"All lowercase" option in Character settings

[Peter Werner]

I'd love to have an "all lowercase" setting in addition to "All Caps" and "Small Caps".

 

It is not uncommon for designs to use only lowercase text, so it would be a handy feature. I have had to do this manually in InDesign so often I lost count years ago, only to occasionally then manually restore all the uppercase letters when someone changed their mind.

[Dave Harris]

Do you mean sentence case, capitalising the first words of sentences, or literally all lowercase? And do you mean as a formatting option (like Small Caps is), or as a command that changes the text?

 

Could you just type everything in lowercase, and then use All Caps if necessary?

 

In future we may add Sentence Case and Title Case as commands rather than as formatting options. The difference is that they wouldn't be available from text style sheets (when we do text style sheets).

[Peter Werner]

I mean literally all lowercase as a formatting option/text style attribute.

 

In languages such as German, a lot more words in a sentence are capitalized than in English, such as all nouns, proper names and so on. This leads to much more mixed-case text than in English. As such, it has to actually be typed as mixed case in order to appear correctly when no special capitalization settings are applied.

 

If due to aesthetic considerations or due to the way the font was designed, the decision is made to go for all uppercase or all lowercase (and possibly back again, we all know how it is), it is incredible useful to have this as a character attribute that can be set via text styles without having to re-type, say, all headlines in a publication. I have been in that situation even for English text a few times, and I can say from experience that it also leads to errors since you are inevitably going to miss the occasional word.

 

Also if the content is to be reused and the publication is, say, exported to HTML or ePub, you wouldn't want this kind of styling to be baked into the text, be it because of search engines, because of font differences, or because you want it to use CSS text-transform. In general, I think it is a good idea to keep formatting and content separate as much as possible.

 

This is especially critical for Publisher once it comes out, of course. In Designer and Photo, documents will generally be less complex, so re-typing a few lines of text is, while inconvenient, is a lot less of an issue of course since it is probably feasible to do it manually.

 

I imagine you will also be factoring out Affinity Publisher's story editor persona into a separate application at some point in the future to offer something along the lines of Adobe's InCopy and Quark's CopyDesk. In such a workflow, you would then as a designer of a larger magazine or newspaper have to tell all your editors to type out all headlines in lowercase, which then means they will be fighting auto correct and spell check, and it will possibly get messed up or at least flagged again when somebody decides to proofread the copy in story view.

[Dave Harris]

Thanks. We'll consider adding this in future.

[sabgaby]

+1 for adding «all lowercase» to transform characters

[walt.farrell]

6 hours ago, sabgaby said:

+1 for adding «all lowercase» to transform characters

That feature exists in the Publisher Beta, though not (yet?) in the other applications in their 1.7 beta versions.

[CP16]

On 5/15/2019 at 1:48 PM, walt.farrell said:

That feature exists in the Publisher Beta, though not (yet?) in the other applications in their 1.7 beta versions.

This does not seem to work when applying to a field. My field disappears.

[walt.farrell]

5 hours ago, CP16 said:

This does not seem to work when applying to a field. My field disappears.

I suggest reporting that in the appropriate "bugs" forum, rather than tacking it onto this older topic where it may get lost. More details would probably also help.

[jackmcbrezel]

I just had the same problem and found this post. I am using the lastest publisher beta but cannot find the option to put the text completely to lowercase letters in the text styles (only in the text menu under capitalisation). Can anyone help me where to find it?

[walt.farrell]

5 hours ago, jackmcbrezel said:

I just had the same problem and found this post. I am using the lastest publisher beta but cannot find the option to put the text completely to lowercase letters in the text styles (only in the text menu under capitalisation). Can anyone help me where to find it?

There is no setting in Text Styles for all lower-case, or any of the other options below the separator line in the dialog (highlighted below):

The top 3 are settings, as denoted by the check mark that you'll get if you click on them. The bottom 5 are actions, and simply cause an immediate transformation of the currently selected text.

[v_kyr]

For usual text a regular expressions play might work too (you have to try) and often offers more possibilities and flexibility ...

 

---

1. To replace camelCase to snail_case here:

find: ([A-Z])
replace: _\l$1

someText -> some_text

---

2. To replace UPPERCASE words to lowercase words use \L

find: (\w*)
replace: \L$1

SOMETEXT -> sometext

---

3. To replace lowercase words to UPPERCASE words use \U

find: (\w*)
replace: \U$1

sometext -> SOMETEXT

---

4. To replace first character of words with lowercase use \l

find: (\w*)
replace: \l$1

Sometext -> sometext

---

5. To replace first character of words with UPPERCASE use \u

find: (\w*)
replace: \u$1

something -> Something

---

... and so on ...

...often used when coding.