Text Frame breaks words into parts even with hyphenation disabled

[Blake_S]

Even when you disable hyphenation, Text Frame will still break down words into pieces.

There doesn't seem to be any way to stop this.

This presents a huge problem in cases where words being arbitrarily broken down is not permitted, which is pretty much all documents I work with.

This behaviour also prevents a text overflow error being shown in the preflight, so in cases of documents with hundreds or thousands of pages, it prevents you from knowing where the problems are.

Example:

a multi-line text frame where all text fits the frame:

a multi-line text frame where text doesn't fit the frame and a preflight error should have been shown:

instead, no error, and words are broken down between lines. Imagine if this was a business card or something like that. Hyphenation disabled.

And what happens in InDesign if you disable hyphenation:
 

With hyphenation disabled a text overflow error is shown like its supposed to, words are not broken down.

[carl123]

1 hour ago, Blake_S said:

Imagine if this was a business card or something like that

Serif may in the future provide some sort of preflight warning for broken words but not necessarily an "Overflowing Text Frame" warning as the text frame is not overflowing

In the meantime, in the case of stuff like business cards etc you may want to consider individual text frames for each field of the business card (e.g. Name, Surname, Job Title, Telephone, Email, etc)

Doing it that way will show a preflight "Overflowing Text Frame" warning whenever the field's data does not fit the available space

 

[Blake_S]

1 hour ago, carl123 said:

Serif may in the future provide some sort of preflight warning for broken words but not necessarily an "Overflowing Text Frame" warning as the text frame is not overflowing

But that's the bug - the word is being broken down when it shouldn't be, and this is causing the error to not show up when it should be showing up.
Basically, the "broken down words" warning is pointless and shouldn't exist, because the words should not be broken down after you disabled hyphenation. Text overflow check already exists, no need to add a separate check.

Individual text frames do not work in cases where each of the data fields can have multiple lines, and the number of lines can vary.
Like if a name has one line, but the surname has two. Or name has two and surname has one. Most clients in that case ask for all 3 lines to be centered vertically, but they won't be if each individual field is its own text box like in the example above.

Already tried to do it like this, and had to re-do it in InDesign instead as a result.

One text field allows to center things, but then due to this bug in Publisher the text field will break down surnames and names into chunks between lines, ignoring the disabled hyphenation.
 

[PixelEngineer]

15 hours ago, Blake_S said:

If you squish that InDesign text frame you will get the exact same result as you got with the Affinity text frame in your examples, its no different. if you drop a 30 character word in that same InDesign text box words will get broken in InDesign. 

 

As you see here there are no issues.
Affinity Publisher gives the designer total control in this regard. 

 

 

 

 

[Blake_S]

6 hours ago, PixelEngineer said:

If you squish that InDesign text frame you will get the exact same result as you got with the Affinity text frame in your examples, its no different.

No it won't, it is way different. I even provided examples, did you not see them? If you reduce the width of a text frame, it will break words into pieces even with hyphenation disabled. Its in the second screenshot.

Quote

if you drop a 30 character word in that same InDesign text box words will get broken in InDesign. 

No it won't... again, did you not see the example in the first post? It reports an overflow error in this case, it doesn't break down the word, its the 4th screenshot

 

6 hours ago, PixelEngineer said:

As you see here there are no issues.

Because you didn't test it... the issue is when the text frame don't have enough horizontal space to display the word, but has free new lines, then it starts breaking down words in Publisher, ignoring disabled hyphenation. In your example, you didn't reduce the text frame width, it can still show the first word without breaking it. Reduce text frame width below the width of the word.

[MikeTO]

IMO the only bug is the lack of a preflight warning. I think both Adobe's and Serif's approaches for handling words that won't fit are equally valid and Serif uses the same approach as Apple and Microsoft so it's in good company.

I don't have InDesign now so I can't test this, but I believe with Adobe's approach if I have a 1000-page phone directory with lots of narrow columns and a single story, and I type a word longer than will fit in a column on page 2, all of the other 998 pages will be blank as the entire remainder of the story will become overset. With Serif's approach, that word will be broken and the rest of the story will be flowed normally. Oversetting the entire story due to one word that is too long isn't necessarily the best approach for most users.

But I understand that this is not what you're used to from InDesign or what you want. And I agree there should be a preflight warning as in InDesign for when a word is broken due to the lack of space.

I think Publisher is also missing another related preflight warning, one for when a word formatted with no break is overflowed. The Hide Overflow setting has no impact on words that are too long to fit horizontally, that just hides the vertical overflow, and text being rendered outside of the text frame is definitely something I would want to be warned about.

So could we please have two more preflight warnings?

[Blake_S]

On 1/20/2023 at 6:19 PM, MikeTO said:

But I understand that this is not what you're used to from InDesign or what you want.

The issue here is that the current way the text box works prevents me from being able to use it at all.
Like I cannot use Affinity programs for jobs I planned to use them for.

I need the words to remain intact and not broken. That is a requirement.
Current text box doesn't allow that, so its unusable.
Normally you would achieve this by disabling hyphenation.

On 1/20/2023 at 6:19 PM, MikeTO said:

With Serif's approach, that word will be broken

But its not just that word, if the column is too narrow then it may be 10s, or 100s of words broken.
If you're fine with it, then its useful, but I'm not. Its would be an error in my case. And I wouldn't even know where these cases are, thus I cannot use the software at all.

As it stands, in any case where a Text Box that is more than one line in height is involved I cannot use Affinity Publisher, since there is now way to guarantee that the word will remaining intact and will not be broken down.