text ruler still missing in 1.8.2.260

[maxen]

I'm still missing the text rulers in Designer. The help says there should be an icon for activating them, but that simply doesn't show up. There also no entry in the view menu.

[Joachim_L]

8 minutes ago, maxen said:

The help says there should be an icon for activating them

Good point, I can't it find also. Only available in APu.

[GarryP]

Confirmed on Windows 10.
The Text Ruler is mentioned in the Designer Help – on the “Frame Text Tool” page – but there is no icon on the Context Toolbar, or View menu entry, when editing Frame Text (even one that was created in Publisher).

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, GarryP said:

Confirmed on Windows 10.

Same for the builtin help in the 1.8.x macOS retail (& the latest beta) versions of both AP & AD. 

I suspect neither app actually supports text rulers & the Frame Text Tool help topic was copied from the APu help. Probably needs to be reported as a documentation bug.

[MEB]

Hi maxen,
Text frame rulers are only available in Affinity Publisher (along with a host of other features mentioned in the Help page by mistake). I will report this to the documentation team to be corrected (also affects Affinity Photo). Thanks for raising this up.

[GarryP]

@MEB can you report this one too, from the Photo Help.
You can see in my image that it’s from Photo but it mentions Designer. (I didn’t want to raise another new ticket for such a small issue.)

[MEB]

Thanks GarryP. I've logged that one as well.

[maxen]

1 hour ago, MEB said:

Hi maxen,
Text frame rulers are only available in Affinity Publisher (along with a host of other features mentioned in the Help page by mistake). I will report this to the documentation team to be corrected (also affects Affinity Photo). Thanks for raising this up.

I'd rather like to see the rulers implemented into Designer...

[drummonkey77]

Hi guys. Im missing the Text Rulers in my version of Publisher 1.8.3 on Mac 10.15.4. I have no icon and even using the menu 'Show text ruler' I get nothing. Restarted machine and app. Any ideas? 

 

[walt.farrell]

5 minutes ago, drummonkey77 said:

Hi guys. Im missing the Text Rulers in my version of Publisher 1.8.3 on Mac 10.15.4. I have no icon and even using the menu 'Show text ruler' I get nothing. Restarted machine and app. Any ideas? 

 

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

Just to be sure, do you have a text frame selected, and is the text cursor within that frame? That's the only time the text ruler will show.

Also, make sure you don't have View > Preview Mode enabled.

[drummonkey77]

Thanks Walt. Was not a text frame. Was artists text as id copied out of another app! Newbie to publisher but loving it so far ! Thanks. 

[walt.farrell]

You're welcome 

[Dochgu]

On 4/1/2020 at 1:51 PM, MEB said:

Hi maxen,
Text frame rulers are only available in Affinity Publisher (along with a host of other features mentioned in the Help page by mistake). I will report this to the documentation team to be corrected (also affects Affinity Photo). Thanks for raising this up.

For the last hour I was trying to find it but I wasn't successful even with the Help tool.

I do wish the text rulers would be available in Affinity Designer too and not only in Affinity Publisher. It is quite handy and I used it a lot in Adobe Illustrator before.
Would be awesome if you guys could implement that in another update.

[Lvis]

Yes please, implement text rulers in AD

[v_kyr]

 Well, let's show some prefs hack here how one could enable FrameText rulers for the other Affinity apps like APh & ADe then too. - I'll demonstrate that under MacOS here since that's what I have & run Affinity apps on. Further since I'm too lazy, I will show it only for APh here, but it should be equally for ADe too.

PRE-NOTE: On a MacOS system Affinity Preferences settings are stored in OS related binary "plist" files (aka binary representations of XML-files), so in order to read/write and perform changes to such binary "plist"-files, the right tools have to be used. Usually one would use Apple's Xcode in order to manipulate and change a binary "plist"-file, but there are also some easier to use third party editor tools available, which can showup and edit binary "plist"-files in an easier to use fashion (without the need of Xcode).

PRE-NOTE2: UnderWindows systems doing the same should be much easier, since there (on Win) you usually just deal with text based XML settings files, so no binary versions of those, which eases the overall changing process.

Ok let's start to enable FrameText rulers for APh under MacOS now.

1. On my MAS APh version the preferences "plist"-file to alter can be found under the path ...
   
   --> /Users/username/Library/Containers/com.seriflabs.affinityphoto/Data/Library/Preferences/com.seriflabs.affinityphoto.plist
   
   ... since we will modify that file, we will first make a backup of the original "com.seriflabs.affinityphoto.plist" file and work on a copy of that one.
    
2. We have to open and edit the above file copy with some binary format capable "plist"-file editor (aka Xcode or some third party editor)
   and look inside that file for a key/value pair which initially reads "ShowFrameTextRuler/NO", the value type is a boolean here, so ...
   
   Key = ShowFrameTextRuler   Type = Boolean   Value = NO
   
   ... which we will now just change into ...
   
   Key = ShowFrameTextRuler   Type = Boolean   Value = YES
   
   
   
   
    
3. Now after saving our changed "com.seriflabs.affinityphoto.plist" file, we copy that over to the original file location, namely ...
   
