typography love & holy buckets these palettes are huge

[wandering_crow]

When working with text headlines, I often find myself wanting to change one letter to an alternate. The screenshot doesn't show the hover state on InDesign, but with InDesign, if you hover over a letter you see every option. It's so easy to change things. Also, while the palette situation has improved since v1, it's still a bit much. I applaud Affinity for not just copying InDesign and for doing their own thing, but there has to be a better way to organize these tools so that it possible to have more digital real estate. 

[loukash]

6 hours ago, wandering_crow said:

there has to be a better way to organize these tools so that it possible to have more digital real estate.

Assign custom keyboard shortcuts to Show Left Studio, Show Right Studio and Hide Studio.
Also, make your own Studio preset(s). Usually I keep only the Right Studio open, with panels that I deem essential. With the shortcut I can then open the Right Studio with the rest of the panels when needed.

What I miss though is the "collapsed to icon" mode. Oddly enough, Affinity on iPad has that.

[Hilltop]

1 hour ago, loukash said:

What I miss though is the "collapsed to icon" mode. Oddly enough, Affinity on iPad has that.

Perhaps I misunderstand you but double-clicking on the top bar of a panel makes it collapse. 

What I did was to set up a few clusters of Studio panels that are related in my workflow; widen them to the same width and with enough space to double-click the top bar without running the risk of making them disappear; and position these at the top of the app window. I'm using Windows, so there's a lot of space next to the main toolbar and with version 2, these clusters conveniently click into place. The fact that I have a widescreen monitor also helps. 

[loukash]

Just now, Hilltop said:

Perhaps I misunderstand you

Yes, you do.  

Just now, Hilltop said:

double-clicking on the top bar of a panel makes it collapse

Yes, it collapses to the – what's the correct term? – "panel bar". All fine and well, we know this concept since the 1990s.

What I mean is, panels collapsing to their icon representation.
Like InDesign:

And Affinity on iPad:

That mode is missing from Affinity on desktop, and is thus definitely a valid feature request.

[loukash]

11 minutes ago, Hilltop said:

The fact that I have a widescreen monitor also helps

On a notebook, every (non-retina) screen pixel counts.

[Hilltop]

I understand loukash! I know you're very experienced with the apps but others may not be. 

To be clear, my approach with the panel clusters is a workaround. I hope and already have asked for more buttons, among others to open/collapse panels. I still find the UI underdeveloped and sometimes not very intuitive. I also wish they would expand the context menus.

[loukash]

2 hours ago, Hilltop said:

What I did was to set up a few clusters of Studio panels that are related in my workflow; widen them to the same width and with enough space to double-click the top bar without running the risk of making them disappear; and position these at the top of the app window. I'm using Windows, so there's a lot of space next to the main toolbar

1 hour ago, Hilltop said:

my approach with the panel clusters is a workaround

Ah, now I understand it from your screenshot.

That's not possible on Mac because there's no such "waste of screen estate" available anymore. And you can't use the free menubar space as seen on @wandering_crow's screenshot above because that's a locked global space that always floats on top.

It would be possible with Affinity v1 on MacOS El Capitan which still has a blank window bar on top (apart from the three window buttons and the file name), and I vaguely remember that as an "early adopter" of ADe I may have even tried that approach back in the day. After all, that's exactly how I used to set up my workspace decades ago when I was still working with Freehand's collapsable palettes. But alas, floating panels in Affinity turned out to be a p.i.t.a. for my workflow because they break the very little of UI scripting capabilities that Affinity apps have – because the Affinity UI doesn't follow MacOS UI guidelines, duh! So eventually I gave in and adopted the unified window mode with all panels docked within. 

1 hour ago, Hilltop said:

I still find the UI underdeveloped

Oh yeah!

[Hilltop]

Let's hope further improvements are on the way!

[fde101]

On 2/23/2023 at 11:25 PM, wandering_crow said:

there has to be a better way to organize these tools so that it possible to have more digital real estate. 

Easy: eliminate the redundant "Close" button (since there is already an obvious one on the title bar) and replace the radio button groups with drop-down lists.

[Bobby Henderson]

CorelDRAW uses a similar approach to InDesign for allowing alternate character changes. You highlight a letter in a text object; if any alternates are available a down arrow will appear under the letter. Hover over the down arrow and it will reveal a drop-down menu showing all available alternates in the font file. The same method can be used for applying two or three letter ligatures. Although those usually apply automatically, but if a typeface has multiple options it's possible to choose any of the other options. A glyphs palette is also pretty handy.