How do I make the Text Selection Cursor More visible?

[SaltyClownShoes]

When I am editing documents in Publisher these days the Text Box Selection tool seems to go transparent (or white) when it moves.  It is making it nearly impossible to to keep track of my/it's place on my screen.  Is there a way to make the tool remain black?  While inputting the message here the cursor is easily visible at all times, and this is a simple web interface.  How can I change it in Affinity Publisher?  I am using the latest build of the release software.    

 

[carl123]

1 hour ago, SaltyClownShoes said:

the Text Box Selection tool seems to go transparent (or white) when it moves.

If you are highlighting text the selection text-cursor does disappear but the highlighted text should show you where it is

Is this what you mean?

If not, we may need a video as I can see the cursor at all other times

[thomaso]

8 hours ago, SaltyClownShoes said:

these days the Text Box Selection tool seems to go transparent (or white)

Have you tried to close & reopen APub? – Also often it helps to fix such glitches with rendering screen contents to change the zoom value.

Additionally, if you zoom out, the interface items like object handles get displayed increased, and the text cursor becomes more obvious:

[SaltyClownShoes]

9 hours ago, carl123 said:

If you are highlighting text the selection text-cursor does disappear but the highlighted text should show you where it is

Is this what you mean?

If not, we may need a video as I can see the cursor at all other times

What I am saying is that I am writing a book, with a TON of text on screen.  Whenever the Text selection tool hovers over the text it goes transparent, I want it to remain Black and visible at all times because I have to crunch through a LOT of stuff when editing a 700 Page 8x11" formatted book.  In previous releases of the Publisher I don't recall having this issue at all.  Even here as I type this the text selection cursor remains black as it hovers over text.  

 

I need to know if I can customize the tool to remain a solid color (don't care what color that is, so long as it's not white).  I don't want to have to force a background color or parchment image into my master pages just to see the cursor as I edit the document. 

[prophet]

8 minutes ago, SaltyClownShoes said:

Whenever the Text selection tool hovers over the text it goes transparent

I don't see this behavior in Publisher on my Mac. Maybe a Windows glitch?

[thomaso]

11 minutes ago, SaltyClownShoes said:

I need to know if I can customize the tool to remain a solid color (don't care what color that is, so long as it's not white). 

No, there is no way in Affinity to change the cursor colour.

12 minutes ago, SaltyClownShoes said:

I don't want to have to force a background color or parchment image into my master pages just to see the cursor as I edit the document. 

Can you see this text cursor on a different background? – Initially you wrote the cursor would be "transparent (or white) when it moves". If it's transparent it wouldn't show up on any colour, if its white it would appear on text colour different than white, correct?

• Does this issue occur in every document?
• Have you tried the quit + launch the app again?

[carl123]

33 minutes ago, SaltyClownShoes said:

Whenever the Text selection tool hovers over the text it goes transparent, I want it to remain Black and visible at all times

I, long ago, changed my Windows cursor to a large green arrow, it also affects the cursor that hovers over text in Publisher 

So, I now have a large I-beam cursor when hovering over text

Not sure why yours goes transparent

Edit: You can't change the cursor in the app

[SaltyClownShoes]

6 minutes ago, carl123 said:

I, long ago, changed my Windows cursor to a large green arrow, it also affects the cursor that hovers over text in Publisher 

So, I now have a large I-beam cursor when hovering over text

Not sure why yours goes transparent

Edit: You can't change the cursor in the app

I'm going to try that.  It might be system specific issue.  Because... I can see the cursor over the text on my personal laptop (though the cursor still doesn't scale with zoomed text).  A giant Green text cursor sounds kinda wonderful to me after all the hair pulling I have been doing on my main PC. 

[Babs_wo]

On 8/26/2022 at 4:33 PM, SaltyClownShoes said:

I'm going to try that.  It might be system specific issue.  Because... I can see the cursor over the text on my personal laptop (though the cursor still doesn't scale with zoomed text).  A giant Green text cursor sounds kinda wonderful to me after all the hair pulling I have been doing on my main PC. 

hi everyone,

i seem to have the same issue. did this get solved? has anyone a hint how the transparent cursor can be avoided?

for a short period of time it helped to turn off the touch-pad on my laptop. but now it is as it was before. the cursor-position will appear within 3-4 sec. of leaving it on the same position. a really pain when in a working flow...

thanks in advance

Babs

[Patrick Connor]

