Editing text in Affinity Photo

[toltec]

1 hour ago, bmoeskau said:

 

It's pretty clear that people fleeing Adobe-subscription-land are a huge demographic for these products. As such, I would think making it as frictionless as possible to switch would be a priority (especially with commands as common as exiting text edit mode). Just my two cents, obviously it is what it is.

 

Not really. Remember that Affinity is part of an editing suite. It will be possible to edit Photo files in Publisher or Designer and vice versa (as I understand it). A DTP program certainly does not require you to place Cmd + Enter after every bit of text, so it would all go very wrong if Serif adopted every quirky Adobe Photoshop method.

 

Innovations need a new approach. 

[bmoeskau]

Look, this isn't a hill I really feel liking dying on -- at the end of the day, the software designers can do whatever they please. It's fine.

 

But, two things. I'm old enough to remember the days when people were switching in droves from Word Perfect to MS Word. The MS developers were smart enough to provide a complete crosswalk key mapping from WP to Word. Did they do it because WP had the perfect set of keyboard shortcuts? No -- in fact, they were optimized for terminal style usage (pre-Windows). They did it for one reason -- to make it dead-simple for WP users who had years of muscle memory to switch. That's it. They wanted to reduce friction / increase adoption, and it worked like a charm.

 

Secondly, there's a thing in software called the Principle of Least Astonishment. Simply, software should behave consistently and predictably. Granted, you can argue that within Affinity's tools, whatever behavior they dictate is by definition consistent and predictable, given no other constraints. However when you are explicitly positioning yourself against the 800 lb gorilla in the space, and wooing users from their platform to yours, the POLA applies in the sense of making things minimally surprising in general, for all users. The reason I commented in this thread about this issue specifically is because the sequence of events for me went like this:

• T
• <type some text>
• Cmd-Enter (muscle memory)
• <go on with doing other stuff, use a few tools, etc.>
• T again (to edit previous text)
• Click on the previous text. Click again. Double-click. Scratch head.
• <5 minutes pass trying to figure out what's going on>
• Realize text is now a bunch of random shape layers. Scratch head again.
• Shrug, delete text and type it all again

I literally did that entire sequence 3 or 4 times over a few hours before finally coming here in desperation, thinking I was going nuts. Now that I know about this, fine, I can remap the keys as you mentioned. Great. But as someone wanting (really) to switch happily from AI, this was extremely surprising (read: frustrating) in the POLA sense.

 

Again, in summary, it's fine  I'll deal with it. Just letting you know where I'm coming from.

[toltec]

Well, as you discovered Photo requires one less step. There is no need for the unnecessary and time wasting Cmd + Enter. I call that progress  That brings Affinity in line with virtually every DTP and Word Processing program I have ever used. 

 

I agree that it would be nice sometimes if more companies meshed shortcuts and procedures. I have lost count of how many times things went horribly wrong because I tried to use a shortcut from a different program. And who ever reads the "Are you sure you want to delete all your files" warning that flashes up 

 

That is my main bugbear with Irfanview. The shortcuts are very strange and nothing like any other graphics type program I know.

 

[Fixx]

I have never felt any urge to press cmd-enter with adobe apps. I have used them almost 30 years.

[R C-R]

9 hours ago, bmoeskau said:

Secondly, there's a thing in software called the Principle of Least Astonishment.

Yes, & if developers strictly adhered to that principle, there would be no progress, no innovation. There would be nothing besides "me too" apps on the market to choose from that did everything in the same unsurprising way, not because it was the best way to do anything but because computers were once not powerful enough to do it in any other way.

 

The Affinity apps are the result of a 'clean slate' approach, designed from the ground up to leverage the power of today's computers & the advanced services their operating systems provide. Sure, that is going to cause some surprises for users that expect everything to work the same as they have for decades in older, more established apps, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing, particularly when it eliminates the need for extra steps that do nothing to improve their workflows.

[ski542002]

Hi:  Having no luck at all; very simple procedure in Photoshop.  I have a text layer containing a person's name.  All I want to do is change the name.  In PS, I double click the layer, the text is highlighted and I can type in the new name. 

 

In Affinity, when I double click the layer in the layer's palate, I get the blue line around the text block, but the cursor does nothing. Can't highlight the text to change it.  I'm wasting time.

