Quote

This paper discusses a new approach to the problem of dividing the text of a paragraph into lines of approximately equal length. Instead of simply making decisions one line at a time, the method considers the paragraph as a whole, so that the final appearance of a given line might be influenced by the text on succeeding lines. A system based on three simple primitive concepts called ‘boxes’, ‘glue’, and ‘penalties’ provides the ability to deal satisfactorily with a wide variety of typesetting problems in a unified framework, using a single algorithm that determines optimum breakpoints. The algorithm avoids backtracking by a judicious use of the techniques of dynamic programming. Extensive computational experience confirms that the approach is both efficient and effective in producing high-quality output. The paper concludes with a brief history of line-breaking methods, and an appendix presents a simplified algorithm that requires comparatively few resources. 

 

[Affinity Publisher: Microtypography]

Just a quick follow-up here. 

Excellent, usable interface for handling margin kerning! Thank you Serif!

Can't wait for the paragaph-based comp engine!

[Affinity Publisher: Microtypography]

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction Chrysogonus! 

[Affinity Publisher: Microtypography]

Greetings everyone,

Having had a chance to peek at the Publisher Beta, I'm interested to know if there has been any follow-up with regard to implementing a microtypographical engine. A key document (for me, at any rate) is Hàn Thế Thành's 2000 dissertation Micro-typographic extensions to the TeX typesetting system (3.5 MB PDF). I generally use ConTeXt for typesetting, in part due to the excellent control over the implementation of these functions. I would love an Affinity-quality WYSIWYG typesetting program that included a similar fineness of control, at the least with margin kerning.

Thanks for listening!

[DXF or DWG file import in Affinity Designer]

+1 This would be extremely helpful for my workflow. I have to use Illustrator CS6 to get proper SVG files from DWG — any more recent Illustrator has trouble with the placement of layers

[Designer pen tool, node appearance control]

Thanks for the response, Gabriel.

What I have in mind is the black circles (in my sketch) indicating the node anchors (squares in your sketch), automatically rather than manually like in my sketch. So even in a straight pen line, if I dropped node anchors along the way, they would have a controllable color/opacity/etc.

Probably not needed by many. I can go forward manually :-)

Best,

David

[Designer pen tool, node appearance control]

Hi gang,

I may be missing something right before my eyes.... but I'm struggling to find a way to control the appearance of nodes while using the pen tool. See the rectangle attached. I'd like to be able to have typical color/thickness/opacity controls for the nodes of a given pen line. Is this possible?

Many thanks