Basing text operation on MS word is a BIG mistake!

[Wosven]

30 minutes ago, Seneca said:

I never heard of any font designer concerned about the leading.

How strange. But font, like calligraphies, have a purpose and convey some ideas, and for this, you need to think about their forms and the space each character and line need.

If you want to convey "grandeur", great ideas, élégance, you'll create something like the Chancery hand (écriture de chancelerie or Chancelière in French), that need huge leading.

If you're more prosaic and need to put a lot of text in a page, you'll produce some blackletter types, where lines and characters are narrow and don't need so much leading to be readable.
Spaces between the lines that compose a character are as important that space between line. Usually, it's base on a proportion in relation with the "o" width (spaces between words should be egal or more than the space in the "o", and there's another relation for the height of the line too).

 

I never produced fonts, but leading is important when doing calligraphy, and font creators certainly think about how the character should be displayed on a page, since it's like kerning, but in vertical, and you need to set a minimum leading that'll permit your characters to stay lisible, and optimum if the space between lines are done to enhance the proportions of the characters.

Perhaps it's less visible with fonts that take the same amount of space as we usually use for mostof the text, but testing with more exotic fonts will show this.

Good examples are Zapfino and some Fraktur, that need large of small leading to be aesthetic. Small variations won't matter, but try inversing the leading of the two, and it won't be.

[Seneca]

4 minutes ago, Wosven said:

I never produced fonts, but leading is important when doing calligraphy

I never said it wasn't. Precisely, that the job of a typographer to find the best leading for a given font at a given size.

My "I never heard of any font designer concerned about the leading." was meant as I never heard that a font designer would enshrine a leading size in a type they design.

[Wosven]

6 hours ago, Seneca said:

a font designer would enshrine a leading size in a type they design

But they do.

All those paragraphs are in different fonts 12 pts and default (designer) leading on:

[Seneca]

12 hours ago, Seneca said:

we get the default from the font metrics

This is the answer.

So, there is no such thing as leading inbuilt in the font. Affinity picks up the numbers from the font metrics, meaning they analyse, most probably, the ascenders and descenders of a font and whatever they want and they come up with a "Default" for a font. But there is no such thing as a default leading, a number, that they read from the font. 🙂

[Oval]

1 hour ago, Seneca said:

This is the answer

Where is the question?

[kanihoncho]

then why does every other text-based program automatically have a default leading? Why does publisher automatically set solid all fonts? I have to manually go in every time to set the leading every time I add a new font . . . this should be an automatic setting like every other program. if you don't like the automatic setting THEN you can go in and alter manually or create a style. I don't feel that I should have to create styles every time I open a document, especially on new projects. I fool around with styles manually and then create a style sheet AFTER the project is finished so that other designers know what's going on.

[Fixx]

8 minutes ago, kanihoncho said:

I don't feel that I should have to create styles every time I open a document, especially on new projects.

Usually creating styles is the way to go, just after document setup.