Typography script, Typography language

[Pyanepsion]

My texts are mainly written in French, but with some files, I sometimes use other languages in the text (Asian, English, Latin, Greek).

The explanation of the help does not seem very clear to me. It says that it allows you to choose the script language to use when applying OpenType rules, but it does not tell me how to choose the right script.

Quote

Typography script: indicates the script language to be used when applying OpenType rules. For example, the OpenType function Ordinals "ordn" applies mainly to Latin script, and the function Very small caps "pcap" applies only to scripts with upper and lower case forms (e.g. Latin, Cyrillic, Greek). The list of available scripts depends on the current typography.

and

Quote

Typography language: indicates the language to be used when applying OpenType rules. For example, several OpenType functions should only be applied to Japanese or Chinese text.

Which typography script and wich Typography language should I use?

[thomaso]

11 hours ago, Pyanepsion said:

I sometimes use other languages in the text (Asian, English, Latin, Greek). (...)

Which typography script and wich Typography language should I use?

Unless you do not use or miss certain alternative characters "Auto" or "Default" are fine.

Alternative characters get selected in the "Typography" section of the "Character" panel (+ … Typography window). Their accessibility depends on the font file, not on Affinity, and thus available options vary between different fonts, depending on the available characters within the fonts.

A script can be different from a language, e.g. English or German use mainly the same Latin script (characters) though 'ß' and 'ö' are part of German only, similar for e.g. quote marks, which vary typographically within various Latin scripts ( e.g. “ ” | „ “ | » « | « » ).

Also a script can be independent from a language, a text can be written in a 'language' different from its script, e.g. Greek can be written in Latin or Cyrillic script (e.g. demokratia | δημοκρατία, or whisky | ουίσκι), or in Braille or Chinese script. Whereas Asian scripts as symbolic or syllable scripts often use the sound of a foreign word to choose according Asian characters – regardless of a possibly different meaning of its single characters which mainly are syllables or words, not just single characters as e.g. in Latin (e.g. whisky | 威士忌). As Chinese language & script can have dialects (Simplified vs. Traditional like Cantonese, Mandarin etc.) also in Arabic language the script may depend on certain Arabic 'flavours', as 'High Arabic' can be different from spoken Arabic and additionally varies between regional areas, e.g. Morocco versus Syria.

Because of this optional complex flexibility when choosing language, type and character your question can not get a general answer without talking about certain goals with specific text spots – the mentioned "Auto" and "Default" excepted.

So, in the Character panel the two options "Typography script" and "Typography language" influence each other / depend on each other, while both are always depending on the font respectively the way its chars got assigned by the font design to certain groups within this font. To make it worse, even 1 specific char can vary in its position in the font's Unicode table of different fonts. Thus only the available and variable Affinity Character panel Language menu options + the Affinity Typography window + the Affinity Glyph Browser can shed definite light on this in case of doubts.

Last but not least, a text may contain characters which do not exist in a selected font, Affinity indicates this "unsupported characters" with an exclamation mark in front of the ! Font family name (+ reports it in the "Font Manager" window).