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Optical Alignment for right edge of the text frame in left align mode


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5 hours ago, ashf said:

Would be nice if I could apply rules for right edge of the text frame in left align mode.

Sorry, but I don't think I understand that.

If you're left-aligning the text, you would have a ragged right-edge for the text. How is optical alignment of the right edge going to help in that case?

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
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7 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Sorry, but I don't think I understand that.

If you're left-aligning the text, you would have a ragged right-edge for the text. How is optical alignment of the right edge going to help in that case?

In Japanese typography,  it doesn't matter if the right edge is ragged or not.
Punctuations should go outside of the text frame when the line reaches the right edge.
It's called "Burasagari" aka hanging punctuation. 
 

Adobe has Burasagari rule option built- in and it can be turned on/off with single menu item.

AI-burasagari.jpeg

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12 minutes ago, ashf said:

In Japanese typography,  it doesn't matter if the right edge is ragged or not.
Punctuations should go outside of the text frame when the line reaches the right edge.

So you would end up with something where you have the last character, then if there isn't room for the next character you'll have some blank space, and then after the blank space you'll have the punctuation?

If so, I'm not sure you should be asking for optical alignment on the right, because "put the punctuation outside the frame" seems like something different from optical alignment. It would deserve its own option (as in your Adobe example).

Thanks for the info.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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28 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

So you would end up with something where you have the last character, then if there isn't room for the next character you'll have some blank space, and then after the blank space you'll have the punctuation?

If so, I'm not sure you should be asking for optical alignment on the right, because "put the punctuation outside the frame" seems like something different from optical alignment. It would deserve its own option (as in your Adobe example).

Thanks for the info.

Punctuations are considered as zero width at the end of the line and will be shown outside of the frame.
Adding a separate option might be a way, but my thought is:

1. Adobe apps have a long history, they have been adding features after another, so it may not be so organized and efficient.
2. Serif is super reluctant to add non-latin language specific features, as you may know. it would be in the far far future. 
3. Optical Alignment has similar concept with Japanese typography such as Mojikumi rules or Brasagari, so I think merging those ability to Optical Alignment would be well organized and efficient. Burasagari can be achieved with small tweak in it.
 

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  • 4 months later...

The use case for this isn't limited to Japanese text. Even in left-aligned text, some lines of text will run to the right edge, and one could have valid reasons to want punctuation that reaches the edge to hang beyond the frame. I just ran into a case where adding a quote mark on the end caused my text to overflow the frame. Letting the mark hang would allow it to fit again, so I expected Optical Alignment to be my solution. But even though I have configured it to hang the mark 100% off the right edge, it isn't doing it. This thread offers an unofficial explanation that this is intended behavior for left-aligned text, but that certainly runs counter to the information being presented in the UI. It says "Right 100%" for that character, so I would expect it to hang 100%. So really, even if one doesn't accept that there could be valid reasons for using right-edge optical alignment in left-aligned text, the user interface is misleading.

image.png.7db50164265ac2d52caadb7109868bc5.png

 

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16 hours ago, flyleaf said:

some lines of text will run to the right edge, and one could have valid reasons to want punctuation that reaches the edge to hang beyond the frame.

To be honest I have never seen the closing quote outside a block of text.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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  • 7 months later...

Apparently this is normal behavior for hanging characters in Adobe and it certainly is in Quark XPress. I was trying to figure out why right edge was not being honored and IMO its silly to disallow. In the case in hand its a straight quote (used to indicate feet). The whole point of optical alignment/hanging characters is to maintain visual consistency and forcing a line wrap is just maintaining ragged right for the sake of assiduously adhering to ragged right, not about truly maintaining visual consistency.

If for some reason I wished to avoid optical alignment on the right it seems that would be easily handled via setting the right value to 0%. After all, similar reasoning would indicate that a style for left-aligned paragraphs should not be used with right-aligned paragraphs -- but from a change perspective there is a pretty obvious solution: rename 'left' to 'aligned edge' and 'right' to 'ragged edge'. This way the 'aligned edge' would be used on the appropriate side for the selected alignment while allowing those who wished for the possibility of a ragged edged hang to achieve that. For fully justified text the 'aligned edge' is what would be expected to be used on both.

 

In the end the argument about the behavior in other DTP serves to illustrate that it isn't as outlandish as suggested, is not relying on anecdote, and fundamentally it is hard to see how depriving the person doing layout of tools is a bad thing.

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