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Quickest way to have numbers with square or ellipse background


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Fourshame number four.

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9  
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On 2/11/2020 at 10:09 AM, GarryP said:

An alternative method would be to create a circle and then convert it to a Text Frame.
By doing this you can change the text easily without having to go ‘inside the group’.
It doesn’t always produce something that looks perfect, depending on various things, but with some tweaking of settings you can get something fairly nice.

Ok this looks good. Does it only work with Publisher? I can only find text frame in studio on Publisher - doesn't seem to be available in Designer or Photo

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Text Frames are available in Designer and Photo too but you may have to click the little arrowhead to the bottom right of the Artistic Text Tool icon in the Toolbox. Or you can use “View → Customise Tools…” and drag the Frame Text Tool onto your Toolbox.

Annotation 2020-02-12 141332.png

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Ah, no, sorry there’s no Text Frame Studio in either Designer or Photo.
It came in with Publisher and hasn’t been pushed out to the other applications, and may never be.
You can still copy and paste a Publisher-edited text frame into a Designer document but you can’t change the Text Frame settings.
If you have specific needs then someone could probably give you a sample which you can copy/paste and then change the text formatting as you need it, but it might need a bit of to-and-fro to get things looking just right.

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Ok, at the risk of pissing someone off...

I don't know what the client is being charged for this job. I don't know what the OP charges. I only know that a single style of the font I linked to is $19. I also know I have used up a minimum of $19 dollars worth of my own time reading through all the replies and downloading a couple files.

What that means to me if this was something I was charging for is: If I was charging per hour, I would likely either discount my time for faffing about so the client wasn't "over-billed" for my "playing around" or, well, charge them more than I ought to in order to recoup my time. If I was charging per job, I would be making less and less as each hour goes by (which can have value if I'm learning, but...).

Mike

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17 minutes ago, MikeW said:

I don't know what the client is being charged for this job. I don't know what the OP charges.

The client is a non-profit community association. I am helping them pro bono. If there were no alternatives I would ask for expenses. But knowing they rely on kind donations and are doing good work in the community I would prefer not to eat into their funds if there is a viable alternative. I am very grateful for all the suggestions - whether I use them or not in this project I have learned a lot.

But my preference for this job which I would prefer not to even charge expenses for is the text frame background. I am used to Photo and Designer but editable text frames was a revelation as I have only just got publisher. Plus I am learning about symbols which is good.

My time for professional work is normally charged at £45 - £75 p.h. (depending on whether it is music production or artwork or whether royalties are involved). I would never bill a client for faffing around or, as I prefer to call it, research unless it was specific to a particular job only and they new in advance I would need to do it so giving them the opportunity to compare a realistic quote withe somebody else - who may already know everything they needed.

So I might say "this work will cost £300 but is not my specialist field. I have to charge that for my time and studio, but you may well find a specialist in putting numbers on maps for a lot less"

But many thanks for your suggestion about the font, I may well want it one day - looks like a very worthwhile $19

 

 

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6 hours ago, Lagarto said:

Thanks for the hint, I purchased the Sans version. Typographically clever and shows well capabilities of OpenType. This would be highly useful e.g. in programmatic creation of large number of diffrently shaped legends, and serves also as an excellent guide for creating similarly operating fonts oneself.

To be used effectively in an app, the font would require a feature like Convert to Artistic Text and Break Apart, similarly as in CorelDRAW where this font works brilliantly (provided that you have shape and number colors ready before using the font) to quickly produce fully editable independent "shapenumbers". In InDesign or QuarkXPress this would require separate text frames for each numbershape and then breaking the text flow so that each shape stays separate yet editable as text (so that the "number" and the shape can be changed, if necessary). This could of course be done easily with a script. In these apps separate character styles for the shape and number part are handy to define separate color for each. 

In Affinity apps (primarily just Publisher, as text frames are not supported in other apps) neither method is currently possible so the font cannot be used too effectively (it requires creation or separation of each "shapenumber" manually). But it may be that I just have not found out the easiest way to use the capabilites of this font in Publisher.  

Programmatic wonders of OT fonts...Ray's font works like the Chartwell set of fonts re the use of ligatures + contextual lookups.

