William Overington

Can one include an attachment in a PDF document that is produced using Affinity Publisher? For example, sometimes I would like to use a font in a publication and also include the font as an attachment to the PDF document so that a reader may use the font for himself or herself if he or she so chooses. For the avoidance of doubt this is for fonts that I have made myself and so I own the intellectual property rights and have every right to publish it. For the avoidance of doubt, I know that one can embed a font in a PDF document so that the display is good even if the font used in the document is not installed on the computer where the PDF document is being displayed. This enquiry is not about doing that. This is about actually including an attachment within a PDF document. The attachment can then be extracted using Adobe Reader. William Overington Saturday 29 December 2018

> What’s a cuboctahedron to the uninitiated? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuboctahedron > All the indications are that Serif has no plans to add any 3D ‘shapes’. What are those indications please? 3D 'shapes' could be like the PagePlus Quick Cube and Quick Cylinder in that once the handles have been adjusted, the image is fixed in the document. However, a further step may be possible. I remember that some years ago Adobe introduced support for 3d models within Adobe Reader. There was a free PDF document which was a demonstration. One could open the PDF document in the (free) Adobe Reader and within the text there was an illustration which was the 3d model and one could rotate it. It was good. Years ago Serif produced ImpactPlus. William

Whereas with the Polygon tool one has the ability to rotate through an angle, I suppose that with a Cube tool there could be controls for roll, pitch and yaw as was done with ImpactPlus. I suppose that one could have Cylinder tool, Cone Tool, Pyramid Tool, Dodecahedron Tool and Cuboctahedron Tool as well, all with roll, pitch and yaw capability. Then there could be Jewel Tool. William

So I made a test font ligatst5.otf Ligature test 5 and I changed the glyph name for the 'Good day.' glyph to become asterisk_a_h_h and I changed the OpenType code accordingly. That is the glyph name is nothing to do with the !123 sequence but is nevertheless made up of standard Postscript names used in fonts. The line of text in the OpenType code is as follows. sub exclam one two three -> asterisk_a_h_h; I installed the font and made a copy of test004a.afpub as test005.afpub and simply formatted the text with the Ligature test 5 font. The PDF document test005.pdf displayed the two special glyphs well. Copying from the PDF and pasting to WordPad gave *ahh for the plain text version. William ligatst5.otf test005.pdf

If the glyph for 'Good day.', which is accessed by !123 has a PostScript name within the font of exclam_one_two_three then the !123 can be pasted from the PDF to WordPad, but if the glyph for 'Good day.', which is accessed by !123 has a PostScript name within the font of good_day then the !123 cannot be pasted from the PDF to WordPad. It is as if the correct code points for !123 are decoded from the glyph name, which may or may not be the case. However, the spaces around the !123 do not get pasted. I am wondering if this is because the width of the glyph for 'Good day.' is a lot wider than the combined width of the !123 characters upon which a glyph substitution takes place. William

Thank you. Well, et is not a standard ligature, yet that has worked fine. > BTW, this works properly for applications using the Adobe PDF engine. Which particular test, with which font, does "this" in the above line refer please? William

Just in case it was a more general issue if the ligature has a space in front of it or after it, I produced the following .afpub files and PDF documents. The copying from the PDFs to WordPad works fine. So it is not general. test002a.afpub test002a.pdf test004b.afpub test004b.pdf

Hello Alfred > What were your export settings, William? PDF for web. > Does the PDF file include an embedded subset of your font? Yes. I remember seeing a setting for that the other day with another project, but it is the default and I did not touch it. > After you copied the symbol from the PDF, where did you try to paste it? WordPad Since posting I have been producing some carefully composed source files and PDF documents that show the issue, those I did yesterday were just rough and I had lost them anyway. Here are the attachments now, in chronological order. The second .afpub file is just a Save As from the first one and then a change of font. Please note how the spaces around the first glyph and the space in front of the second glyph do not get through to WordPad. William test004.afpub test004.pdf test004a.afpub test004a.pdf

