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Precise text justification in Affinity Publisher


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12 minutes ago, prophet said:

why is it in 'px' instead of '%'?

I am not sure, seems like a mistake to me @Jon P what think you? Is this setting the point size at which the other justification settings starts taking effect between characters, or should this be "desired" spacing?

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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1 hour ago, prophet said:

Not an expert on such things, but I do see a couple of options similar to the OP's screen shot. Do these offer some of the control that folk might be looking for?

Screen Shot 2020-07-16 at 2.18.01 PM.png

Similar, but with fewer capabilities. The justification is handled line by line, rather than trying to get the nicest text flow and justification of the entire paragraph.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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5 hours ago, Patrick Connor said:

Is this setting the point size at which the other justification settings starts taking effect between characters, or should this be "desired" spacing?

 

According to the documentation on affinity.help:

Quote
  • Desired Letter Spacing—sets the preferred tracking (spacing between letters) within words when a paragraph has a justified alignment.

https://affinity.help/publisher/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=pages/Panels/paragraphPanel.html?title=Paragraph panel

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5 hours ago, Patrick Connor said:

I am not sure, seems like a mistake to me @Jon P what think you?

The Desired Letter Spacing is in % on Windows, not px.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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5 hours ago, prophet said:

and the center "Desired Letter Spacing" seems uneditable for me.

Your screenshot shows your Minimum Letter Spacing as 0%, and your Maximum Letter Spacing as 0%. The Desired Letter Spacing needs to lie between those two values, so it is indeed uneditable until you adjust at least the Maximum value to some larger value.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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9 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Your screenshot shows your Minimum Letter Spacing as 0%, and your Maximum Letter Spacing as 0%. The Desired Letter Spacing needs to lie between those two values, so it is indeed uneditable until you adjust at least the Maximum value to some larger value.

This is correct.

I've logged the inconsistency in the measurement unit used between OS's, thanks for the report

Serif Europe Ltd. - www.serif.com

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13 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Your screenshot shows your Minimum Letter Spacing as 0%, and your Maximum Letter Spacing as 0%. The Desired Letter Spacing needs to lie between those two values, so it is indeed uneditable until you adjust at least the Maximum value to some larger value.

Still no go. Can't edit the Desired Letter Spacing even after setting the Maximum. Slider doesn't work and typing a number reverts to 0px

3 hours ago, Jon P said:

This is correct.

I've logged the inconsistency in the measurement unit used between OS's, thanks for the report

It seems the whole input is broken on macOS, not just the measurement unit.

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I think something is broken here. I just pulled it up to test, created a frame with the default formatting (I even reset to factory defaults to be sure), and I was surprised to find that my settings were the same as the screenshot: 0% - 0px - 0%. Also, I can confirm that lowering the minimum (example -4%) and raising the maximum still will not allow the middle value to be changed from the Paragraph Studio. By contrast, when applying a paragraph style and editing the same values from the Edit Text Style settings, it does seem to work just fine, even though they all start at 0%. I have always assumed 0% is the relative to font default, so -1% is less than default and 1% is more than default. When editing as a style property, the middle value is %, not pixel, and changing it there does work.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Complete noob here (so don't judge me, lol) but I think this issue is my problem.  I am basically trying to teach myself how to use this software (honestly, I didn't have much experience in InDesign either).  I'm recreating my own version of a document that was originally done in Adobe Photoshop with Affinity Publisher.  Everything is fine until I get to the typeset. 

In the Photoshop document, it looks as if there are two columns of text in phrases that were done with text boxes in Century Gothic font.  Each line seems to be aligned center but when I try this in Affinity Publisher, one or two lines of text end up on the next line, which causes an overflow of text.  If I play with the leading to get everything on one line, the text looks crowded and altogether unattractive, lol. Is this something that would be fixed with Designer or is it a 'no can do' situation.

Am I making any sense at all? Like I said, I am an absolutely beginner with this. 

Any helpful advice would be gladly accepted.

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16 hours ago, DCreatif1 said:

Each line seems to be aligned center but when I try this in Affinity Publisher, one or two lines of text end up on the next line, which causes an overflow of text.  If I play with the leading to get everything on one line, the text looks crowded and altogether unattractive, lol. Is this something that would be fixed with Designer or is it a 'no can do' situation.

Hi,

No matter what kind of composing engine each app uses, going from one app to a different app based on a different engine is fairly well guaranteed to result in reflow differences (except perhaps texts that are very short where the opportunities for reflow are at a minimum).

I am one of several who eagerly desires some kind of multiline composer, such as the Adobe Paragraph Composer in InDesign and apparently the "Adobe Every Line Composer" in Photoshop (I have no experience with the latter—I only read about it in the documentation just now). However, whatever layout Adobe is doing automatically, it is quite possible for you to do manually.

First, you mention leading, but that is interline spacing, a vertical spacing setting, so that is not the setting you need. Maybe you just mixed up terms, because I see you say, "If I play with leading to get everything on one line…" The setting you need is Tracking, which is the space between characters. You also want to notice the justification settings, including inter-word spacing. And finally, don't forget horizontal scale, if you use it in subtle amounts. Justification is inherently a game of compromise, but usually a subtle combination of tracking and horizontal scale will work.

If you have some text that is set to your taste in Photoshop, I recommend you take a representative column and try to recreate the exact flow in Publisher. This is not something you would do every time in the future, but it is a useful exercise for learning how Publisher's text layout works. I did this a couple times myself, so that I could fine-tune my justification settings in Publisher and my understanding of what I need to do to get it the rest of the way.

