Cannot center text in text frame

[Quadma]

I've created a grid of text frames.  I want to be able to center the text within each frame, but it is a little too far to the right.  I cannot figure out why.  There appears to be a left indent of some sort but I can't figure out where.  I've attached the file.  Any help would be so appreciated!

 

text alignment.afpub

[R C-R]

45 minutes ago, Quadma said:

I want to be able to center the text within each frame, but it is a little too far to the right. 

If you want to align each of them to the center, choose Center Align for each of them, either from the Contextual Toolbar or the menu item Text > Alignment options.

[Quadma]

Thanks so

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

If you want to align each of them to the center, choose Center Align for each of them, either from the Contextual Toolbar or the menu item Text > Alignment options.

Thanks so much for your reply, RC-R.  I do know how to use Text>Alignment.   My difficulty is that when I choose Center alignment, it's not actually centered, but shifted a bit to the right.  I included the Left Justified and Right Justified examples to show that the entire text box seems to be indented a bit to the right.  When I Right justify, the text is flush against the right side of the box, but when I Left Justify, it is slightly indented.  This is carrying over to the the Center Justified-it's not actually in the center, but shifted to the right.  I'm hoping someone can help me figure out why.

[carl123]

Look in the Paragraph panel in the Spacing section

You will see the Left Indent and First Line Indent settings are non-zero

With the text frame selected, change both to zero and it will fix the "problem"

[thomaso]

There is confusion in the style definition, respectively the Affinity UI: Though the Paragraph Panel says 0 there are two indents set. Reset them to zero again.

[Quadma]

7 minutes ago, thomaso said:

There is confusion in the style definition, respectively the Affinity UI: Though the Paragraph Panel says 0 there are two indents set. Reset them to zero again.

Thanks, thomaso-2 questions

1) could you clarify how to reset the indents?  I've never done that before and am not finding the information readily when I search for it.

2) where is the Style settings box that you picture?.  It certainly looks like helpful information.

[carl123]

13 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Though the Paragraph Panel says 0 there are two indents set

 

Strange, on Windows, you can see the values

 

 

[Quadma]

3 minutes ago, carl123 said:

 

Strange, on Windows, you can see the values

 

 

I should have just switched to my Windows machine! THAT I know what to do with!

Hopefully thomaso does reply to clarify how I can reset it on my Mac, because it would be good to know how to do that.

[carl123]

1 minute ago, Quadma said:

Hopefully thomaso does reply to clarify how I can reset it on my Mac

I'm sure he will but in the meantime try changing the vales you see to something else then back to zeros

Does that cure it?

[thomaso]

20 minutes ago, Quadma said:

1) could you clarify how to reset the indents?  I've never done that before and am not finding the information readily when I search for it.

Click on the down arrow for the left indent, this will make the first line indent (the field below) jump to 0.23 in, then set this to 0 again.

20 minutes ago, Quadma said:

2) where is the Style settings box that you picture?.  It certainly looks like helpful information.

Place the text cursor into a text frame (regardless which position). Then click in the Text Style Panel at the bottom the + symbol to create a new style. This will open the Edit Text Style window with all parameters of the style at your text cursor position. At its bottom it gives the summary. Another, same, summary is at the top of the Text Stels panel, but that is even more cumbersome – none of the two fields can adjusted in their height. But can select all contents and copy / paste it into a text frame on your page for better overview.

17 minutes ago, carl123 said:

Strange, on Windows, you can see the values

Aside the fact that both are empty to me on mac, the values appearing on click are different to the style definition summary, too. (but show correct in your screenshot).

This feels like a bug – but possibly hard to reproduce. @Quadma, do you remember and can tell how you styled these text frames, what steps first and tried with indent set anywhere, for instance via the text ruler? Or was the text imported or pasted from another source?

Edited May 17, 2022 by thomaso
added info about style summaries

[Quadma]

5 minutes ago, carl123 said:

I'm sure he will but in the meantime try changing the vales you see to something else then back to zeros

Does that cure it?

Yes! That did it! I had to do it in two steps. I had to change Yes! That did it! I had to do it in two steps though. I changed both the left indent in the first line indent to new, nonzero numbers and then I changed them both back to zero, starting with the left indent first.  For some reason, that fixed one of the lines but not both. So then I repeated the same process but I changed the first line indent to zero first and then both lines were where I wanted them. 

[thomaso]

26 minutes ago, Quadma said:

For some reason, that fixed one of the lines but not both. So then I repeated the same process but I changed the first line indent to zero first and then both lines were where I wanted them. 

In this case that all lines of text / all frames are affected by the indent error you can easily select all text frames with the Move Tool. That will apply the change to all frames and text instances. (as shown in my second screenshot above)

[Quadma]

5 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Click on the down arrow for the left indent, this will make the first line indent (the field below) jump to 0.23 in, then set this to 0 again.

Place the text cursor into a text frame (regardless which position). Then click in the Text Style Panel at the bottom the + symbol to create a new style. This will open the Edit Text Style window with all parameters of the style at your text cursor position.

Aside the fact that both are empty to me on mac, the values appearing on click are different to the style definition summary, too. (but show correct in your screenshot).

This feels like a bug – but possibly hard to reproduce. @Quadma, do you remember and can tell how you styled these text frames, what steps first and tried with indent set anywhere, for instance via the text ruler? Or was the text imported or pasted from another source?

Thanks!  The only thing I recall doing when I set up the text boxes was setting the text size, and center/middle of justifying the text. It’s possible that I did something else, but I don’t recall doing so. I did however change indents on a numbered list elsewhere in the document that this came from. I had actually saved that particular style, but when I set up this text box, I was careful to make sure that it said no style. But perhaps some of the indenting I set up elsewhere somehow carried through…?

[thomaso]

22 minutes ago, Quadma said:

I had actually saved that particular style, but when I set up this text box, I was careful to make sure that it said no style. But perhaps some of the indenting I set up elsewhere somehow carried through…?

Yes. Usually the style of the last set object gets applied to a following, newly created object, too. It's a feature to speed up the workflow.*

You can interrupt / avoid this by clicking the "Revert Defaults" button in the Toolbar after creating a new object.

If you edit a text formatting which is set already to No Style than clicking No Style again doesn't help to reset any change. Instead try clicking another style and back to No Style or click the tiny T in a circle icon in the upper right corner of the Text Style panel.

* but its not a feature that this indent doesn't occur in the Paragraph Panel.

[Dan C]

Hi @Quadma,

Thanks for your file provided! I'm glad to hear you've been able to resolve this issue, but there certainly seems to be a UI bug on Mac with this file - as I too am seeing 0 values on macOS and the correct values on Windows, so I'm logging this directly with our development team now.

I hope this helps

[Dan C]

@Quadma, Our developers are currently investigating this issue further and they have confirmed that these Indent values shouldn't allow for negative values - which is why Windows and Mac are displaying this differently, as they are unexpected values.

However we've thus far been unable to determine how negative values are used in these text frames, as we cannot replicate this in a new document.

Can you please confirm for me, was this document imported from another format, into Affinity? Or do you recall how these text frames were created?

Many thanks in advance for any information you can provide

[Quadma]

Thanks for looking into it.  Unfortunately I cannot remember how I created the text frames.  I doubt that I imported them from another format, but I can't be certain.   Wish I could be of more help.

[Dan C]

No problem at all, I certainly understand - many thanks for letting me know!