Counting spaces as characters at sentence end when centre aligning

[mark dreams big]

hi there, I will preface this with saying I've just came to affinity photo from photoshop, I'm self-taught with PS so i can't even say I know much about that either!

I'm a boardgame designer and I'm using affinity photo to create cards, which are a combination of text and icons. On PS when creating space at the end of a text line it would include the spaces as characters for centre alignment purposes, but I can't seem to give spaces any 'volume' in photo now that i've opened the PSD in affinity. I've tried using special characters and playing about with paragraph options but don't want to mess about with it too much, any ideas?

The simpler the explanation the better, I'm a noob!

[GarryP]

Welcome to the forums @mark dreams big

I’m curious as to why you would want to override the centre-justification slightly by adding a space (or more than one).
Wouldn’t that make the text look worse?
Can you give a bit more information about why you would want to do this?
I’m not saying that you are ‘wrong’ by wanting to do it, I just don’t understand why.

A quick (and horrible) way to do this would be to add some full stops (or anything else) to end of the line of characters and set their Fill to 0% Opacity.

[mark dreams big]

Hi @GarryP

The space is not visible as an icon is placed in it. currently the text would be centred but the width of the icon pushes out the full central effect, if that makes sense?

 

[mark dreams big]

[mark dreams big]

the PSD version

[Pšenda]

In order for the text alignment to be "visually" correct, I would definitely not do it by manual alignment using spaces/some characters, but I would use some circle from the Windings font, which I would make exactly as big as a red symbol, which I would then insert over the text (in the same position).

P. S. That trailing spaces are excluded from text alignment is a standard feature for me (Word does, for example).

[carl123]

33 minutes ago, mark dreams big said:

On PS when creating space at the end of a text line it would include the spaces as characters for centre alignment purposes

One way...

Replace the spaces with asterisks, highlight/select the asterisks and in the colour panel change Opacity to zero 

[mark dreams big]

6 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

In order for the text alignment to be "visually" correct, I would definitely not do it by manual alignment using spaces/some characters, but I would use some circle from the Windings font, which I would make exactly as big as a red symbol, which I would then insert over the text (in the same position).

Great, thanks @Pšenda I can have a look at doing that. Can i define the wingding text in mm rather than points to get it exact? And is there a way to save that as a specifi character as I'll be using it a lot?

Edited March 2, 2021 by mark dreams big

[Pšenda]

5 minutes ago, mark dreams big said:

Can i define the wingding text in mm rather than points to get it exact?

Yes, write "xx mm" instead "xx pt".

Edit: For search appropriate symbol try Glyph Browser. Maybe copyright would be appropriate (it is in all fonts).

[Petar Petrenko]

11 minutes ago, mark dreams big said:

And is there a way to save that as a specifi character as I'll be using it a lot?

Save it as an asset, maybe?

[Pšenda]

17 minutes ago, mark dreams big said:

Can i define the wingding text in mm rather than points to get it exact?

However, keep in mind that the size of a "font" is usually not the size of the symbol/character that this font displays. So if you want to draw a circle with a font that will have a radius of exactly 10 mm, then it is not a 10 mm font. You can specify the desired font size using the Artistic Text Tool, which you can use to draw a frame of the desired size.

Edited March 2, 2021 by Pšenda

[mark dreams big]

Thanks @Pšenda, I've found a cheat anyways - the icon is the exact width of 4 dashes so i can keep that in the text and just have the icon on a higher layer

 

[R C-R]

There is another way to do this but it is fiddly so not very practical. The idea is to create the icon as a group, copy it, & paste it into the text at the appropriate place, where it becomes an "Inline in text" object.

Fiddly text fake.afphoto

[loukash]

3 hours ago, R C-R said:

There is another way to do this but it is fiddly so not very practical. The idea is to create the icon as a group, copy it, & paste it into the text at the appropriate place, where it becomes an "Inline in text" object.

This is in fact exactly how it should be done.
I was just about to propose that Photo si perhaps the wrong tool for the job, and that using at least Designer with its slightly more advanced typographical tools would be a better idea because I thought that Photo cannot do pinned inline objects in the first place. I'm quite surprised that it can. Also, Publisher offers logically the "best" pinned object control of the threesome bunch. ("Best" being a relative term here because… well, there's still a lot of "room for improvement"…)