William Overington

I used some clip art from Serif PagePlus X7. In PagePlus I enlarged the reindeer and I flipped the hedgehog horizontally. I set it all out in an A5 horizontal publication in Affinity Publisher. The text is in the Annie BTN font, which was bundled with PagePlus X7. I initially typeset using Arial but changed the font as Annie BTN is narrower setwise so I could use a bigger point size so as to fill the space better. I set it all out on a plain background first then added a large rectangle, changed the fill colour and then moved the rectangle to the back. I exported the whole page as a png, setting the height as 512 pixels. William

Yes, but I seem to remember there was a team of four people, including those two people. Indeed there was one episode where a group of four criminals dressed up similarly and went around misrepresenting themselves as the real team and they all met up at the end. William

Alright.

Could someone at Serif possibly say please, as long as it is not a proprietary secret, how does the word File get onto the menu bar in Affinity Publisher please? For example, is it sort of like the following. Lettering(20, 100, "File") where Lettering is a function either within the program or supplied by the compiler system. The reason I ask is because I am wondering if in the special version that I am suggesting that that could be replaced by something like Lettering(20, 100,LocalizedVersion("File")) where LocalizedVersion would be a function in the program with a parameter of a string and a returned value of a string, and the LocalizedVersion function would search the customized text file for the string File| and if it found it then use the text after the | character on the same line in the customized text file as the returned string and if it did not find it then return the input string. By doing it that way the method would not depend upon the word File being on any particular line of the text file, so more searching would be needed to find strings but there would be the benefit of the customizable file for each Affinity program would be much simpler to construct and any errors in making a customized version of the customizable file (such as accidentally deleting one line of it) would tend to have only a minimum, more easily detectable, effect rather than a major effect. Certainly in principle the search would be through the file but in practice maybe the file could be rad in to the program at the start and thus the searching could be done by searching a data structure in the software rather than keep opening the file as such William

Would it be practical for Serif to produce a special version of Affinity Publisher that at run time gets all its labels by looking in a customizable file? For example, suppose that there were a text file that has the following File|File New|New Open...|Open... Open Recent|Open Recent Close|Close and so on and then there could be a version of the text file that had been customized for Czech where the text after the | is changed for the same meaning in Czech, and there could be a version of the text file that had been customized for Latvian where the text after the | is changed for the same meaning in Latvian, and so on for various languages. If that facility were available then the versions of the text file could be produced by community effort, so that Serif would not need to make a commercial outlay for each separate language. Then it would be a matter of using the correct customized version of the file and at start up the special version of Affinity Publisher would become customized to that language. The words are put twice in the original version of the customizable file so that by default the original English would be used. So if, say, someone starts to make a customized version of the file for Czech then those labels that have been set up for Czech would be displayed in Czech and the rest would be in English rather than be blank. That way, successive versions of the customized version of the file could gradually be produced over a period of time. The customized files could be made available in the forum. William

If you were to start a new document in Affinity Publisher, landscape format, wide but only as deep as needed and include each character that you want to include then produce a PDF document, then the PDF document could be used as a typecase for an end user to select a character and copy it onto the clipboard and paste into a document. It is not a good a solution as what you request, but you could do it now and it would have the benefit of all the characters for one topic being in the same document so that an end user would not need to already know in which Unicode block the character is listed in the glyph browser. Here are some samples of similar things that I produced some years ago. They can be very useful sometimes. These were produced using PagePlus. Affinity Publisher has the advantage that the PDF can include characters from al, of the Unicode planes. Using the copy and paste can be a bit clunky at times as it may well be necessary to format it all to the correct font. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/typecase_welsh_accented_characters.pdf http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/typecase_esperanto.pdf A possible benefit of trying the above is that the results produced by community effort could help Serif if Serif wants to implement your suggestion, because Serif could then use such PDFs as a guide to how to provide what you request without needing to do all of the specialist linguistic analysis themselves. William

'Regarding the picture of Ferdinand Magellan. It is very good. When I saw the thread listed, I wondered if there would be any reference to the Magellanic clouds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magellanic_Clouds I first leaned of them in the 1950s. I had a book possibly about A4 size pages or so, and it was not like a text book it was more like a serious subject comic-style book and it was black and white text on paper and also large line drawings and throughout it were also blank squares about 2 inches by 2 inches or so each with a number near it and in the centre was a double spread pull out sheet of numbered stickers printed in full colour on glue-backed-paper, like the glue on old fashioned envelopes, to cut out and stick in the squares, thus producing quite a colourful book. One of the pictures was of men on Magellan's ship looking up at the sky and one pointing at what are now known as the Magellanic clouds. I am just wondering whether you might like to consider making a second version with the Magellanic clouds in them as well. Your picture already has a black background, it would perhaps being more a matter of deciding how to feature them. William

Google translate gives the following translation, detecting the language as Chinese. > Hello, my name is Tengis, a typeface designer in China and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. My main font design direction is traditional Mongolian. Traditional Mongolian is left-to-right, top-to-bottom text, so the font will use the Mirror version when arranging the article, and then reverse the text box...I feel comfortable when using Affinity Publisher. I have already helped me a lot. If there is further support in traditional Mongolian, I think it will be cool. If you are willing to do such an update, I am willing to participate.

@Pattou Thank you. William

@Pattou Very nice. You have made it so that it looks like it is a photograph of a painting, perhaps sort of like a painting by John Constable. Could we possibly see what you started with as well please? William

The requested tag has now been added. Excellent. Thank you. William

I have just seen the following. I am on the lady's e-mailing list for her new posts. https://www.michellesblog.co.uk/autumn-leaves-2/ William

Well, I cannot play a musical instrument. Also, although I can think of a tune for a song and I sing various of my songs when I am doing housework and so on, I cannot go from a tune to producing written musical notation. So I find it often quite easy to have a tune for a song, it seems to sort of emerge as I write the lyrics. A solution that I have used is to record me singing and publish the result within a document in the hope that maybe someone who can sing well could hear my singing and thereby understand the tune that I intend and its speed and so on and then, based on that understanding, could produce a good performance. For examples, http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/the_mobile_art_shop.pdf and http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/cyberspace_cafe.pdf which were produced using Serif PagePlus. To do that I needed to embed a .wav sound file into a PDF document, which is possible using PagePlus - I needed to choose an output level for the PDF that is more than the basic level so that Adobe Reader will play the sound file. Playback of the sound depends on the way it is played back. I have found that playback online on the web often does not work depending upon how the we browser tries to read the PDF document, but downloading to local storage and then using Adobe Reader works well, both for me and for people who have reported their results to me. If one has a musical score written out in music notation it would in principle be possible to typeset some musical notation in Affinity Publisher. It needs a music font. There are some about. I have not looked at them in detail and I am not knowledgeable about musical notation beyond the basics, such as for single notes such as are used in music for a recorder. William

The article about Peter Quince refers to quoins. The word 'quoins' is one that I have known for over fifty years, but only in the context of letterpress printing. I was unaware of other uses until now. https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/quoin William