Optical Alignment issue with quote marks

[Dekker500]

Windows 10 20H2 build 19042.964; Affinity Publisher 1.9.2.1035

I am trying to do something that seems very straightforward, but I am hitting a wall that might be a bug.

Below you see text with a "quotation" paragraph style applied. Each line is a separate "paragraph", and two lines are indented even further. No problems there.

The problem is with the "optical alignment" and the quotation mark. I clicked "add" below to show the values being used. My desire is for all the letters W to be perfectly aligned, and to have the quotation mark floating on the left. I assumed that having a value of Left 100% would accomplish that, but no. The dialog won't let me increase beyond 100, and it will not let me manually type a value larger than 100.

Any suggestions, short of manually fiddling with the indentation for these sort of poems/quotations?

As a minimum, I would have liked the optical alignment to allow me to set a value where the character completely disappears into the margin...

 

Edited May 3, 2021 by Dekker500
Added platform/publisher versions

[Dekker500]

Interesting. This may be an interaction with the letter W and T.

Here is a quotation from two different sections. In the first, everything works as planned. In the second, the alignment is off again.

 

Edited May 3, 2021 by Dekker500

[loukash]

2 hours ago, Dekker500 said:

that might be a bug

I'd say this is "by design".

2 hours ago, Dekker500 said:

I assumed that having a value of Left 100% would accomplish that, but no

The value affects the respective character width 100% of “. It's not the same value as 100% of W.

2 hours ago, Dekker500 said:

it will not let me manually type a value larger than 100

That's weird because on Mac, the maximal value this field will accept are a whopping 2147483647 %! (no idea why this exact value, but there you go…)

So is this possibly a Windows specific bug?

2 hours ago, Dekker500 said:

Any suggestions, short of manually fiddling with the indentation for these sort of poems/quotations?

Yup:

1. remove W from the optical alignment field for this selection
2. adjust indent as you see fit

[Alfred]

6 minutes ago, loukash said:

That's weird because on Mac, the maximal value this field will accept are a whopping 2147483647 %! (no idea why this exact value, but there you go…)

2^31 - 1 = 2147483647

(This is the maximum value of a signed 32-bit integer.)

[Dekker500]

14 minutes ago, loukash said:

2147483647 %! (no idea why this exact value, but there you go…)

As a programmer, I can say it is because that is the maximum value of an integer (INT32)

I'll try your suggestion on removing the W, it sounds logical.

[loukash]

Just now, Alfred said:

the maximum value of a signed 32-bit integer

Thanks. As I may have posted elsewhere already, my last algebra lesson must have been around 1982 or so. Haven't had much use for this kind of stuff since…
But… I expected that it would be something like that.

[Dekker500]

21 minutes ago, loukash said:

remove W from the optical alignment field for this selection

OK, the final solution is for blocks like poetry/song, where alignment of the character is more important, to simply remove ALL alpha characters from the alignment, and simply leave the punctuation (on the left, anyway).

After some fiddling, I found out the "rationale" behind the wonky column of Ws. The first line's quotation marks are indeed treated as 100% left, as in not optically aligned. The side-effect of this is that the very next character, the first W, is aligned perfectly with the assigned indent. The visual disparity comes from the following lines also having W, which ARE being affected by Optical Alignment.

In edge cases like these, it'd be convenient to have a further option - "if first glyph has 100% adjustment, apply optical adjustment to following glyph?" Food for thought.

[loukash]

1 minute ago, Dekker500 said:

"if first glyph has 100% adjustment, apply optical adjustment to following glyph?"

Yep, I figured that this is what you were initially after.
But conditional stuff like this adds massively to complexity. And given Serif's record of implementing confusing UI solutions, I'm happy that they haven't tried.

You'd be better off to create character styles for specific combinations, then use Find & Replace to locate those instances and apply the character styles to them.

[SGG]

Have just come across this post and wonder if the following will help, which on my limited testing seems to avoid any manual “fixes.” Page 352 of the Affinity Publisher Workbook (the page covering optical alignment) indicates the following:

If you notice that ATWY capital letters at the start of lines are outdented slightly after optical alignment, this can be fixed by editing the ATWY entry to have a Left setting of 0% (not 20%).