Initials words: option to exclude the end characters

[Wosven]

Hi,

It would be usefull to get an option that exclude the end characters in the propriety Initials word of a text style.

For example for this :

Word, blabla bla
Word (comment)
Some more words (comment)

I dont wan't the comma or the parenthesis to be bold when they are in the end characters.

[garrettm30]

I agree with this suggestion.

I thought that we could use regex for the end characters, but I can't make it work in this circumstance, so I must be remembering something else incorrectly.

[Old Bruce]

I use a Zero Width space before the comma, bracket whatever and include the Zero Width Space as an ending character in the definition. Pain if there are lots of things but it does work.

[Wosven]

The principle is to paste your texte and have everything formatted in a blink, adding extra chracater or selecting the word to add bold or whatever take nearly the same amount of time. And adding extra invisible characters can be a problem later when needing to search text in a document or pasting in another application, for example.

[Old Bruce]

I agree. 

[comancheTodd]

On 3/26/2020 at 10:33 AM, Old Bruce said:

I use a Zero Width space before the comma, bracket whatever and include the Zero Width Space as an ending character in the definition. Pain if there are lots of things but it does work.

Old Bruce, I have encountered the concept of using Zero Width Space with "Initial Words," to delimit the initial words BUT—

—I cannot enter a ZWSP character directly into the "end characters" field, because all the characters under the "Text > Insert > Spaces & Tabs > menu are shaded
—the code in angle brackets, <ZWSP>, (as suggested in a post somewhere) DOESN'T WORK.
—I can't find anywhere in any documentation, forum, or on the Internet where the use of HTML codes like that are suggested or allowed.

Please elaborate. PLEASE.

comancheTodd

[Old Bruce]

17 minutes ago, comancheTodd said:

—I cannot enter a ZWSP character directly into the "end characters" field, because all the characters under the "Text > Insert > Spaces & Tabs > menu are shaded

I will use the Menu for Text > Insert > Spaces.........

Then I will carefully select the zero width space and copy (or cut, if necessary) then I can call up the Text Styles and paste this into the ending spot. It will look empty until you open the Text Styles again and then it will look like <zwsp> Here you can see that I have 7 words for the maximum but it ends after the blue triangle which is the zero width space between two plain spaces, the dots. 

[kenmcd]

49 minutes ago, comancheTodd said:

I can't find anywhere in any documentation, forum, or on the Internet where the use of HTML codes like that are suggested or allowed.

I went looking for this recently to insert some Unicode characters directly. ... found it here:
https://affinity.help/publisher/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=pages/Text/specialCharacters.html?title=Special characters and glyphs

To insert glyphs/Unicode characters directly using Hex code:

1. Click for an insertion point in the text.
2. Do one of the following:
   • For a glyph: Type 'G+' then enter the Hex code, e.g. '02F5' or '2F5'.
   • For a Unicode character: Type 'U+' then the Hex code, e.g. '0040', '040' or '40'.
3. Toggle from code to displayed character by using Text>Toggle Unicode. Toggle back to Hex code using the same command; keep insertion point at end of character.

 

[comancheTodd]

23 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

I will use the Menu for Text > Insert > Spaces.........

* * *

Then I will carefully select the zero width space and copy (or cut, if necessary) then I can call up the Text Styles and paste this into the ending spot. It will look empty until you open the Text Styles again and then it will look like <zwsp> Here you can see that I have 7 words for the maximum but it ends after the blue triangle which is the zero width space between two plain spaces, the dots.

* * *

OK, that make's sense. I was trying to type in "<ZWSP>" into the field (with various quotes around it or not), because some other post made is sound like that's what you do. I also tried copying it from the text, and for some reason that didn't seem to work either (though that may have been my fault).

On my Mac, the Character Selector (badly named "Show Emojis and Symbols" —I guess we know what audience they care about!) was confusing to copy from, but I found that if you go to https://unicode-table.com/en/search/ and search for the character ("ZWSP" and "Zero Width Space" both work), it "shows" you the character, and has a convenient button to "Copy" it. It worked perfectly.

Thanks for the clarification, Old Bruce!!

[loukash]

14 hours ago, comancheTodd said:

Mac, the Character Selector (badly named "Show Emojis and Symbols" —I guess we know what audience they care about!) was confusing to copy from

A truly helpful free app that I've been using since at least 2003 is earthlingsoft.net/UnicodeChecker
It has a search filter, you can save favorites, and it also provides useful MacOS Services commands like display full info on a selected character, or percent and HTML entities escape conversion. (Sadly, Affinity apps are "immune" to MacOS Services so you may want to temporarily copy your text to TextEdit or BBEdit first.)