William Overington

Hello Alfred Thank you. I cannot find SimHei listed in my supply of fonts in Affinity Publisher and I have had a look in the Fonts directory as well. Here is a png for what I have got displayed. William

Now, each CJK character in Unicode has a code point. I also seem to remember seeing somewhere sometime, nothing to do with the Unicode character map, a picture from a book of Chinese characters and below each of them was a four digit number in the style as used in English. I cannot quite place it but it might have been something to do with sending telegrams originally and might be used when recording a name in a document, akin to how someone from the west is asked to spell his or her name. I am wondering if the original request is something along the lines of asking for Affinity Publisher to have a panel into which one can enter such a number and at the touch of a button the character is entered into the document. That would need the availability of an electronic file that links those code numbers to Unicode code points so that Affinity Publisher can decode the number input and then choose the appropriate Unicode character. Maybe such a file is available somewhere already. Maybe it is open source. William

I have the following fonts, at least SimSun which is CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) from plane 0 of Unicode. SimSun ExtB which is from palne 2 of Unicode NSimSun https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/simsun William

So I copied the purportedly Arial text onto the clipboard and pasted it into WordPad, and the text displayed in WordPad is not in the same font and is listed as SimSun in WordPad. Repeating that with the purportedly Times New Roman text gives the same result, SimSun. The SimSun font may well be the same font that is purportedly Times New Roman in Affinity Publisher. Maybe the system 'knows' that Arial is sanserif and substituted a font and knows that Times New Roman is serifed and substituted a different font. So, what is the font substituted for Arial in Affinity Publisher? Should Affinity Publisher ideally have changed the name of the font to that which is being used? Is that possible or is it lower down in the system? Anyway, I am posting this and then try to use SimSun in Affinity Publisher and report back. William

I have emailed two experts and received replies. Unfortunately there is not enough information for them to ascertain what is the problem that is being encountered. I know very little about Chinese. I tried a test. I copied the poem that is on page 3 of the following document onto the clipboard. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_the_novel_chapter_034.pdf In Microsoft Edge I searched for translate and got the Bing Translator I pasted my poem into the left-side anel and chose Chinese Traditional as the target language. I copied the result onto the clipboard. I then used Google translate to translate back to Englsh, just to observe what a round-trip with two different machine translators would do. The round trip is not exactly back to the original but is very close and the meaning is the same. So, the text in Chinese still on the clipboard I pasted into a new Affinity Publisher document, with the font set as Arial at 24 point. (more about this later! not as it appears at first!) A display is produced. It seems to be Arial. Changing the font to Times New Roman produces a different display. Yet upon checking, neither font seems to have Chinese characters, so it seems that the system might have substituted fonts. So entering Chinese characters from the Glyph Browser using Arial or Times New Roman is not possible. Investigation is continuing, but please join in. William

A reboot put it right. But I am still wondering what happened. William

I started Affinity Publisher this morning and I have found a weird effect. Sometimes, on previous occasions, with PagePlus X7 I had the problem that upon start up the words on the menu bar did not show. A reboot of the computer usually fixed that. But the loss of text was total. Today I have just started Affinity Publisher and the words on the menu bar are there, and I drew a text frame, but there is no name at all in the font name text box though the word Font: is to the left of the text box, and I cannot get text to appear in the text frame of the publication. I now intend to try a reboot, but it does seem strange that the words are nontheless in the menu bar and the cascading menus. So I can do Text Glyph Browser, but then the panel is blank! I appreciate that this might be something to do with the computer and maybe nothing to do with Affinity Publisher, yet I feel that I should report it anyway as the problem is observable when trying to use Affinity Publisher. William

In the help system, under Typography there is included the following. Character variants—allows specific character variants within the text. Stylistic Sets—allows you to automatically apply a font's alternate characters throughout the text. I am not sure of variants, (can anyone explain please?) but for alternates they are produced by a person making an OpenType font using fontmaking software such as High-Logic FontCreator. To make an alternate available in a font the font designer needs both to include a glyph for the design in the font and also to include OpenType code in the font so that the font knows of which particular letter the new design is an alternate. So, for example, if the font has a letter e with a horizontal line and there is an alternate design where the line is slightly angled going up from left to right, then the OpenType code needs to include information that the alternate design is an alternate of a letter e. There is a forum for High-Logic software and you could learn how to do it if you so choose. William

