Publisher Find / Replace Glyph

[v_kyr]

7 hours ago, voo said:

Hello, thank you for your replies. Actually the way with typing Unicode (e.g. \u00c3) works on Mac. But is there any way when the glyph only has a designation e.g. G+012f ? Of course I have tried \g012f, \G+012f but it doesn't work.

Under MacOS (for Intel CPU platforms) I highly recommend to you to use then, in such font cases where the Affinity Glyph panel doesn't show up the Unicode coding, instead the UnicodeChecker which is by far a much more powerful tool than the Affinity Glyph panel here!

That shows you all Unicodes and also offers copy/paste (and much more) of the characters etc. So you can take either (the Unicode for typing in, or the shown Glyph character) over into the APub find/replace panel

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

Could be done with the Glyph panel button insert method, when taking the two additional IB Outlets for the find/replace textfields into account, checking then for their views panel if it is alraedy loaded into mem (aka available) and if one of the textfields isFirstResponder. - The whole could also be assigned to another button click-/doubleclick event, like Ctrl-doubleclick etc., in case one want's to distingush those then by another/different mouse+key trigger event.

Why can't it be done exactly like inserting a glyph into a document text field by simply double-clicking on the glyph in the Glyph Browser panel when the insertgion point is in either F&R field? At that point the field in that browser panel has the focus, just like when a document text field has the focus?

IOW, why add a new button or whatever when we already have a double-click method?

[v_kyr]

1 minute ago, R C-R said:

IOW, why add a new button or whatever when we already have a double-click method?

Read again what I wrote, which you seem to have misunderstood, buttons means those Glyph buttons which are already there, these do trigger an event, aka double-click! - So you could do that via the actual implemented double-click event, or when wanted via another key + double-click action event on those Glyph buttons.

[v_kyr]

24 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Thanks, that's correct, in my question referred to 'U+' only.
So again, did you know about '\u' instead of 'U+' for F&R by an info in the Help (or another Serif source) – or e.g. by your general coding skills?

By the later, since thats what we use in prog lang coding often when we have to deal with specific chars (escaping characters) here. - It's also something which we often commonly use in/for reg expressions too.

[R C-R]

14 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Read again what I wrote, which you seem to have misunderstood, buttons means those Glyph buttons which are already there, these do trigger an event, aka double-click! - So you could do that via the actual implemented double-click event, or when wanted via another key + double-click action event on those Glyph buttons.

But how would this event result in the glyph being added to either F&R field? Currently, the double-click event only places the glyph in a document text item if the text cursor is in it or there is some text selected in a document text item; IOW, that it has the focus.

It doesn't work for F&R fields because as soon as the Glyph Browser is selected, the F&R field is no longer the focus of the event (the highlight & blinking text cursor vanishes), unlike when a document text item has the focus. There does not seem to be any reason for that I can think of. Can you?

[Old Bruce]

20 minutes ago, R C-R said:

It doesn't work for F&R fields because as soon as the Glyph Browser is selected, the F&R field is no longer the focus of the event (the highlight & blinking text cursor vanishes), unlike when a document text item has the focus. There does not seem to be any reason for that I can think of. Can you?

I think the problem with double clicking a glyph in the Glyph Browser and having it not appear in the Find and Replace panel is that they are both Panels and only one of them can have "focus" for any kind of input/editing. It would be kind of like setting both the Stroke width and the red colour in the RGB colour panel to 40 by selecting each field and typing 4 0 once. We can only select one field in one panel at any time.

Being able to copy the glyph from the Glyph's panel would solve that problem, as it is now we can insert the glyph into a text frame and then select that glyph in the text frame and cut it and paste it into the Find and Replace field(s).

[v_kyr]

27 minutes ago, R C-R said:

But how would this event result in the glyph being added to either F&R field? Currently, the double-click event only places the glyph in a document text item if the text cursor is in it or there is some text selected in a document text item; IOW, that it has the focus.