@Babs_wo

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums  

I think this problem is still outstanding and I have bumped the issue with your report, thank you

[Babs_wo]

20 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

@Babs_wo

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums  

I think this problem is still outstanding and I have bumped the issue with your report, thank you

Thank you Patrick Connor!

i did a little try and error, and i think i found a solution to my problem! I changed the Windows-cursor-setting to a different one. a few made it worse, but with trying i found one that works. not the prettiest one, but with excellent behaviour. 😁

maybe this info helps someone else. 🤗

[Streak]

I'm having the exact same issue on Windows 11.  Has anyone found a more concrete solution other than changing the windows cursor in general?  I have something called Yolo Mouse that I think I might use to try and fix the situation but I'd like to have a solution that doesn't require an external alteration.  No other software on my PC has this behavior.

[Todd W]

8 hours ago, Streak said:

I'm having the exact same issue on Windows 11.  Has anyone found a more concrete solution other than changing the windows cursor in general?  I have something called Yolo Mouse that I think I might use to try and fix the situation but I'd like to have a solution that doesn't require an external alteration.  No other software on my PC has this behavior.

I'm also experiencing this problem, although if I wait an eternity (about 1 sec), the "I" beam appears. The minute I move the cursor, it disappears again, and wait....

Perhaps that was the fix, to force the cursor to redraw. Until I realized I had to wait, I was kinda frustrated. This only happened when the Frame Text Tool, the Table Tool, or the Artistic Text Tool (as far as I tested) were selected. I am hovering the cursor over a grouped set of text boxes. The text was imported from a PDF. I'm using version 2.5.3 of the Affinity Publisher 2. I have not checked against Designer or Photo. Running Windows 11 Pro 23H2.

Waiting is my solution. Using Windows controls to change the cursor didn't help. The newer/ish versions of the Logi(tech) no longer offer cursor (shape) customizations (for my mouse?), and I'm not going to try importing a new cursor set to find out.

My guess, not being the developer, suggests Affinity may be parsing the text boxes, and the "I" beam appears when it is done. I'm done testing for this.

I'm gonna go with "It's a feature!"

 

 

[aPcYQaUF]

This has started to happen to me on Windows 11. Selection tool is fine but moving the cursor around with the frame text tool activated just completely disappears. It makes it nearly impossible to edit any text. No amount of restarts or Windows setting adjustments have fixed it.

[Catshill]

8 hours ago, aPcYQaUF said:

This has started to happen to me on Windows 11. Selection tool is fine but moving the cursor around with the frame text tool activated just completely disappears. It makes it nearly impossible to edit any text. No amount of restarts or Windows setting adjustments have fixed it.

Windows 11 as well as getting bloaty is getting glitchy too. Updates seem to have worsened things too. It’s not as minimalist as it was when I first installed it and it has an increased tendency to force unwanted things on the user.

[Rudiii]

I found a solution for me with Windows 11 and Affinity and other programs as well. 
Settings > Accessibility > Mouse pointer and Touch > Mouse pointer style > change here to "black" or "inverted" cursor. Now I can see my text selection tool  No restart needed, you can try it while the settings window is still open. I hope that helps.

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Affinity forums, @Rudiii, and thanks for the tip.

[Pixelope]

Hi all, not sure if people are still having this problem, I realised after doing some heavy text work this last week I was having the same issue as everyone here and I have a small solution. Let me ask, do you have AMD graphics on your windows 11 laptops?

On a different windows 11 laptop, for some reason in Microsoft Excel, the cursor was completely white and therefore unusable. Both laptops use AMD drivers and I found a fix for the excel problem on the AMD community boards, I tried it with my laptop with affinity installed and it seems to have fixed the white cursor on text fields.

Open regedit on windows and create the following reg key and reboot.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Dwm]
"OverlayTestMode"=dword:00000005

This disables multi plane overlay.

This may help you, if not just delete the reg key and reboot.

[bigwhoop]

On 9/21/2024 at 2:55 PM, Rudiii said:

I found a solution for me with Windows 11 and Affinity and other programs as well. 
Settings > Accessibility > Mouse pointer and Touch > Mouse pointer style > change here to "black" or "inverted" cursor. Now I can see my text selection tool  No restart needed, you can try it while the settings window is still open. I hope that helps.

Thanks - that's a workaround. And i if you don't want an inverted cursor, you can also change it to the "green" arrow option and change the color to white. It's almost the same as the normal cursor.