Eelco Deuling Posted September 24, 2014 Share Posted September 24, 2014 I am running the beta of Affinity Designer, but I cannot find a way to use the typographic features of some fonts, especially a way to enter old style numbers. Normally I can use this features with the standard OSX "CMD-T" window (I use a Dutch localized version of OSX, and I do not know how this is called in English), but Affinity Designer uses a non standard window. For a graphic designer extended attributes of fonts are a must, so I would be disappointed if these could not be used. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eelco Deuling Posted September 24, 2014 Author Share Posted September 24, 2014 …just a check: if I copy paste from TextEditor the features are preserved Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Harris Posted September 24, 2014 Share Posted September 24, 2014 Does the menu option Format/Character/Show OpenType include the features you need? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eelco Deuling Posted September 24, 2014 Author Share Posted September 24, 2014 Hello Dave, Unfortunately not. If you pick for instance (not a favorite of mine) Zapfino, TextEditor gives me: ligatures, vertical positioning, Ornaments, Stylistic Variants, Oldstyle Figures, Special and 5 Character Variants. Affinity Designer gives me: Default ligatures and Fraction Ligatures. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eelco Deuling Posted September 24, 2014 Author Share Posted September 24, 2014 …Zapfino is an old .dfont: I will check with some more modern OTF's. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eelco Deuling Posted September 24, 2014 Author Share Posted September 24, 2014 …Minion Pro also gives me Default ligatures and Fraction Ligatures. The list of special features in TextEdit is even longer than for Zapfino :-) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff TonyB Posted September 24, 2014 Staff Share Posted September 24, 2014 Can you post a screen shot of TextEdit showing the extra options please. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eelco Deuling Posted September 24, 2014 Author Share Posted September 24, 2014 I hope this works: as an attachement: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff TonyB Posted September 24, 2014 Staff Share Posted September 24, 2014 Thanks, I was missing the 'Show Typography' setting in the Text panel. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Harris Posted September 24, 2014 Share Posted September 24, 2014 It looks like "Zapfino" uses Apple Advanced Typography, especially 'morx' tables in the font. We currently support OpenType (especially 'GSUB' tables) but not AAT, so I'm not surprised you aren't getting typography with that. We will have to consider whether to support AAT in future. The "Minion Pro" on my machine (OS X 10.9.5) uses OpenType, and Affinity Designer shows two page of typographic options for it. If it doesn't show these for you, I wonder if you are using an older version of the font. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eelco Deuling Posted September 25, 2014 Author Share Posted September 25, 2014 @Dave: that is probably the case. I work in a small design agency with a history of 20 years (and a +6000 font library with some very old fonts). I will try to find some more "modern" OTF files in our font library :-) …but, I have a feeling even older files should work, as the OS gives me acces to those features in other applications and these features are persistent if you copy/paste text from TextEdit into Affinity Designer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eelco Deuling Posted September 25, 2014 Author Share Posted September 25, 2014 Tried some more fonts: all OTF fonts dating before 2005 do not show OpenType features at all. The newer ones do: I am not able to pin a date when the do, but the OSX supplied Avenir Next (2007) does. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Harris Posted September 25, 2014 Share Posted September 25, 2014 …but, I have a feeling even older files should work, as the OS gives me acces to those features in other applications and these features are persistent if you copy/paste text from TextEdit into Affinity Designer. I agree; ideally it would work, but as we do our own font rendering it won't work until we do some programming work. I am not finding the features are persistent when I copy/paste from TextEdit into Affinity. Nor when I paste into Apple Pages. The clipboard uses Rich Text Format for text, and RTF doesn't seem to capture the typography features. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eelco Deuling Posted September 25, 2014 Author Share Posted September 25, 2014 On my computer it does in Affinity. Not in Pages: this feature was lost with the latest version (although Apple promised it will be returned later). Maybe this depends on the font being used? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eelco Deuling Posted September 25, 2014 Author Share Posted September 25, 2014 Hm… tried it again today… yesterday it worked, but today not… (maybe I wasn't looking yesterday?) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eelco Deuling Posted October 4, 2014 Author Share Posted October 4, 2014 Hm… I bought Affinity Designer right when it became available: that is, for myself (not for the company I work for). It looks like the OpenType features are not reliable: attached are two screenshots of a small poster set in Adobe Garamond Premier Pro (2005): in two textboxes he OpenType features panel shows me options, for the third one not. For one text box the OpenType features are applied incorrect. Since I bought Affinity Designer I had some more time to test type settings, and paste text from one application into Designer. No matter what OpenType font I use, I do not get the same results twice. I also miss the OSX standard combinations to navigate within text (using the alt-arrow combinations). As a drawing tool Designer is quite (insanely!) good (and really fast on older hardware!), but if the same text engine will be used in Publisher I doubt if I would buy that program as well: it would need a lot of work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff TonyB Posted October 4, 2014 Staff Share Posted October 4, 2014 I also miss the OSX standard combinations to navigate within text (using the alt-arrow combinations). Very unfortunate as we did support these but we got blasted by many users for not using alt-arrow for kerning. The users basically said that if we didn't support alt-arrow kerning then nobody would take us seriously. I guess it's hard to please everyone. How about we make it a preference? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Eelco Deuling Posted October 4, 2014 Author Share Posted October 4, 2014 A preference is nice :-) …I always hated InDesign not using standard OSX settings for text navigation. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff Andy Somerfield Posted October 4, 2014 Staff Share Posted October 4, 2014 We have a number of OpenType fixes and improvements coming in the next patch :) AndyS goloub 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goloub Posted October 10, 2014 Share Posted October 10, 2014 Hello! Could you put more languages in the OpenType language menu? This is extremely useful for the 'locl' feature. And in my dreams, Affinity Designer has a Glyphs palette like Illustrator or InDesign. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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