It doesn't work for F&R fields because as soon as the Glyph Browser is selected, the F&R field is no longer the focus of the event (the highlight & blinking text cursor vanishes), unlike when a document text item has the focus. There does not seem to be any reason for that I can think of. Can you?

It depends on how panel interactions are overall setup! - Actually the Glyph panel interacts just with the document text and only as far as that is selected! Meaning, if the doc text layer isn't selected and you use just the Glyph panel, so nothing -no doc text etc.- is selected in the layers panel, the Glyph panel doesn't insert any Glyph via a double-click into doc text (there's nothing active to insert into, other than it's own recent used text area). So here instead it then just adds the double-clicked Glyph to it's own bottom "recend used" text area!

Now suppose you've setup/associated the Glyph panel to also interact (can be reused) with the find/replace panel too, now it would have somehow to determine which of the F/R-fields was before active/had previously the focus (...that's what I before initially meant is the difficult part to handle here at all).

But instead suppose you've setup/associated the F/R & Glyph panel so the Glyph panel could also be opened (reused) from the F/R-panel fields and the Glyph panel thus can also access the find & replace textfield objects (by their name IDs). Since a specific F-or-R-field has initiated the connection (...opened the Glyph panel) both of them could interact with it, and the Glyph panel knows which of the fields initiated it and is the active one to insert a character to (... it can now distinguish between both fields). - The later would be probably needed in order to distinguish at all which F-or-R-field to insert a Glyph into.

However, there are for sure also some other (better) interaction scenarios possible, but those might then need some more finer grade design pattern usage here for some clever panel interactions & reusage!

 

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, Old Bruce said:

I think the problem with double clicking a glyph in the Glyph Browser and having it not appear in the Find and Replace panel is that they are both Panels and only one of them can have "focus" for any kind of input/editing.

OK, that makes sense to me .... & it is a simpler & easer to understand explanation than the one  @v_kyr wrote, even I think both are saying (more or less) the same thing. 😀

6 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

But instead suppose you've setup/associated the F/R & Glyph panel so the Glyph panel could also be opened (reused) from the F/R-panel fields and the Glyph panel thus can also access the find & replace textfield objects (by their name IDs).

... or just by double-clicking on the glyph?

Basically, anything besides the clumsy typing a slash, a "u" & the unicode of the glyph would be an improvement!

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, Old Bruce said:

I think the problem with double clicking a glyph in the Glyph Browser and having it not appear in the Find and Replace panel is that they are both Panels and only one of them can have "focus" for any kind of input/editing. It would be kind of like setting both the Stroke width and the red colour in the RGB colour panel ...

Partly yes, since that's the whole difficulty here, overall one would need a clever panel interaction & reusability. - BTW you don't need strictly for a panel to have the focus in order to write something into some of it's text fields. Though you need of course to have an objects interaction access between the panels. And then in order to determine in which other panels fields to write, you need to have a clever way to somehow observe that (some advanced Observer pattern or even better suited design pattern).

[R C-R]

1 minute ago, v_kyr said:

And then in order to determine in which other panels fields to write...

Couldn't that be done by noting which (if any) field the text cursor was in just prior to using the Glyph Browser? IOW, basically just like how it works for document text items?

[voo]

In my case, the glyph I need is labelled in the font documentation as Unencoded Glyphs. I also checked with UnicodeChecker and there is no unicode present for the letter "a" I need to replace. For me in Affinity Publisher, the method with copy/paste in FR works if there is a U+ in the glyph and it works to write e.g. "\u00df" in the Replace with field as described @v_kyr. 

[v_kyr]

58 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Couldn't that be done by noting which (if any) field the text cursor was in just prior to using the Glyph Browser? IOW, basically just like how it works for document text items?

And what happens if the text cursor wasn't in any selected field and/or a document text is actually selected too in the layers panel, whome to serv now? - UI things work usually similar to that before mention observer pattern, objects which change their state do inform the observer, which in turn then tells other dependent objects to react/update on that changing. See the observer pattern for example and the common MVC pattern and here MVC and GUI widget libraries.

