William Overington

If QR code generation capability were to be built-in to Affinity Publisher then there could also be a tool so that one could add a QR code for a hyperlink and the same hyperlink could be built-in to the document. Then If a PDF were produced and put on line, then clicking the QR code either online or in a downloaded copy of the PDF could follow the link, and from a hardcopy printed copy the QR code could be read using a smartphone or other device and the link followed. I hope that Affinity Publisher has QR codes and that special feature to apply them as well. William

The discs of old Serif legacy products are worth keeping because of all the fonts on them. Not the same selection on every disc. William

I am wondering if someone from Serif will reply please? William

The following discussion about colour font technology might be of interest to some readers. https://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=7856 William

Well, I was not thinking of the SVG drawings, I was thinking of the format using the CPAL and COLR tables of an OpenType colour font. For me, Affinity Publisher should be a first class software program, so that it is not a question of "Well, if you want features like that, you need to get EXPENSIVE PACKAGE that is EVEN MORE EXPENSIVE PACKAGE if bought in the United Kingdom" but that "Well, that Affinity Publisher software from Serif is amazingly modern, even futuristic, notwithstanding its budget price." For example, I have already noticed the feature that all of the Universal Character Set can be accessed as characters (rather than just as glyphs) and that the characters can be extracted from a PDF that has been produced, even that the underlying text can be extracted from a PDF that has been produced where there are ligature glyphs used in the display (subject to the font having suitable glyph names for ligature glyphs so as to facilitate that extractability). For me those are significant advances over PagePlus. So, while I appreciate that things take time, and there is not the thing about priority, I hope that such features are on the agenda. I wonder what is the target market for Affinity Publisher. For example, there was a time when PagePlus seemed, over a few updates, around PPX3 and PPX4, to be focused on printshops, with PPX5 OpenType capability was introduced. I first started using PagePlus with PagePlus 9 because it included the ability to produce PDF documents. PagePlus 12 allowed plane 0 characters to go to PDF as characters rather than convert to curves and PPX5 introduced OpenType facilities. My publishing is as pure electronic publications on the web. The OpenType facilities in PPX5 I found to be great. I was able to use them to test fonts that I had made using the High-Logic FontCreator program. I have found that sometimes it takes quite a while for Serif to introduce a new feature, yet when they do, they do it extremely well. William

Will Affinity Publisher support colour fonts please? As part of this, will Affinity Publisher when using a colour font, produce a PDF that shows the colours please? It may be that PDF does not support colour fonts as such, but Affinity Publisher could possibly work round this by producing a multi-layer conventional PDF automatically where the text layer is repeated as many times as necessary in order to have one colour in each layer so that the display looks good, though I accept that could be tricky depending upon how colours are ordered for each of the glyphs in the font. For example, if there are, say, blue letters each with green holly leaves and red berries, and each glyph has the colours in the same order that could go down to three layers blue, green, red. Yet if the font has lots of emoji and there are many colours and they are not all in the same order in each glyph that could mean that some colours have to have two layers at different place in the "layer pile" and it could all be very complicated and maybe in practical terms impossible. William Overington Friday 1 February 2019

? I don't follow that. Telesoftware was actually broadcast, being broadcast in the way that television is broadcast. It looks that I have gone "off-topic", oops! William

Ah, if only it was "Over the air". Memories of my telesoftware invention, where software was broadcast cyclically and anyone could receive it and use it. William

Well, reading that I just tried again to give Walt's post a Thanks logo and got the same message. 09:15, so maybe in time it will be possible! William

Thank you for your reply. I tried to add one of those Thanks logos to your post, but I was told, Sorry, you cannot add any more reactions today. And it was just 4 minutes after midnight! Anyway, Thank you. William

Well, I have found, having had several computers break down over the years that having Serif discs available has allowed me to get software packages up and running quite quickly once the new computer arrives. I know that people who bought a download then were in a position of having time limits in which to download and possible payment of fees to extend the download time available and only so many goes. So it always seemed to me that having a disc saves a lot of problems. I do have some software, from High-Logic, that is download only, but when a computer breaks down it is just a straightforward matter of downloading a new copy and using the security key that is stored in webmail. I hope that Serif allows downloads as many times as one needs without all the fee payments and time limits. William

Can you explain that please? So what is an app in this context please? Does "its documents" refer to a .afpub file? I do not understand what is "an embedded web view" or "an embedded web view from a link". William

Ah, but if there were only one thread about adding hyperlinks to Affinity Publisher and nobody had started another one, would Serif be developing the feature now at the same priority level? It would be good if my idea in one of those threads about having a link and a QR code for it produced automatically as part of one optional choice becomes implemented. Then if a PDF were published on the web and someone printed it out, then the link could still work from the hardcopy print out using a smartphone with a QR decoder in it. William