   --> /Users/username/Library/Containers/com.seriflabs.affinityphoto/Data/Library/Preferences/com.seriflabs.affinityphoto.plist
    
4. Finally we start APh and look what happens when we use any FrameText inside our APh documents ...

 

That's all to it folks!

 

 

[walt.farrell]

21 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

PRE-NOTE2: UnderWindows systems doing 

the same should be much easier, since there (on Win) you usually just deal with text based XML settings files, so no binary versions of those, which eases the overall changing process.

 

[R C-R]

Since I do not want to install XCode on my Mac, can you recommend another & possibly easier to use third party editor tool I could use instead? 

[v_kyr]

10 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Since I do not want to install XCode on my Mac, can you recommend another & possibly easier to use third party editor tool I could use instead? 

I will tell you a good one via a PM, since I don't want to share every developer tool I personally use and prefer here publically.

[v_kyr]

6 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Some files are .xml, but many are .dat. I do not know for sure, for this one, whether it is a .xml file or a .dat file (but I think it is a .dat file if I remember prior experiments correctly).

If it is a binary .dat preference file for Win and has a magic number of "{{magic|00FF4B41}}" for the first 4 bytes in it (hex values), then it is an Affinity file format based file. - Even though I have some routines for reading parts of such affinity files, I won't share them here as it's more something that normally developers can handle and not mere mortals aka plain users. - Further note that the above shown is more a proof of working concept here and thus, that the other apps (aka APh & ADe here) also do support and can (or could) handle frame text rulers (they even have and support the prefs option flag). - So the only thing missing for them is, a corresponding associated/connected menu entry for toggling on/off the frame text rulers. - But who knows, maybe that menu option will be also added in future updated APh & ADe versions.

 

[Old Bruce]

23 hours ago, v_kyr said:

let's show some prefs hack here how one could enable FrameText rulers for the other Affinity apps like APh & ADe then too.

And when I don't want the (intrusive) ruler on my text frames I will have to do it all in reverse, setting the value to false, correct?

 

23 hours ago, R C-R said:

Since I do not want to install XCode on my Mac, can you recommend another & possibly easier to use third party editor tool I could use instead? 

I use BBEdit for Mac, there is a quite powerful "limited" version for free.

this is what it looks like after searching for ShowFrameTextRuler

[R C-R]

14 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

I use BBEdit for Mac, there is a quite powerful "limited" version for free.

LOL! Perhaps ironically, I have BBEdit on my Mac & it is set to be the default app for opening any of the several thousand *.plist files on my Mac (& *.dat ones too).

I never really thought about searching the Affinity related ones for "ShowFrameTextRuler," but sure enough, that works & by changing "<false/>" to "true/" AD gets the frame text ruler. Same thing works for AP.

Just to be on the safe side, I first copied the com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner.plist in place (same folder) & after testing switched the names so it would revert to not showing it. I can switch names again to reenable showing it but I'm not sure I want to do that.

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, Old Bruce said:

And when I don't want the (intrusive) ruler ... setting the value to false, correct?

Jip, that's correct!

1 hour ago, Old Bruce said:

I use BBEdit for Mac ...

I've once somewhere had read that BBedit can handle .plist files too, but I never used or tested it out. Especially here then, if it will open/edit/save binary plist-files too, without having to use the Apple MacOS CLI "plutil" tool ("plutil -- property list utility", see it's man page via "man plutil") before & afterwards. - Probably since I use more multiple platform supporting editors (Sublime Text, VSCode, vim, Emacs ...), since I also have sometimes to work under Win & Linux too.

Though now where I wrote the above, it reminds me to maybe one day write some shell script, or Automator applescript, etc., which then for a passed over binary file ...

1. converts the binary plist file it into a textual XML one, via plutil
2. opens the converted file in my favorite editor
3. and after saving the altered textual XML file converts that back into binary plist-file, again via plutil

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

I've once somewhere had read that BBedit can handle .plist files too, but I never used or tested it out. Especially here then, if it will open/edit/save binary plist-files too...

I can't say for sure if it resaves the plist file in binary format but the file size difference between the modified & unmodified one is only 4 bytes & both work equally well with no discernible effect on performance or responsiveness.

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

Though now where I wrote the above, it reminds me to maybe one day write some shell script, or Automator applescript, etc., which then for a passed over binary file ...

FWIW, BBEdit has extensive AppleScript support. I have not tested it for this but it looks like it might offer a quick automated way to toggle the boolean, among other things.

[thomaso]

On 4/10/2022 at 8:33 PM, R C-R said:

Since I do not want to install XCode on my Mac, can you recommend another & possibly easier to use third party editor tool I could use instead? 

Many years ago I used the Plist Editor  https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/plisteditpro/

[R C-R]

2 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Many years ago I used the Plist Editor  https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/plisteditpro/

Thanks for the info but since I was reminded that even the free version of BBEdit works for this & it is already installed on my Mac, that app is all I need.