[v_kyr]

8 minutes ago, voo said:

I also checked with UnicodeChecker and there is no unicode present for the letter "a" I need to replace.

Why should you need to insert the Unicode hex representation for the common "a" letter here? - Just type an "a" into the find field and then the Glyph to replace that into replace field. - What's your replace character for "a"?

[walt.farrell]

2 minutes ago, voo said:

In my case, the glyph I need is labelled in the font documentation as Unencoded Glyphs. I also checked with UnicodeChecker and there is no unicode present for the letter "a" I need to replace. For me in Affinity Publisher, the method with copy/paste in FR works if there is a U+ in the glyph and it works to write e.g. "\u00df" in the Replace with field as described @v_kyr. 

If the character has only the G+ form, and no U+ form, you can probably still use Find and Replace, but in a more complex way.

1. Type (for example) G+012f into the Replace field.
2. Do your Find and Replace operation. This will put the literal string G+012f into your text. Of course, that's not what you want, so you need more work.
3. This time, just put G+012f  into the Find field. Click the cog (options) to the right of the Find field, and make sure the options are set to Normal rather than Regular Expression. Click the Find button.
4. Publisher will position you to the first occurrence of the string. Type Alt+U (Windows) or Ctrl+U (Mac), and it will transform into the character you want, if the font has that character at that location. Click Find again to get the next occurrence, and keep repeating until no more are found.

[voo]

38 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Why should you need to insert the Unicode hex representation for the common "a" letter here? - Just type an "a" into the find field and then the Glyph to replace that into replace field. - What's your replace character for "a"?

@v_kyr I need to replace the "a" as in the screenshots I need to change this throughout the document almost 20 pages into the document.

37 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

If the character has only the G+ form, and no U+ form, you can probably still use Find and Replace, but in a more complex way.

1. Type (for example) G+012f into the Replace field.
2. Do your Find and Replace operation. This will put the literal string G+012f into your text. Of course, that's not what you want, so you need more work.
3. This time, just put G+012f  into the Find field. Click the cog (options) to the right of the Find field, and make sure the options are set to Normal rather than Regular Expression. Click the Find button.
4. Publisher will position you to the first occurrence of the string. Type Alt+U (Windows) or Ctrl+U (Mac), and it will transform into the character you want, if the font has that character at that location. Click Find again to get the next occurrence, and keep repeating until no more are found.

@walt.farrell your method works but as above I need to change on 20 pages. And it's like I highlighted each letter separately and clicked twice on the glyph in the table.

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

Couldn't that be done by noting which (if any) field the text cursor was in just prior to using the Glyph Browser? IOW, basically just like how it works for document text items?

The F&R panel appears to be excluded from various common (re-)actions, e.g. Undo and Escape. With the cursor in the Find or the Replace field "Undo" goes back 1 step in History panel and the Escape key causes the warning beep + its according white flash on a mac. Both feels unexpected to me: "Undo" because I don't want to get anything changed in the background while I am focused in the text field of F&R, "Escape" because I may quit / leave other UI fields this way.

[Old Bruce]

10 minutes ago, thomaso said:

The F&R panel appears to be excluded from various common (re-)actions, e.g. Undo and Escape. With the cursor in the Find or the Replace field "Undo" goes back 1 step in History panel and the Escape key causes the warning beep + its according white flash on a mac. Both feels unexpected to me: "Undo" because I don't want to get anything changed in the background while I am focused in the text field of F&R, "Escape" because I may quit / leave other UI fields this way.

It is not just the Find and Replace panel which will ignore the escape key. I have lost track of all the ones that ignore it, I also got tired of reporting these bugs due to no acknowledgement. 

[v_kyr]

49 minutes ago, voo said:

@v_kyr I need to replace the "a" as in the screenshots I need to change this throughout the document almost 20 pages into the document.