Having had great success with this feature, I tried something yesterday that was, in fact, really pushing the envelope. Things did not work out totally well, so I thought about it and tried again and got a better result, certainly useful, but not quite as would have been perfect. Bearing in mind the extreme envelope pushing involved I decided to just keep it all to myself. Yet, thinking about it, I am posting details of what has happened, just in case it might highlight some bug that might be worth fixing. In the three test fonts thus far posted, there are three ligature glyphs, one for a ct ligature, one for an et ligature, one for an st ligature. The font Ligature test 4 in ligatst4.otf added two more ligatures to the liga table of the font. I have for some years, since 2009, being carrying out a research project from time to time on communication through the language barrier. Since 2016 I have been writing a novel based around some of the ideas and how they may be applied. This test involves a part of the research that is in the novel yet not in a scientific research document, so the links here are to the novel, but just enough so as to give the necessary background to the experiment. The novel, which is not at the present time complete, is linked, chapter by chapter, from the following web page. Most of the chapters are not very long, so there is not a lot of reading involved for this topic. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/novel.htm For the present purpose, please read Chapter 46 from the second section of page 1, and page 2; the second section of Chapter 50 version 2, just the first page for this purpose; and the fourth and fifth blue glyphs on page 3 of Chapter 72. What it comes down to for this test is that there is a sequence !123 that is to be regarded as a ligature that will produce the symbol designed to represent 'Good day.' in a language-independent manner and that there is a sequence !987 that is to be regarded as a ligature that will produce the symbol designed to represent 'Best regards,' in a language-independent manner. The first test is will Affinity Publisher substitute the symbol for !123 automatically? Yes it does. The second test is can it be copied out of the PDF into plain text? No, it cannot. I wondered whether the fact that I had named the one glyph in the font to be good_day and the other glyph to be best_regards might be something to do with it, as the ct ligature had been named c_t and the et ligature had been named e_t and the st ligature had been named s_t and that maybe the name provided a clue for decoding in some way. So on to the font Ligature test 4a in ligatst4a.otf which is far as I have got at present. So I looked up the glyph name for the exclamation mark, which is exclam, and renamed the glyphs as follows. exclam_one_two_three exclam_nine_eight_seven The first test is will Affinity Publisher substitute the symbol for !123 automatically? Yes it does. The second test is can it be copied out of the PDF into plain text? Yes, it can, but there seems to be an issue of missing out one or more space characters near the glyph that is decoded. So it seems to be trying to work but it is not quite right. By the way, the glyphs shown displayed in Chapter 72 were done using a font where the special glyphs are in an ordinary TrueType font and mapped into the Private Use Area. If any reader wants to have a look at some more glyphs that have been produced as part of the project, Chapter 5 and Chapter 42 have a number shown. Chapter 34, whilst not showing any glyphs as such might give an insight into the ideas of the project. William ligatst4.otf ligatst4a.otf

Hello Alfred > You’ve piqued my curiosity, William. Please elaborate! Thank you. Here is a link to the sort of thing I have in mind, as well as ViOS-style images. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocks_world William

I have just exported a poem (not written by me) as a png file from Affinity Publisher beta. I had pasted the text in from the original in another Serif forum. I formatted the text using a test font that I had produced for another Affinity Publisher forum thread. I noticed two things during the process. I could not find a Select All for the text in the text frame that contained the poem. Is there one? If not, one added in would be helpful. When exporting the png there did not appear to be an option to use a transparent background png. For this poem I did not want a transparent background. However the facility would be good to have available. William Overington Friday 28 December 2018

Thank you. William

> There never were "quickshapes" in the Affinity products. Well, in Microsoft PowerPoint in the late 1990s such items were called autoshapes. Serif called them quickshapes in DrawPlus and PagePlus. Then Serif referred to each individual quickshape as a Quick <name> so for example, Quick Rectangle, Quick Polygon. So, alright, they are not called quickshapes in Affinity Publisher Public Beta. Yet they are clearly the same sort of thing as quickshapes and referring to them as tools is far less descriptive as tools can cover all sorts of things whereas the word 'quickshape' is more specific as to the intended meaning. > This is not a continuation of PagePlus, it is a completely new product line, starting basically from scratch. Yes, that is fine. I have already found two features that I felt were missing in PagePlus implemented in Affinity Publisher. > PagePlus was around for a long time to gain the features it had - don't expect parity any time soon. Well, this is a public beta test, so mentioning that I would like more of these … tools … and naming two that were in PagePlus and suggesting one that was not will hopefully get those suggestions onto an agenda for consideration at a meeting. Whether they go forward or are rejected is a matter for the meeting. At times when using PagePlus I have thought that it would be nice if some particular quickshape were available - I appreciate that it takes time and effort to produce a new … tool … and that some will be much easier to implement than others. The reason that I would like a Quick Cone is that one can then have designs with shapes placed on a plane. I am reminded of the layout in the ViOS program from the early 2000s. That was an amazing system and the first time I learned of its existence and saw an image exported from it I was amazed. https://computer.howstuffworks.com/vios.htm The title of the forum is "Discussions and Suggestions for Affinity Publisher Beta on Desktop" and I have made some suggestions. William

