Using the Typography options to produce Fractions and Ordinals

[Ulysses]

I'm very well versed in the Affinity Suite, but talk to me as if I've never opened Affinity Photo or any of its siblings.

Question 1: How, exactly, would you go about producing fractions and ordinal numbers in Affinity Photo?

Question 2: In the attached sample, why are all of the characters I selected rendered as fractions, but 4/5 will not?

Question 3: Why is it that when I try to create ordinal numbers nothing seems to happen?

 

I've attached screenshots of the selected options in the Character/Typography panel. As far as I researched, I'm not reading about any bugs in version 1.10.1. I thought this would be rather basic, but I'm guessing there's more to creating these sorts of characters than at first meets the eye. Thanks for any insights you might have on this feature. 

 

Font: Times New Roman
Affinity Photo 1.10.1
macOS Mojave

[Ron P.]

IMHO, this is either a bug, or just plain ridiculous.

I don't have a problem with the fractions, can get the 4/5 fraction. However the Ordinals, so far the only way I've managed to get it to work is by using specific fonts. In my test case it is the Cambria or Cambria Math.

I see you're on a Mac, where I'm on Win10.

Edited

Further checking in AP AD, the following Fonts recognized the Ordinals;

[Joachim_L]

5 hours ago, Ulysses said:

Question 2: In the attached sample, why are all of the characters I selected rendered as fractions, but 4/5 will not?

Maybe it is not part of Preferences >> Auto-Correct >> Your language ?

5 hours ago, Ulysses said:

Question 3: Why is it that when I try to create ordinal numbers nothing seems to happen?

Maybe you unchecked the option Superscript ordinals as they are typed in Preferences >> Auto-Correct ?

[Ron P.]

15 minutes ago, Joachim_L said:

Maybe it is not part of Preferences >> Auto-Correct >> Your language ?

Maybe you unchecked the option Superscript ordinals as they are typed in Preferences >> Auto-Correct ?

Where are you finding the Preferences>Auto Correct? It's not in the Preferences in my copies of AP and AD.

I also tested this in Libre Office, and it has no problem with Ordinals with any fonts.

[Joachim_L]

6 minutes ago, Ron P. said:

Where are you finding the Preferences>Auto Correct? It's not in the Preferences in my copies of AP and AD.

Need more coffee in the morning. Sorry, this option is only for APu and not for AP.

[lacerto]

 

8 hours ago, Ulysses said:

Question 1: How, exactly, would you go about producing fractions and ordinal numbers in Affinity Photo?

Question 2: In the attached sample, why are all of the characters I selected rendered as fractions, but 4/5 will not?

Question 3: Why is it that when I try to create ordinal numbers nothing seems to happen?

 

If the font supports Open Type features Fractions and Ordinals, then all you need to do is enabling these features in the Character panel:

Some fonts, like Helvetica Now in the example, have features supported contextually so they turn on as you type.

In fonts where these OpenType features are not supported (like Times New Roman), the Fractions formatting option only fetches fractional glyphs that exist in the font (1/2, 2/3 etc), but the other ones need to be created manually with a fraction symbol and numbers with e.g. superscript and subscript formatting, added with baseline shift as needed. Character styles can be helpful in recycling the formatting to be used with other fractional compositions.

As mentioned above, in some apps (like LibreOffice Writer, or Affinity Publisher), autocorrection can be used to automatically apply ordinal formatting as you type (in some apps autocorrecting can also be applied by using Find/Replace, but not in Affinity apps); but autocorrection, as mentioned, is only available in Affinity Publisher. This means that superscript formatting is automatically applied in context of using ordinals which makes this feature available with any font even without proper ordinal glyphs and Ordinal OpenType feature.

[Alfred]

28 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

In fonts where these OpenType features are not supported (like Times New Roman), the Fractions formatting option only fetches fractional glyphs that exist in the font (1/2, 2/3 etc), but the other ones need to be created manually with a fraction symbol and numbers with e.g. superscript and subscript formatting, added with baseline shift as needed. Character styles can be helpful in recycling the formatting to be used with other fractional compositions.

If you have to do them this way for some fractions it’s best to do them all the same way instead of depending on any built-in fraction glyphs, otherwise (as shown in @Lagarto’s screenshot) some of the numerals may not match exactly.

[kenmcd]

Times New Roman on the Mac (v5.10)
- does have OpenType arbitrary fractions - so the Typography panel fractions do work
- does not have a ⅘ character - so AutoCorrect would not work for that one
- it does have these 9 pre-composed fractions - ¼½¾ ⅓⅔ ⅛⅜⅝⅞ (could work with AutoCorrect)
- in my APub only 1/2, 1/4, and 3/4 are in AutoCorrect by default, no 2/3, no 4/5, etc.
- there is no OpenType ordinals feature - so APub is creating them, if enabled in Preferences
- the only ordinal characters that exist in the font are ªº

TNR v7.00 on Windows has 20 pre-composed fractions: ¼½¾⅐⅑⅒⅓⅔⅕⅖⅗⅘⅙⅚⅛⅜⅝⅞⅟↉
And OpenType arbitrary fractions.
Ordinals features are the same as above.