[R C-R]

49 minutes ago, ski542002 said:

In Affinity, when I double click the layer in the layer's palate, I get the blue line around the text block, but the cursor does nothing. Can't highlight the text to change it.

If you are having problems double-clicking on the canvas to enter text editing mode, try selecting the layer with the Move Tool (so the bounding box is showing) & then type "T." The cursor should change to the text one & you can click or drag-select in the text in the normal way.

 

It also can help to zoom in if the text is small, or to lock layers that might be obscuring it.

[carl123]

4 hours ago, ski542002 said:

In PS, I double click the layer, the text is highlighted and I can type in the new name. In Affinity, when I double click the layer in the layer's palate, I get the blue line around the text block, but the cursor does nothing

It's not the same as Photoshop, you cant automatically select the text when clicking in the Layer's panel.  Double (or triple) click the text on the canvas to select it

 

[firstdefence]

This is akin to having shoes that have shoelaces, then getting shoes that have velcro straps and trying to tie them up the same.

[toltec]

2 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

This is akin to having shoes that have shoelaces, then getting shoes that have velcro straps and trying to ties them up the same.

 

  That's where I've been going wrong.

[ski542002]

Hello RC-R.  Solution didn't work, or I did something wrong.  When I select the Move Tool, I do get the bounding box. (see attached screenshot) Clicking "T", does not give me the Text one.  I get crosshairs with the letter T next to the crosshairs. 

Edited May 7, 2018 by ski542002
Letter change from A to T (shown on screenshot).

[carl123]

If you look in the Layers panel you will see that that layer has the designation (Pixel) after it, this means it is a pixel layer and thus cannot be edited as text any longer.

You either somehow converted it to a pixel layer or you imported it as a pixel layer

 

[R C-R]

@ski542002

As Carl mentioned, you are trying to edit a Pixel layer (a picture of text rather than editable text). While a pixel layer may look the same as a text layer, in Affinity Photo & Designer, the two kinds of editable text (Frame text & Art text) can be identified by their icons in the Layers panel, like in this Text Layers.afphoto file:

Another way to tell editable text layers from pixel layers with text is to use the Text menu > Hide All Text & Show All Text items to see what disappears & what remains visible.

[ski542002]

Ok, that helped.  This was a Photoshop doc and I don't recall doing anything to the document, other than opening it in Affinity.  I deleted all of the other text blocks in this doc and was able to enter a line of test text.   I'm sure over time I'll see the benefits of using Affinity, but for now it's very counter-intuitive, most likely due to PS muscle memory.  I appreciate the replies.

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, ski542002 said:

This was a Photoshop doc and I don't recall doing anything to the document, other than opening it in Affinity.

There is a preference in the General section that must be enabled for text in Photoshop documents to be imported as text instead of as bitmaps (pixel layers). This is not enabled by default because importing text as bitmaps guarantees it will look the same as in the PS document.

[ski542002]

Sweet!   Thanks RC-R for the positive direction!  

[dstraigh]

 

Okay, so, if at all possible, is there an ultra simple way of describing what one needs to do to edit existing text in Photo Affinity? 

I've got the same problem.     Just can't do simple things like change the text or change the text color.  

Perhaps I need a simpler program to use.    I don't need anything fancy. 

[Alfred]

18 minutes ago, dstraigh said:

Okay, so, if at all possible, is there an ultra simple way of describing what one needs to do to edit existing text in Photo Affinity? 

I've got the same problem.     Just can't do simple things like change the text or change the text color.  

Perhaps I need a simpler program to use.    I don't need anything fancy. 

Please tell us more about the text you want to edit. Is it actual text, like the characters in our posts to this forum, or is it just a picture a piece of text? Can you share a sample file here?

[R C-R]

25 minutes ago, dstraigh said:

Okay, so, if at all possible, is there an ultra simple way of describing what one needs to do to edit existing text in Photo Affinity? 

The simplest possible way I know to describe this is to make sure that text objects are not converted to pixels ("rasterized").

If the difference is not clear to you it may help to think of text objects as like arranging Scrabble© tiles to form words, sentences, & paragraphs so you can change the arrangement to 'edit' the text; whereas rasterizing is like taking a photo of the arranged tiles & everything else the camera sees.

[rightdroid]

Signed up just for this.

