Request: Add Hyphenation Controls to Designer & Photo

[Mark Oehlschlager]

Please add hyphenation controls to the Paragraph Panel in Designer and Photo. 

Presently both Designer and Photo (like Publisher) have justification and optical alignment controls to improve the evenness of letter- and word-spacing in justified text, but (unlike Publisher) neither Designer nor Photo offer the related control of hyphenation to further improve on the even setting of justified text. It seems like an app design oversight.

Please consider adding hyphenation controls.

[GarryP]

7 hours ago, Mark Oehlschlager said:

It seems like an app design oversight.

There’s a chance, since that functionality only came to the suite when Publisher was released, that it could be deliberately Publisher-exclusive functionality, possibly for economic reasons. E.g. If you want the extra typographic functions of the suite then you should buy Publisher and use them there.
I’m not saying that the hyphenation controls won’t or shouldn’t ever be included in Designer and Photo, just that there may be business model reasons why it possibly won’t.

[Mark Oehlschlager]

@GarryPSetting good type is just as relevant to the digital ad designer and to the poster or packaging designer as it is to the book or magazine designer. It makes no sense to arbitrarily restrict the tools for setting good type to Publisher.

The compelling use case for purchasing Publisher is it's ability to design book forms: multi-page documents with title pages, TOCs and other front matter, chapters/sections, running heads and folios, multiple master pages, indexes and other back matter.

It would be a strange form of punishment for Affinity to restrict hyphenation control to Publisher to encourage sales of that app.

[GarryP]

If you look through the feature requests there are so many “this functionality is already in <X> so it should also be in <Y>” suggestions that, if they were all honoured, we would end up with three applications which mostly did the same thing, with a few functional exceptions.

As I said above, I’m not suggesting that hyphenation controls shouldn’t be added to Designer (or Photo) but there has to be some kind of ‘cut-off’ where the functionalities of the different applications differ enough that there continues to be three distinct applications which can be sold inexpensively and separately.

Otherwise we could get to the point where there is only one application which does everything but costs more than people want to pay for the functionality they need.

As with most things where it comes to the Affinity range, all we can do is make a request and see what happens.
Who knows what 2.0 will bring?

[abra100pro]

@GarryP I highly disagree - 1. there is already a feature built into AD - it just seems not to work. 2. AD does not have to be the App you make a 120pages fashion catalogue, but is MUST be a reasonable Illustration- and Layout-App. Therefore it needs the superbasic hyphenation feature. This is not a sophisticated typo-feature, it is basic. So, you led me to this topic, but I still don't know whether Serif has forgotten to activate this function or ...whatever. Don't get me wrong - no hard feelings, I just had a quite depressing day regarding all the bugs and issues I found today in AD solely.

[walt.farrell]

49 minutes ago, abra100pro said:

So, you led me to this topic, but I still don't know whether Serif has forgotten to activate this function or ...whatever

It is a function that did not exist in any Affinity application until Publisher canned out, and it still exists only in Publisher.

Therefore it seems like a conscious decision on Serif's part.

Note that Publisher can be used for simpler documents, too. It is not limited to complex books. 

[abra100pro]

And why is this in AD, then?

 

Besides: An Illustration Application that cannot handle hyphenation.... really? I can't imagine someone not buying Apub because AD would have hyphenation integrated. Even a Webbrowser does it! What can be more basic? I don't get it. It is ridiculous, IMHO.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, abra100pro said:

And why is this in AD, then?

You're right. Having that setting visible is inconsistent, and possibly it should be removed, too.

[Dan C]

On 1/3/2022 at 5:36 PM, abra100pro said:

And why is this in AD, then?

I can confirm this is already logged with our developers and is currently awaiting an update - as it was logged that both this feature is not working as expected in Designer, or perhaps has been included incorrectly, since this was made available in Publisher.

I certainly understand why you'd want this feature in Designer also, and I'll be sure to provide your feedback to our devs within this same log to potentially help their decision here.

I hope this helps

[abra100pro]

@Dan C it does. Thanks!