Add minimum used font size check in Prefiglht

[ugrandolini]

Hello,

I'm almost ready with the first book I made with Affinity Publisher and I uploaded to lulu.com for a quick test.

I keep getting a warning stating:

Quote

Font Size: Some of your fonts are less than 5 pt. That's pretty small. We recommend all fonts be 8 pt or more.

 

I opened a thread but at the end I realized it will be a nice feature if Preflight could check if there is text with a size under a predefined value in the document.

Ideally it would be nice to set the minimum font size somewhere in the preferences, however checking for anything smaller or equal 5 pt should be helpful enough.

Thank you

 

[Pšenda]

5 hours ago, ugrandolini said:

Ideally

Isn't it better to use text styles consistently? This ensures the correctness of the entire appearance of the text, not only "less than 5pt", which is probably quite important for a book.

[Old Bruce]

7 hours ago, ugrandolini said:

Hello,

I'm almost ready with the first book I made with Affinity Publisher and I uploaded to lulu.com for a quick test.

I keep getting a warning stating:

Quote

Font Size: Some of your fonts are less than 5 pt. That's pretty small. We recommend all fonts be 8 pt or more.

I opened a thread but at the end I realized it will be a nice feature if Preflight could check if there is text with a size under a predefined value in the document.

Ideally it would be nice to set the minimum font size somewhere in the preferences, however checking for anything smaller or equal 5 pt should be helpful enough.

Thank yo

Do you have any Superscript or Subscript text? Used in footnotes and math for the exponent plus sometimes for fractions.

Not all fonts have them and sometimes a smaller font size is used instead.

[ugrandolini]

11 hours ago, Pšenda said:

Isn't it better to use text styles consistently? This ensures the correctness of the entire appearance of the text, not only "less than 5pt", which is probably quite important for a book.

sure but while learning to use the software or when experimenting one can forget to add a style.

I think adding a check for the developers should not be a difficult task and can help at least all the new users – like me.

 

 

[Pšenda]

1 hour ago, ugrandolini said:

sure but while learning to use the software or when experimenting one can forget to add a style.

Personally, I find it far more useful to Preflight the check that non-stylistic formatting is used, ie inconsistent formatting with other text (something like underlines the inconsistent style with a blue wavy line in MS Word).

[ugrandolini]

11 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Do you have any Superscript or Subscript text? Used in footnotes and math for the exponent plus sometimes for fractions.

Not all fonts have them and sometimes a smaller font size is used instead.

thank you @Old Bruce yes this is a good clue: I have some "small caps" 8 pt font, changed to "all caps" and the issue is gone!

So this makes it even more important if it can be spotted by Preflight.

thank you so much!

 

Edited January 27, 2021 by ugrandolini
Confirm the clue is ok

[Jowday]

On 1/27/2021 at 12:28 PM, ugrandolini said:

thank you @Old Bruce yes this is a good clue: I have some "small caps" 8 pt font, changed to "all caps" and the issue is gone!

So this makes it even more important if it can be spotted by Preflight.

thank you so much!

 

Your suggestion is not at all bad. Personally I would also recommend using styles like a fanatic - but there are plenty of use cases where styles are often not used. Small handouts, posters, small whatever. You make a small estimate and there is no time to fiddle with styles and perfect them. And the work is easy, you can improvise and benefit from your experience. Here a custom preflight warning with a min and a max may benefit some. I am not sure I would ever trigger it though.

When/if Serif makes some export as ebook options such font size checks specifically for ebooks would make total sense. With additional new ebook preflight checks.

[tudor]

Adding my +1 for this request.