I'm with bmoeskau. 
First off, the program looks and feels good and we will most likely switch to it as a company.

It took me 20 minutes to go from "Why cannot I edit this text" to googling "how to edit text in Affinity" (should be a BIG RED FLAG) to realizing I was creating curves instead of text objects. Then I found this thread and the helpful bit was learning that ctrl+enter is bound by default to "Convert To Curves". It's one thing to not bind it to end text editing, it's whole another peculiarity to bind so common shortcut to a desctructive command (unless you're able undo, or unless there's some way to convert from curves back to text objects I'm not aware of).

It is a muscle memory, but not only from Adobe products. Gmail and Trello would be another two examples, something a designer would use day to day. Enter creates a newline. Ctrl+Enter submits/sends text. So the logic is whenever you can create newlines, as you can in Affinity, submitting/finishing the text is with ctrl+enter. Otherwise it's just enter. Clicking a mouse makes no sense to end a typing action.

As for justifying why this is the correct UX philosophy for the Affinity team/devs... it doesn't help anyone. Clearly there's a friction here, however minor one.

Edit: even this very forum uses ctrl+enter as a submit comment.

Just my two cents as well. 

Edited November 14, 2019 by rightdroid
added text, spelling corrections

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, rightdroid said:

Clicking a mouse makes no sense to end a typing action.

Frankly, having to do anything besides clicking outside a text block or choosing another tool to exit text entry mode (a.k.a. "finalize" the text) in a graphics app has never made much sense to me.

After all, it is not as if I am going to pause & admire what I have typed or anything like that. Instead, I am going to perform the next step in my workflow, whatever that may be. That usually involves selecting something else, switching tools, creating new objects, using menu commands, or some combination of those things, so I am constantly using the mouse anyway.

Besides, in Affinity I can use the mouse to move, resize, rotate, or shear a text block without even leaving text entry mode.

Of course, you have the option to remove the "Convert To Curves" shortcut or change it to something else that you won't type by accident, like maybe adding Alt to the default. 

[AndyQ]

On 11/14/2019 at 8:55 PM, rightdroid said:

As for justifying why this is the correct UX philosophy for the Affinity team/devs... it doesn't help anyone. Clearly there's a friction here, however minor one.
Edit: even this very forum uses ctrl+enter as a submit comment.

It becomes even more of a problem if you used both applications daily, or if Illustrator is your main application. Designer's similarity to Illustrator is why I'm moving towards it and  away from CorelDraw. CTRL-Enter is really bothering me. If it did nothing that would be OK - the fact that it does something highly undesirable (in my context) is the problem. In choosing a short cut for "convert to curves" surely some other key combo would be preferable - something meaningful e.g. CTRL-C ("curves") or "CTRL-O" (outlines)....anything really. Any shortcut using the "enter/return" key should be reserved for operations logically linked to the termination of an operation, a submission or a return to a previous state. It's OK to say the shortcuts are customisable but if you use dozens of applications on multiple machines, or you are implementing an application for a team of employees, it's considerably easier to stick with defaults (and less pain for support staff!).  As people have mentioned in this thread, you can end up not realising you've converted text to curves until way-too-late.

[JLukeW]

I, too, have registered just for this topic. It's extremely frustrating to go from Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Gmail, Microsoft Word, Excel, and other applications which follow a similar pattern for ctrl+enter to Affinity, where ctrl+enter irreversibly destroys text.

A possible solution is to add an option ("Exit Text Tool" / "Confirm Text") to the Keyboard Shortcuts panel, or an option in settings to toggle between the two default behaviors (Convert to Curves vs. End Text Editing).

My workflow in Affinity Photo (and Adobe Photoshop) is almost exclusively text-based, and my ability to move back and forth is greatly hampered by the lack of a valid ctrl+enter keyboard shortcut target.

Edited June 12, 2020 by JLukeW
(fixed typo)

[walt.farrell]

7 hours ago, JLukeW said:

A possible solution

The best immediate solution, for you, is probably to change the Convert to Curves shortcut to something else, or remove it entirely. You can do that via the Keyboard Shortcuts section of the Affinity Preferences.

[JLukeW]

What happens when the shortcut is reassigned to nothing:

Click, type text, press ctrl+enter (has no effect), press "b" to select brush, "b" appears after text. Backspace, press "esc.", press "b" to select brush.