+] Well, because publicly saying so might open me up to claims of criticising a business and risk having trouble as a result. William

Well, I'll drop you a private note. William

There was a font that I liked and considered buying but upon checking the EULA seemed to mean that if I wanted to publish on the web a PDF with the font embedded that that would be considered a commercial use and that would need special commercial licensing. I just wanted to have the font and to be able to use a bit of it now and then. So I did not buy it. William

Will Affinity Publisher be available on disc please? William Overington Thursday 31 January 2019

That is interesting. So it will be interesting which way Serif goes with this. Will Serif provide some bundled fonts with Affinity Publisher? I suppose that it might cost Serif money to do so, but having some fonts included would greatly help people getting started with desktop publishing - just install the program and some fonts are installed. I found with Serif PagePlus that font installation is optional. Apart from early versions going back to PagePlus 9 I choose not to install the fonts but save them in a folder on the hard disc so that they are readily accessible if I want to use one or more of them. For example, recently, I wanted two fonts to convey the idea, the impression, of handwriting by two different people and so I had a look through what Serif had available. I chose two to use, one I had used before (Firenze SF) and the other I had not, as best I remember, used before. http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_the_novel_chapter_075.pdf Old Serif discs are worth keeping for the fonts on them, because sometimes the choice got changed. For example, Sea Monster was available but then went in later versions. Incidentally, I am wondering if one will be able to get Affinity Publisher on a disc - maybe I need to ask about that in a new thread. William

Will Affinity Publisher include bundled fonts please? This is important because when using a product such as PagePlus or Affinity Publisher to produce a PDF to be published on the web, there can be concern over which fonts can be lawfully used for embedding within a PDF. This as contrasted with embedding fonts in a PDF just to print or send to a printshop for printing. Thus I have tended to use fonts bundled with Serif products and fonts that I have made myself when a PDF is to be published on the web. The End User Licence Agreements for many rather nice commercial fonts available individually seem to indicate that embedding the font in a PDF for publication on the web is only allowed for an extra fee. Thus although I often like the designs I have felt unable to get them for my own use. So, is Serif going to bundle fonts with Affinity Publisher and if so are there any ideas which fonts to bundle and is Serif open to suggestions? Will Serif make sure that any fonts bundled are able to be used clearly lawfully for embedding in a PDF that is to be published on the web please? William Overington Thursday 31 January 2019

That is one possibility. However, there is another possibility. This is that the fi might be displaying properly in the PDF reader, but that does not necessarily mean that the code points for the f and the I are accessible from the PDF by any software at all as the information may not be there. A simple test might be helpful. Can you copy from the PDF a sentence with an fi ligature in it please and paste into WordPad (not NotePad, I do not know if that will work) on a Windows machine and then clear the clipboard by copying something else from somewhere, then copying from WordPad and pasting in this thread please. If so, I can then search for the code point in FontCreator so as to find out what we have. Also we can note whether an f and an I appear or just one character or nothing at all. If you do not have access to a Windows computer maybe you could use some other application, a basic application - maybe somebody reading this forum who knows about Mac computers could advise please. William

Thank you. I wondered about Polish because the L with a stroke character is used in Polish and I was wondering if was an old "code page" issue where the characters from hexadecimal 08 to FF had been used for Polish, though on further thought it would have been a page for Central European languages rather than Polish specifically. I have only ever used a Mac on a desktop publishing course in 1997. William

Thank you. William

Well, is your computer in any way set up to use the Polish language? On which computer was the pdf produced and with which software please? The thing is, the letter combinations fi and fl have a special history both in typesetting going back centuries (with metal type) and more recently with computer typesetting. Historically the reason is that the top of a letter f often overhung the metal shank of the piece of metal type, so that it fitted over a smaller letter, as in fa, fe, fo, and so on, but with fi the top of the f might hit the dot of the letter i in the sequence fi (or would look ugly) and the top of the f might hit the lowercase letter l in the sequence fl. So with metal type, separate pieces of type for fi and fl were often included in fonts, also ff, ffi and ffl. This effect has been attempted to be used in displays in computer typesetting in various ways, more often for just fi and fl than for the others. This has been by way of some strange encodings of some characters, such as having a special character for fi and a special character for fl in some cases. So the effect you are noticing might be something to do with that. I do not know the whole answer but maybe a discussion with various participants can take place please. William

What are the modalities over the way that bug reports are handled please? For example, will the Serif team acknowledge that they have seen this bug report and provide any feedback on it? William

In the thread 'What is this?' there is mention of the release notes . Where can they be found please? William