Affinity Publisher + TT2020 font with contextual variation = weird line wrapping

[Bebebebenny]

 

Below two screenshots that should explain my problem.

The only difference between the screenshots is "contextual alternates" being turned on for the second one.

What confuses me is that when on, the wrapping doesn't just miss its mark by a little, but will sometimes break words, sometimes wrap almost at the beginning of lines, and sometimes even begin new lines with a space...

Any thoughts about this?

 

[Callum]

Hi Bebebebenny,

Edit: Nothing to see here 😅

C

[Bebebebenny]

3 hours ago, Callum said:

Hi Bebebebenny,

I

 

Hi @Callum,

That's some short answer! 😄

 

[joe_l]

4 minutes ago, Bebebebenny said:

That's some short answer! 😄

This is Callum's short version for: I was able to reproduce the problem and logged the bug under afb-1234 with the developers. 🤣

[Callum]

58 minutes ago, joe_l said:

This is Callum's short version for: I was able to reproduce the problem and logged the bug under afb-1234 with the developers. 🤣

Not sure what happened here lol but Joe hit the nail on the head! I'll update this thread once I have more info

C

[Tanya F]

Just wondering if this issue is likely to be resolved. TT2020 would be exceptionally useful, if only it would work in Publisher!

[MikeTO]

I know this is logged but I looked at it because it seemed interesting. The issue occurs because not only does context alternates show variations of the characters to simulate a real typewriter, it shows variations of spaces which is a bit unnecessary. As a result, only a few of the spaces you type are normal spaces. For example, in this sentence with four spaces, only the one between "a short" is a normal space, the others are alternates. You can see this because Publisher shows the special character for a normal space as a dot and for non-standard spaces as blank. Compare with Courier below. Publisher considers the non-standard spaces to be non-breaking characters while Adobe's software treats them as breaking characters.

If you want to use the font now and need a workaround, you could use Find and Replace to find all spaces formatted with TT2020 Style B and replace them with TT2020 Style A.

[kenmcd]

9 hours ago, Tanya F said:

TT2020 would be exceptionally useful, if only it would work in Publisher!

Note: There is an issue in the TT2020 Style B fonts which can cause problems.
I contributed a fix, which I think made it into the repo, but not into the release zip.
You can get the fixed fonts from the repo
https://github.com/ctrlcctrlv/TT2020/tree/master/dist
or from the zip files here:
https://github.com/ctrlcctrlv/TT2020/issues/21#issuecomment-1239613748
 

5 hours ago, MikeTO said:

it shows variations of spaces which is a bit unnecessary.

And all of those alternate spaces are the same width (it is a typewriter font).
So I do not know why the space is even included in the Contextual Alternates (calt).
This kind of substitution is used to simulate randomness, which makes no sense for the space character in a typewriter font.
Maybe I will test deleting this part from the font and see if it breaks anything else.

Regardless, this font should work properly in APub as-is.

[kenmcd]

10 hours ago, Tanya F said:

Just wondering if this issue is likely to be resolved. TT2020 would be exceptionally useful, if only it would work in Publisher!

Give this a try - TT2020StyleBAF-Regular.zip
Renamed to: TT2020 Style B AF
(so it can be installed at the same time as the original)
Removes the space character from the Contextual Alternates.

Appears to be working.
Below is an image of the PDF output from APub 2.5.2.
The original font is at the bottom - which looks broken.
(it is using the exact same text as at the top)

It appears to be working, but I did not test extensively.
So please test.
 

Note: this is a work-around for the bug in APub.
APub should be fixed. This is not a problem in the font.
OpenType substitutions should have the same line breaking traits as the original.

 

[Tanya F]

Yep! Good catch. My solution up to now has been to highlight words with repeat characters and turn contextual alternatives for those segments alone. It seems to do a good job at tricking the eye for me, and I'm not too fussed about losing out on the spacing functionality.