I do not know whether Affinity Publisher has, or will have, a special facility for typesetting mathematics. However, on this computer at least, if one uses the font Times New Roman and then uses Text Glyph Browser and then where it says All, use the arrow at the right of that panel to open the drop down menu, then there is a section labelled Mathematical Operators and there are characters such as the integral sign, the summation sign and the root sign and those can be inserted in a document. Arial also has those symbols. The Unicode Standard also has some more complicated symbols, such as double integral, but fewer fonts support more than just the basic ones. Mathematics is often typeset using italic type. So one could probably be able to typeset many mathematical formulae in Affinity Publisher using Times New Roman italic, and maybe needing to have a few text frames one over the other to be able to do things like the limits of integrals. In the old days Word 97 used to have a section for setting mathematical formulae, but I think that it produced an image rather than using characters directly. William

Thank you. I have now added that information. I was intending to post this to try it out, but I have since noticed that it has acted retrospectively on my previous posts already. William

Thank you for your reply. I checked again but it is not displayed for me. I am using Windows 10. Are you using Windows or a Mac please? As there are two different finding can some other readers check this please and report their findings in this thread, stating whether they are suing Windows or a Mac please? William

To me, the initial splash screen when starting Affinity Publisher is too small and lacks adequate contrast in the lettering and the details about build number are too small. Now I do have the brightness control on the computer turned right down and I do use Affinity Publisher with the grey colour scheme rather than the default colour scheme, so maybe they are factors. Generally I have found that most people have brightness controls set far brighter than do I, so maybe that is a factor in this. The logo looks fine though. Could you please consider changing the lettering on that initial splash screen from grey to the Affinity Orange colour that is in the logo? William Overington Wednesday 16 January 2019

Thank you. William

How does getting an update work please? I started with the present beta so have not updated before. William

Oh, is the beta going expire before there is either a later beta version on a finished product ready to buy? Could someone from Serif clarify the position please? William

Hello Alfred What is 'creep' in this context please? So to make the comic book, what does one do? Maybe export art as a png or a vector graphic and then place the png or vector graphic into an Affinity Publisher document? I have found that one needs to use File Place... in Affinity Publisher. William

When starting a new publication there is a choice of a number of preset page sizes, as well as the availability for having a custom size. I am pleased to note that Affinity Publisher includes large sizes such as A0 and A1 as preset page size choices. In the thread https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/76773-need-expert-publisher-help/ there is discussion of producing a publication of a comic book. Apparently there is at least one (quasi-)standard size for a comic book. When setting up the size of a publication, could you consider having available a page preset choice of comic book please? It appears that the width would be 168 mm but it is not quite clear at present whether the height should be but 260 mm seems a good choice. William

I am hoping to suggest to Serif that comic book size is added to the choice of preset sizes available when setting up a publication. I have not used Affinity Designer so I cannot advise you one way or the other. William

I found this mention about the size. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-standard-size-of-a-comic-book-from-Marvel-and-DC-Comics I also found the following. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_comic_book#Format The width seems to be 160 mm and the height could be 257 mm or 260 mm. Is that the size that you want please? If so, which height please? William

I do not claim to be an expert on this but I thought that as nobody else has replied and the problem looks interesting, I decided to have a go. I think that I may have solved some of the problem. I am not sure of the size of the comic book page so I have used A4 (297mm tall by 210 mm wide for each page). I tried to make an 8-page comic book. So, File New Then the choices on the panel as Print A4 millimetres Prefer embedded 8 Tick the Facing pages choices Horizontal Start on right. Now, Use the following, File Spread setup Margins [Comment: For this example, suppose that outer margins are 30 mm; and the inner margins are a total of 30 mm, that is, 15 mmm on each page.] All Spreads, set inner margins to 15 mm and outer mm to 30 mm. Now with page 1 showing in the main workspace, File Spread setup Margins Current spread, set inner margin to 30 mm and outer margin to 30 mm. Now with page 8 showing in the main workspace, File Spread setup Margins Current spread, set inner margin to 30 mm and outer margin to 30 mm. File Save I hope that this helps. William

> … (standard comic book size) … What size is that please for the purpose of this question? William

Thank you both. William

Could you explain what you mean please? William

Thank you for the links. I have posted to one of the threads. Maybe my idea will become implemented. Wow! William

I suppose that Affinity Publisher could be designed so that as well as an insert hyperlink feature, there is an automated insert hyperlink and QR code feature, such that a hyperlink and a QR code with the hyperlink information encoded into it could both be added into the document as one automated facility. That could be good. William