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Afpub: Balance ragged lines and optical kerning with IDML open


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Hi,

I used the IDML open function to convert one of my layouts to afpub. So far so good everything is working except for two really essential things.

The first one is optical kerning. The numbers and letters especially in the headlines are not balanced even though the setting in character studio are set to auto (see overlay on the bottom). What am I doing wrong? Which setting do I have to use to get a more balanced look like in indd?

The second thing is that the paragraphs are not balanced anymore so now they don't look very evenly. Is there an option in publisher like in indd (balance ragged lines)?

363196186_BalanceRaggedLinesandOpticalKerning.jpg.ebaaefe31da9443ca61e0f14bf4c4b19.jpg

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The kerning will need to be manually adjusted, it may be something within the .IDML file that our imported is having trouble reading/converting. Balance ragged lines isn't a feature we currently support and have any current plans to add, but you never know for the future.

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 3/5/2020 at 3:32 PM, Lee D said:

Balance ragged lines isn't a feature we currently support and have any current plans to add

really sad to hear that... Optical kerning and balance ragged lines are basic features for pro users. I can't tell how often I use them per day and how many time they already saved me.

I'm sorry to say that but as long as there are no plans to implement those features, the real pro users will not be able to do a full switch to affinity. Along with multisite spreads and a passthrough option for placed content, these are the missing features that keep me stuck to indd with my more advanced projects

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  • 6 months later...

unfortunately I haven't found a workaround yet. This is a feature that I really miss very much. Doing all of this by hand takes a lot of time, which is why I still have to work a lot with InDesign. I really hope that the affinity team will still implement this feature.

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I find that using the Auto Hyphenation  option turned on in the Paragraph Styles helps with giving me a 'better looking' ragged right edge.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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  • 3 weeks later...
3 hours ago, PeterB. said:

do you know which ones bigger requests

I wasn't referring to anything official, and Serif does not share their list of priorities (anymore). I wasn't being specific, but I was thinking in terms of those requests that seem to get the most attention on the forums. Footnotes and scripting are the two remaining pinned requests that have not yet been addressed, and they gain quite a lot of attention. We have had confirmation that these are planned to be included at some point. Then there are other hot requests that haven't been pinned but keep coming up in various threads. Column span/split and "global layers" are a couple examples that come to mind.

To give some examples of my idea of past "bigger requests" that have been or are currently in the works: IDML import (released in 1.8), preflight (released in 1.8), packaging (precursor released in 1.8 but true packaging in beta 1.9), PDF passthrough (in beta 1.9), data merge (in beta 1.9).

And obviously, they do need to spend time getting existing features working as intended, so a stead stream of bug fixes is warranted.

As to personal priorities, I have a hard time deciding which I am most eager to see. Honestly, my personal top priority at this point would be a multi-line composer (which I think would be necessary for balancing ragged lines, as I posted elsewhere). Because of the lack of this feature, I spend a lot more time in Publisher as compared to the same publication in InDesign. However, it has not yet garnered the same kind of attention as these "bigger requests" (by which I mean more popular), and as Serif can't do everything at once, it is natural that they would need to prioritize. The popularity of a feature is likely one of several criteria Serif uses to determine its internal roadmap, and that does sound like a fair approach. Amoung the popular requests, I think I personally hope to see footnotes get the attention next.

Back to this thread concerning optical kerning (or alternatively, an interface for custom kerning pairs) and ragged balanced lines, if Serif did choose to work on these in the near-term, I would not complain!

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