The question was more, if you have to replace the ...

... here, since both can usually be typed in directly as  a  and  ß  into the find/replace fields then and so I wonder that you need the Glyph panel at all in order to insert those as search/replace characters. - Or are those mapped differently for the Akkurat font on your system?

 

[walt.farrell]

59 minutes ago, thomaso said:

The F&R panel appears to be excluded from various common (re-)actions, e.g. Undo and Escape. With the cursor in the Find or the Replace field "Undo" goes back 1 step in History panel

That's exactly what Undo is supposed to do: undo the last change made to the document. What were you expecting it to do?

[voo]

11 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

The question was more, if you have to replace the ...

... here, since both can usually be typed in directly as  a  and  ß  into the find/replace fields here and so I wonder that you need the Glyph panel at all here in order to insert those as search/replace characters. - Or are those mapped differently for the Akkurat font on your system?

 

I have a document in which everything is written in the font Akkurat LL where the letter "a" throughout looks like this

and I need to replace it with the other one which is in glyphs. 

[thomaso]

4 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

That's exactly what Undo is supposed to do: undo the last change made to the document. What were you expecting it to do?

You are probably right, it just feels wrong especially in the F&R panel fields where I do something like text editing (rather than value typing as in most interface fields). 

There are unclear "Undo" / "History" moments: With Undo I can undo the naming of a layer (which may appear as 'document' but also as 'interface' property). Or if I type – with no object selected – a font name in the Character field, it creates an entry in the History panel ("Font: <my typed name>"), then Undo goes 1 step back in the History panel – but without resetting my recently typed font name in the field (as I would expect). Or – without an object selected – pressing a number key creates an entry "Set global opacity", apparently with no result, while this no-result can get undone via Undo.

And "Escape" seems to work to quit a current edit in all interface fields, just F&R excepted. So F&R appears to be treated differently.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, v_kyr said:

And what happens if the text cursor wasn't in any selected field and/or a document text is actually selected too in the layers panel, whome to serv now?

If the text cursor is not in any field (document or F&R) then nothing should happen. If it is only in one or the other, then there should be no ambiguity. It doesn't matter if a layer is selected in the Layers panel, only if the text in that layer is in edit mode (an insertion point or some text is selected). So for the 'both selected' situation couldn't a 'last selected' rule be used to determine what to do -- IOW, if the user last clicked in the F&R panel, it takes priority, otherwise the document text does?

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

It doesn't matter if a layer is selected in the Layers panel, only if the text in that layer is in edit mode (an insertion point or some text is selected). ...

The text fields would then ideally need to have a similar selection mode here, meaning they should have the equal ability to be staying in focused/edit mode here then, so it's also visually obvious which field is selected, has the input cursor and thus will get the insert then. But this in turn would mean, that both panels (Glyph + Find/Replace) should be usable at the same time together on demand. So to say, either the doc text layer or one of the text fields is in edit mode (has the input cursor), they can't be together. - That way the Glyph panel could always insert into the right active indicated one, beside it's own recent text field where it always inserts to, even if nothing else is active.

[R C-R]

10 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

So to say, either the doc text layer or one of the text fields is in edit mode (has the input cursor), they can't be together.

I am not suggesting that both can have the focus (the the input cursor) at the same time, just that if the user clicks into the F&R panel on either of its fields, it gets the focus instead of the document text until such time as the user clicks elsewhere, like somewhere in the document text. IOW, a 'last selected' rule determines what gets the focus.

[v_kyr]

22 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I am not suggesting that both can have the focus (the the input cursor) at the same time, just that if the user clicks into the F&R panel on either of its fields, it gets the focus instead of the document text until such time as the user clicks elsewhere, like somewhere in the document text. IOW, a 'last selected' rule determines what gets the focus.

That wasn't what I wrote, I said it has to toggle/go through 4 states, doc text insert mode, or find text insert mode, or replace text insert modus, or nothing is in insert mode at all!