The quickshapes seem to have been renamed tools. Well, alright. But there are a lot fewer now. Oh. I find that amongst others the "three dimensional" quickshapes, the Quick Cube and the Quick Cylinder seem to have gone! I was hoping that as well as those there would be some others, such as a Quick Cone. Ah, Quickshapes, there are so many more possibilities that could be added. William Overington Thursday 27 December 2018

I have made good progress. Please find attached a font and a PDF document. I have produced both of them myself, respectively using High-Logic FontCreator 8 and Serif Affinity Publisher Beta. The PDF document uses the font. The PDF document contains a poem that I have written today, written to show five features of the font, namely three ligatures and two stylistic alternates. The stylistic alternates are each for lowercase e. The ligatures just appeared as I keyed the poem into the computer. I needed to highlight each particular letter e in the text (one at a time) and then use Text Show Typography and choose the desired alternate glyph to replace the ordinary letter e at that location. The really great thing about the PDF document is that if one copies the text from it and pastes the text into WordPad, one gets the underlying original text. Not all desktop publishing programs do that. Some just have a blank for the two letters of the ligature glyph (except sometimes for st, which is a special case) or a blank for the stylistic alternate. The Serif Affinity team have done really well to provide this facility. This facility makes Affinity Publisher a top class product. William Thursday 27 December 2018 ligatst3.otf white.pdf

I have found a fantastic feature in Affinity Publisher. This feature is really top class quality. I have been experimenting. Here is the latest result. Suppose that one produces a PDF document (for publication on the web) where the text of the document is displayed using a font that has OpenType ligature capability. Suppose that one now copies the text from the PDF document and pastes it into WordPad. The underlying text is displayed. Not in the same font, but that is not the issue. The issue is that the underlying text is displayed, not blanks where some or all of the ligatures appear. The ligature must not be mapped as well though. This is a great facility. It means that one can publish a PDF document of a poem and have ligatures in the display, yet the poem can be copied from the PDF document and the underlying text pasted into another document, such as in, say, WordPad. Gold star for that. Something that I have not yet tested is what happens if one has an alternate glyph for a single letter and one produces a PDF document. For example, a swash e at the end of a line of the text of a poem. I made two fonts for the tests. The first one tried three possibilities, namely st ligature as regular Unicode, ct ligature as unmapped and et ligature mapped into the Private Use Area. When I observed the result, I made the second font with the ct ligature and the et ligature unmapped. Actually, I have not turned OpenType on in Affinity Publisher. I just started typing using the font and the ligature glyphs appeared automatically. I had intended entering the text and then trying to find the OpenType facility. Does anyone have any information please about use of alternate glyphs in Affinity Publisher please? I need to relearn how to make a font with an alternate swash e glyph where the glyph is unmapped and in an OpenType font. I have such a glyph available but it is not in an OpenType font as an OpenType alternate glyph. Please find two fonts and two PDF documents attached. William Overington Wednesday 26 December 2018 ligatest.otf ligatst2.otf ligature_test_affinity.pdf ligature_test_2_affinity.pdf

Here is a gold star. I have made the gold star by using a punch in CraftArtist 2.0 on a piece of gold that I produced using some software bought years ago. William

Hello Alfred Thank you. They have done well giving us that option. One thing. I put it onto light and then altered it a bit, but I have not found a reset button that puts them back to the original preset values within Light. William

I asked 'Is the reply in the thread "The colour scheme of the menu bar etc" really intended to be in this thread?' The problem is now fixed. This post can now be deleted. William

I always like to have the screen brightness of a computer turned right down. I find that the white (light grey?) upon black of the lettering on the menu bar and cascading menus of Affinity Publisher difficult to read. I find that sometimes I need to turn up the brightness, which I don't like doing. With PagePlus X7 the black upon light grey of the menu bar and cascading menus is ideal for me with the screen brightness turned right down. The colour scheme for writing this post is similar to the PagePlus X7 colour scheme and is ideal for me. I appreciate that the colour scheme for Affinity might well be all part of the design and the marketing and that I am quite possibly in the sigma2 proportion of the population who has the brightness turned down like that and that Serif may well not want to change the format for the new product. However, could you possibly have an option that a user could set please so that the user may choose for himself or herself to have the colour scheme used for PagePlus X7? Also, on the start up panel, the word Affinity is to me not legible as it is one shade of grey upon another shade of grey. I am using a Lenovo ideapad 510 laptop computer (a portable device, yet in fact permanently located on a desk and plugged in to an ethernet connection) running Windows 10. William Overington Wednesday 19 December 2018

Deleted.

Thread deleted and posted in the suggestions forum instead.

Yes. 384.47 kilobytes. William

10.17 kilobytes

Yes, please find it attached. William test001.afpub