If the numbers are within a text flow, the easiest way of altering them is a story editor. The use of swatches+character styles makes coloring changes easy. To me, ID and Q makes them easier to use than CD...

Capture_000477.png.14d45e91685ac194d9182090ab66de79.png

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In APub or AD, it's easy enough to change numbers or colors without a story editor, though. Even in Q I do this mostly. 

Place the cursor to the right of a number you wish to change. Backspace the number, type a new number. 

To change a color of say one with the solid fill, start at the right and use the arrow key to move over, once for each number, once for to letter code, hold shift and move once more. Now the letter code for the fill letter code is selected and then change to color.

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On 2/12/2020 at 4:03 PM, MikeW said:

I don't know what the client is being charged for this job. I don't know what the OP charges.

The client is a non-profit community association. I am helping them pro bono. If there were no alternatives I would go cap in hand and ask for expenses. But knowing they rely on donations and are doing good work in the community I would prefer not to eat into that if there is a viable alternative. I am very grateful for all the suggestions - whether I use them or not in this project I have learned a lot.

But my preference for this job which I would prefer not to even charge expenses for is the text frame background. I am used to Photo and Designer but this was a revelation as I have only just got publisher.

My time for professional work is charged at £45 - £75 p.h. (depending on whether it is music production or artwork or whether royalties are involved). I would never bill a client for faffing around or, as I prefer to call it, research unless it was specific to a particular job only and they new in advance I would need to do it so giving them the opportunity to compare a realistic quote withe somebody else - who may already know everything they needed.

So I might say "this work will cost £300 but is not my specialist field. I have to charge that for my time and studio, but you may well find a specialist in putting numbers on maps for a lot less"

 

 

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9 minutes ago, Mr Lucky said:

One more question...Can anyone please tell me whether, after converting a circle to a text frame, can I edit that text frame to be a different shape, e.f.g triangle or round cornered rectangle, thanks

No, you would have to create a new shape, you can tell because if you select the node tool the text shape is not editable, i.e no nodes to manipulate, you can however convert that text shape to curves and then the curve can be edited, the text inside will also be converted to curves.

Best option, make the new shape and copy/paste the text in.

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As firstdefence said above, you can’t convert one shape to another, e.g. ellipse to triangle.
To make a differently-shaped text frame you need to copy the text from one to the other.
Converting a text frame to curves converts all of the text to curves, which is probably not what you want.

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This might be a cool request, a text shape feature where you can change the shape and dynamically edit the shape, i.e. rounded corners and the like. A load of baloney 😂

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Or, to go one step further, change any preset shape – one that hasn’t been converted to curves – into any other preset shape.
The method of creating any preset shape is just to drag it out onto the canvas – all we are doing is giving it dimensions – so why can’t we convert one to another?

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Actually I'm half wrong, while trying to find a workaround I noticed the red dot on the text shape. While you cannot replace a text shape for a new shape, as long as you have a shape tool selected the text shape does retain the edibility of the original shape, so in this instance the adaptable polygon tool.
text-shape-change.gif

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5 hours ago, GarryP said:

As firstdefence said above, you can’t convert one shape to another, e.g. ellipse to triangle.

If the shape converted to a text frame initially is an ellipse, it can be converted to a donut or pie shape -- just select text frame & switch to the Node Tool or any of the shape tools. Do that & Convert to Donut & Convert to Pie buttons appear on the context toolbar. Click either one & the usual pie/donut hole radius, start/end angles, & such can be used to alter the shape. 

This suggests that what @GarryP wants -- to be able to convert any quick shape into any other -- is possible.

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2 minutes ago, R C-R said:

If the shape converted to a text frame initially is an ellipse, it can be converted to a donut or pie shape -- just select text frame & switch to the Node Tool or any of the shape tools. Do that & Convert to Donut & Convert to Pie buttons appear on the context toolbar. Click either one & the usual pie/donut hole radius, start/end angles, & such can be used to alter the shape. 

I was going to say "converting a shape would be from a star to a circle" but apparently that can be done within the stars parameters so I'm going to keep shtum about that one 🤫 🤣 

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9  
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