In this exercise, get a text frame of the exact size as in Photoshop, and take note of any difference that would affect available space for text, such as text-frame inset. Hyphenation would also make a big difference. Then paste the text from Photoshop to Publisher. Now your goal is to get the text to look just like Photoshop. Start with adjusting the justification of Publisher to come as close as possible to your settings in Photoshop (Note: I have not used Photoshop in years, and it was well before I had much understanding of typography, so I am really just speaking from my knowledge of InDesign). You won't be able to get it exactly the same with justification alone because of the different composition method and also because of the lack of glyph scaling as a justification setting that InDesign (and maybe Photoshop?) offers.

Next, it is helpful to understand the difference of the composers. Most simple text composers like word processors (MS Word, etc.) use a simple line-by-line justification. It tries to fit as many words as possible on one line, and then when the next word will not fit, it evens out the spacing on the present line and moves on to the next line. Publisher is more advanced than simple word processors in its justification (for example, you should get better results with it as compared to MS Word), but this line-by-line limitation is still true of Publisher. So you end up with situations where Publisher was able to crowd many words into one line, but the next line may be overly gappy because that was the best it could do with that line. Software such as Adobe that offer multiline composers will try to strike a balance with multiple lines, so sometimes it will fit fewer words on one line if it means that a few lines down below comes out with better justification.

Armed with that knowledge, you now know that Adobe may break a line sooner than Publisher for the sake of overall balance. So when you set up the justification settings in Publisher, you will want to get it so that Publisher never breaks before Adobe. Once you get justification settings as best as you can, then try to get each line to match the Adobe rendering, starting from the top line and working your way down. Don't do that with forced line breaks—depending your workflow preference, you might do that in production, but that negates the point of this exercise. Select the characters that would be a single line in Adobe, and carefully apply changes to tracking and horizontal scaling until it not only fits to a single line in Publisher, but inter-character and inter-word spacing looks basically the same.

That's the basic idea. Of course you would not normally need to go to such extremes once you get in the habit of Publisher, but if you are getting better results in Photoshop than in Publisher, then this is a good way to study how Publisher works to achieve what you want. Then you will apply the principles you learned to get better results directly in Publisher in the future.

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@garrettm30Thank you so much for your very thorough, detailed reply!  Yes, I absolutely meant tracking.

Your advice/guidance has pretty much been spot on.  I had never thought of actually copying text from a document that was in PDF format and pasting it into Publisher but that helped a great deal because at least the font looked almost indistinguishable from the font done in the PDF document done with Photoshop.  Instead of a series of text boxes, like had been in the PDF document, I discovered that it actually worked better for me to make columns of only two text boxes and enter my customized text, then adjust the tracking, spacing, etc in the Paragraph panel (I don't think I had to do anything in Character).  I had so much more patience when I saw that the font looked the way I desired it. I'm learning so much.  I may play with the tracking a bit more to make use of the space I have (although part of me says to leave it alone, it looks pretty good).

Once again, thank you so much for all your guidance!

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  • 6 months later...

While this issue appears to be fixed in v1.9, the Maximum Word Spacing is now broken for a change:


The saga continues…

MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2

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20 hours ago, loukash said:

While this issue appears to be fixed in v1.9, the Maximum Word Spacing is now broken for a change:

Could you clarify which issue appears to be fixed? The general request of this thread has not yet been implemented, nor in fact has there been any confirmation that Serif is interested in it at this time.

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5 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

Could you clarify which issue appears to be fixed?

Ah, sorry. I meant this one:

On 7/16/2020 at 8:21 PM, prophet said:

the center "Desired Letter Spacing" seems uneditable for me. And why is it in 'px' instead of '%'?

 

MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2

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2 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

With these conversations that span many months, I get lost sometimes in the details.

And me, on the other hand, was searching for threads dealing with this very issue yesterday, and stumbled upon this thread without ever reading page one… :D

MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2

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I think that good typesetting is a must - it is the very core of all DTP software. It is very difficult at the moment to layout text which is in compliance with the very basic rules of good design.

I'm sure that Serif's developers will come up with hundreds of ideas of improving it - but this features needs backing from other users...

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1 hour ago, Colorado said:

I think that good typesetting is a must - it is the very core of all DTP software. It is very difficult at the moment to layout text which is in compliance with the very basic rules of good design.

I'm sure that Serif's developers will come up with hundreds of ideas of improving it - but this features needs backing from other users...

I hope they have just a few solid ones. They should have a lot of experience and knowledge and algorithms from the companies 25 year long history and from PagePlus.

Not backing from users. Customers. Existing and potential. Supply and demand. If there is a demand out there - Adobe will know - users will seek the features where they are. Not sit and refresh this forum.

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
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Publisher is used for designing publication with text - and yet the way it put the text together is far from the rules of good graphic design (e.g. rivers with small font and hyphenation). This is a huge no-no.

I can make a leaflet for a guy selling shoes - but I would not use it for a book. The text looks like being set up by an amateur. It is very hard and time consuming to achieve greyness of text in Publisher.

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  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
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On the other hand, sometimes I was annoyed why the text refused to flow the way I wanted, only to realize an hour or so later that I had this silly Paragraph Composer turned on. :P

Don't know which exact settings the Rockymountain guy was using, but:

apu_paragraph_composer.png.7ee33be88324f3dd081d8ee447449228.png

Yep, a manual non-breaking space to the rescue. But other than that…

MacBookAir 15": MacOS Ventura > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // MacBookPro 15" mid-2012: MacOS El Capitan > Affinity v1 / MacOS Catalina > Affinity v1, v2, v2 beta // iPad 8th: iPadOS 16 > Affinity v2

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