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Typographic features (old style numbers - Ligatures)


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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.

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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.

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@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.

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…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.

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  • 2 weeks later...

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.

screen1.pngscreen2.png

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  • Staff

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?

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