How to turn off text highlight when I recolor

[hm933]

Mac Affinity Photo

How do I turn off the text highlighting if I want to recolor part of a text block so that I can tell what the new color is actually going to be unaffected by the highlighting? (Photoshop turns it off automatically when you're recoloring)

[Wosven]

Hi @hm933, for this:

• create a character style,
• apply it on this character,
• unselect the character,
• modify the character style colour.

[hm933]

Styles seems like an inordinate amount of work if f I'm testing out multiple different color possibilities and going back and forth between possibilities. If there's no better way, I'm thinking I could create a temporary dummy layer masking out all but the single letter, because you can change the color of an entire block of text without highlighting. It's still a lot of work for something that should happen automatically.

[Wosven]

Using a style will let you use it elsewhere, and modification will be easier later.

You dont even need a mask, just get a single "e" in your example case.

 

[electroplated]

New to Affinity Designer and surprised to have a problem finding a way to hide the highlighting of selected text, which is making it difficult to evaluate font choices for a new design layout. Yes Adobe caters to this and has for decades with the simple Command/H keyboard shortcut to hide the highlight and make the active font entirely visible while editing. Am I missing something or is this feature not available? 

[GarryP]

You’re not missing anything; the functionality you require is not available.

[NotMyFault]

Thinking out of the box might help.

• Instead of using the actual functionality, you could use alternative ways to recolor the text, e.g. a rectangular shape, and blend range set to affect black. This will allow to choose any color without distracting highlighting. Once you found the perfect color, disable the helper rectangle and assign the color to the letter.
• it should be possible to assign a global color, and change the value of that global color any time, again no highlighting.

This given just as ideas. 

PS: on IPad, the highlighting is temporary deactivated as long as i drag the color sliders. Only after lifting the finger, the highlighting re-appears.

[Old Bruce]

I would use a Character or Paragraph style to colour the text, no need to have the text selected then.

[electroplated]

hmmm not really pro level typography here in spite of the many features Designer app does have. I was also informed there is no way to display hidden characters, spaces, para returns etc. wha wha wha...

[GarryP]

2 hours ago, electroplated said:

there is no way to display hidden characters, spaces, para returns etc.

That’s a Publisher-only function – menu “Text → Show Special Characters”.
You can try looking for an existing request for this to be added to Designer and ‘adding your voice’ to it if you want to.