Language pull-down on toolbar? Mixed fonts - paragraph toolbar? - Paragraph composer?

[Fantomas.CZ]

Hi everyone, especially Affinity creators!

I love the Affinity Suite, have been a long time user (if you can say that) and there are so many things I prefer over inDesign, but there is one thing that's been bugging me since I started working with Affinity Publisher, after switching from InDesign: why on Earth do I have to go through so many tabs to do simple tasks? 

I do typesetting of mostly bilingual documents, for some foreign names I also like to set their own language. So for me, the InDesign toolbar is very convenient, on the left, there are the fonts and their most often used properties (capitals, spacing, horizontal shift, kerning etc.), on the right, there are the paragraph properties, especially the spacing, and in the middle, there is the .. drumroll ... the language bar!

Then I do something in Affinity Publisher, which is - despite this impracticality - stil my daily driver in typesetting, and my workflow looks in a following manner:

• I insert a text.
• I switch to the Text Styles tab and do the styling.
• following the text down, I need to regularly switch between the Characters tab to change the language or interleaving, Paragraph tab to change the spacing, then back to Text Styles...
• It gets rather tiring, meanwhile in InDesign, there's everything out there in the main toolbar, so I could just use that with the Styles tab open all the time - for me an ideal solution. But as far as I know, you cannot add those other buttons and customize the toolbar, can you? 

Is it possible to change it, or is that layout style some kind of patent held by Adobe...? 

There is another question concerning the paragraph composer. In Czech, and I guess in other languages too, it is considered ugly and bad practice to leave single-letter words at the end of the line, especially in the case of prepositions, which then get separated from their main word. I can of course manually (or maybe in the Search bar quasi-automatically) fill in the &nbsp, but that's very laborious and time consuming. Could you introduce an option for this to be a standard behaviour? 

Last question: on Mac, when I install a new language, it gets sometimes placed in the end of the dropdown, so I have my European languages, then loads of foreign Asian languages that I'll never use, and then, at the end of the list sits my Latin that I specifically installed and opted for. Is there something I can do to see it before those other languages? Or at least under "L" among my other languages written in Latin alphabet... 

Thanks a lot for the consideration and answer, and thanks also for the great product!

 

[walt.farrell]

7 minutes ago, Fantomas.CZ said:

following the text down, I need to regularly switch between the Characters tab to change the language or interleaving, Paragraph tab to change the spacing, then back to Text Styles...

For now (and the foreseeable future), with the current way that the Affinity applications work, it may be better for you to create Character Text Styles that specify the Language you want to use. Then you can just specify that Text Style via the Context Toolbar (or via keyboard shortcuts), rather than using the Studio panels.

 

[Fantomas.CZ]

OK, I feared this answer... I already have 23 paragraph styles and 5 character styles I use. Some of them contain the languages and may look differently for different languages, but I'd love be able not to do that. This also doesn't solve the issue of the main paragraph totally illogically missing from the main toolbar. And I cannot even move their position, I can only name them differently, thus moving them in the panel. And of course, I can start the name with numbers, but that's just crazy to have to do that... I hope I'm not the only one, who uses paragraph spacing every minute or so, and having to switch tabs this often is not practical at all...

I mean, is it such a problem to add buttons and other elements, that already are on one toolbar (or side panel), and to open the possibility to place them on another toolbar? 

[walt.farrell]

5 minutes ago, Fantomas.CZ said:

This also doesn't solve the issue of the main paragraph totally illogically missing from the main toolbar.

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean by that. Screenshot, perhaps?

6 minutes ago, Fantomas.CZ said:

I hope I'm not the only one, who uses paragraph spacing every minute or so, and having to switch tabs this often is not practical at all...

I certainly have never needed to adjust spacing that often, but your workflow and needs may, of course, be different from mine. It might be interesting to know more about why you have to do that. Perhaps there is an alternative you haven't considered that would work better?

[Fantomas.CZ]

9 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean by that. Screenshot, perhaps?

My bad, a word fell out, it should have read "This also doesn't solve the issue of the main paragraph controls totally illogically missing from the main toolbar."

If you look at the InDesign toolbar (attached), you'll surely see, what I mean. 

I've also attached a page from documents, which I usually typeset, with the Czech translation on the other side or column. You can see there are quite a few styles, title sizes, fonts, colours etc. Usually the main Czech text looks a bit different - in Italics, another colour, etc, but most of the styles are just identical. Also when translating, I'm doing the bulk of my work in a normal text editor, but there are loads of titles, subtitles, comments, rubrics, that are short and usually omited in the main text, so what I usually do, is that I style them on the Latin original, then copy&paste with the styles, and then change the language and position. For which I need to switch tabs twice. For every little rubric, title and subtitle. And there are a lot of them. It's not in every work I do, but currently I'm typesetting a 1000+ page book, and it gets quite annoying, not to mention useless muscle fatigue etc. I could have done it with InDesign, but I don't really like their way of handling fonts, their ignoring of OpenType Font specification, their lack of multiple selection... But their toolbar is simply better.