I'm blown away -- but already have a request for pica units

[Bikerbudmatt]

I am already smitten by Designer and Photo! I have worked with digital design apps since the late 1980s, starting with the 1.0 versions of Freehand, and PageMaker, and with Photoshop since the early 1990s. I see these as viable "next steps" for my current CS6 suite, which is now pretty much frozen in time.

 

Since I'm mainly a "type" guy, one missing feature that stands out for me as soon as I open the apps is an option to show measurements in picas and points. It may not be as important with painting and drawing programs on their own, but I still work with print publications where it really is easier (and for me, native) to think of measurements as 12 to the pica, and roughly 6 picas to the inch.

 

I'd love to see another unit option that allows for this (go with digital picas if you prefer to keep it a straight 72 points / inch).

 

This would add an important underpinning for your upcoming Publisher product, where I guarantee many of us who work with type will demand it.

 

Thanks, and I'm going to go back and play with these new toys now…

 

-- 

Matt

[dotheDVDeed]

Request for pica units for me as well. It would certainly be more useful to me than "yards".

[dotheDVDeed]

5 months later--a new version of Designer.... and ugh still no picas. Yep, but "yards" is still there.   :rolleyes:

[Ben]

Ok - yards I only added because metres is in there, and the units are scale comparable if you are using imperial units - and all these units can be used in formula when setting values. Obviously, we didn't go as far as miles and kilometres.

 

What sort of Pica would we use though - French, American/English, or "desktop publishing"?

[ronnyb]

Also aren't there are two sizes for points as well?

1/72 of an inch and 1/72.27 of an inch?

[Bikerbudmatt]

5 months later--a new version of Designer.... and ugh still no picas. Yep, but "yards" is still there.   :rolleyes:

 

 

Ok - yards I only added because metres is in there, and the units are scale comparable if you are using imperial units - and all these units can be used in formula when setting values. Obviously, we didn't go as far as miles and kilometres.

 

What sort of Pica would we use though - French, American/English, or "desktop publishing"?

Ben, since all three have a defined reference point, why would you not want to include them? Yards and metres are wonderful units to include for drawing and drafting. But, points and picas are bread and butter for typography. (I had to go back to my original post to recall that I recommended at least the American and "digital" simplified pica. But there's no reason to exclude the Didot pica.)

 

Bumping my original request and advocating that it be implemented in the next revision. Thanks!

[Bikerbudmatt]

Ben, since all three have a defined reference point, why would you not want to include them? Yards and metres are wonderful units to include for drawing and drafting. But, points and picas are bread and butter for typography. (I had to go back to my original post to recall that I recommended at least the American and "digital" simplified pica. But there's no reason to exclude the Didot pica.)

 

Bumping my original request and advocating that it be implemented in the next revision. Thanks!

 

If I were confined to just one, though, I'd ask for the digital "DTP" pica, 4.233mm or 0.166 in. 12 points to the pica, 6 picas to the inch, 72 picas to the foot are very convenient in countries that have not yet converted to the metric system.

[Bikerbudmatt]

Also aren't there are two sizes for points as well?

1/72 of an inch and 1/72.27 of an inch?

Well, yes. The point is the base unit of a pica. So by definition there are two different references for points.

[Ben]

Our Point is the conventional 1/72 inch.  So, I'm guessing we'd opt for the 1/6 inch Pica.

 

We've not had anyone ask for the other Point type.  Not sure how we'd go about that.  We use the "pt" suffix to denote anything in 1/72 Points, for both UI display and value input. The suffix could not identify both types of Point simultaneously, so it could only be an app-wide preference that "pt" represents one or the other if we were to ever support it.

 

If we are adding Pica, it won't be in the 1.5 release cycle.  I'll ask the other guys if we can look to add it for 1.6.

[ronnyb]

 

I've never had to use the 1/72.27" point but in Adobe apps I've seen it as a preference setting to select which point the user wants to use as default...

 

Our Point is the conventional 1/72 inch. So, I'm guessing we'd opt for the 1/6 inch Pica.

 

We've not had anyone ask for the other Point type. Not sure how we'd go about that. We use the "pt" suffix to denote anything in 1/72 Points, for both UI display and value input. The suffix could not identify both types of Point simultaneously, so it could only be an app-wide preference that "pt" represents one or the other if we were to ever support it.

 

If we are adding Pica, it won't be in the 1.5 release cycle. I'll ask the other guys if we can look to add it for 1.6.

[Ben]

I've never had to use the 1/72.27" point but in Adobe apps I've seen it as a preference setting to select which point the user wants to use as default...

 

 

Yeah - thought that'd be how most apps would handle it.

[Bikerbudmatt]

Our Point is the conventional 1/72 inch.  So, I'm guessing we'd opt for the 1/6 inch Pica.

 

We've not had anyone ask for the other Point type.  Not sure how we'd go about that.  We use the "pt" suffix to denote anything in 1/72 Points, for both UI display and value input. The suffix could not identify both types of Point simultaneously, so it could only be an app-wide preference that "pt" represents one or the other if we were to ever support it.

 

If we are adding Pica, it won't be in the 1.5 release cycle.  I'll ask the other guys if we can look to add it for 1.6.

 

The other Point (I like the oblique there!) is one of those things that got carried forward for backward compatibility with legacy measures. I still have some metal rules that are marked in traditional point increments. By the time you get to measures like 36 Picas, there is a noticeable difference between the two. 

 

As one example of how an identically-named convention could be handled, I took a look at InDesign's "Units & Increments" dialog. Adobe arguably set the 72 pts/inch standard when they introduced the PostScript language, so they have an editable pop-menu with two hardwired selections: "PostScript (72 pts/inch)" and "Traditional (72.27 pts/inch)". But, you can also define a point to be ANY arbitrary factor/inch.

 

That suggests to me a powerful idea: would your engine be able to deal with a measurement system that allows the user to define their own measurement scale? I'm not sure you'd really want to get in to that, and you'd have to set some boundaries to avoid blowing up the app, but I'm wondering if the app is still "young" enough that you could add this without crossing a whole bunch of dependencies?

 

And all of that being said… I'd be happy to see a PostScript or digital Pica/Point measurement in the 1.6 release. 

 

Thanks Ben!

[Rhys Stenhouse]

Just posting to add my support for picas, I’d mentioned it on Twitter a while back but never actually got around to posting a request here.

 

More than anything else, it’ll be an especially useful feature to have ready for when Affinity Publisher is released – picas are at their most useful when designing full-page layouts and multi-page documents, I use them all the time in InDesign.