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Publisher/ Designer RTL features for Arabic text


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  • 3 weeks later...

It's ridiculous to me that something as basic as right to left text isn't a built in feature. Even a basic notepad can handle right to left text. I found this plugin that seems to fix it, I expect by converting RTL text to unicode. Affinity Designer and Publisher is unusable for Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Azeri and Hebrew because they are all RTL scripts. It collectively excludes a billion people. It's a massive oversight.
 

 

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the word you're looking for is ligature based scripts. Ligature and cursive based scripts are different. That said, Hebrew isn't even that. Regardless, myself and millions of people use RTL scripts it all the time, and as far as ligature scripts go, it's a common component of Latin and Cyrillic scripts too. it even works here:

یہ لے بھایٔ بکش دہ مجھے

 

It's a basic feature. That you don't use it or it looks complicated to you has no bearing on that. 

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1 hour ago, LondonSquirrel said:

It's been discussed many times.

And according to the staff, it has not (yet) been implemented because at the code level integrating it with the other text-based features is much more complicated than it might seem.

I'm not sure what that means but for example, I think since multiple fonts & languages can appear in the same block of text at both the character & paragraph level, it might be hard to work out how they all should work together if a line of text mixes RTL & LTR text along with all the fonts & so on.

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12 hours ago, salik said:

the word you're looking for is ligature based scripts

No, the word cursive is correct. Cursive means the letters join up. Ligatures are also joined up but they are different. There are articles out there about this, but even the main Wikipedia article on cursive scripts lists ligatures as a subclass of cursive scripts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive.

 

12 hours ago, salik said:

It's a basic feature.

It's not. RTL text is not easy to implement. It is not simply a matter of reversing a string of text. If it was available I would use it.

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11 hours ago, R C-R said:

I'm not sure what that means but for example, I think since multiple fonts & languages can appear in the same block of text at both the character & paragraph level

One difference (of many): There are no hyphens in Arabic/Persian/Urdu. Any justified text in a mixed Latin/Arabic sentence where an Arabic word happens to appear at the end of a line would have to be handled with careful spacing before it. If Arabic words appears in the middle of a sentence, they could be handled by kashidas. Basically it means a new text engine.

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12 minutes ago, Zaher Houlayhel said:

I always wonder how a company more recent than affinity, like canva.com, could handle RTL correctly and properly, in the browser, from the get go... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

If now Canva support RTL, why not use Canva instead of Affinity Suite?

Isn’t Canva for free in standard version?

Don’t expect to have RTL in Affinity before version 3.0…

Happy amateur that playing around with the Affinity Suite - really love typograhics, photographing, colors & forms, AND, Synthesizers!

Macbook Pro 16” M1 2021, iPad Pro 12.9” M1 2021, iPad Pro 10.5” A10X 2017, iMac 27” 5K/i7 late 2015…

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18 hours ago, salik said:

It's ridiculous to me that something as basic as right to left text isn't a built in feature. Even a basic notepad can handle right to left text. I found this plugin that seems to fix it, I expect by converting RTL text to unicode. Affinity Designer and Publisher is unusable for Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Azeri and Hebrew because they are all RTL scripts. It collectively excludes a billion people. It's a massive oversight.
 

 

Affinity is a niche product with “only” three million users - Adobe CC (supports RTL) has 30 million users, so, if you wants RTL there’s a lot of other choices out there that can do RTL…

We other three million continue to use Affinity with LTR.

Happy amateur that playing around with the Affinity Suite - really love typograhics, photographing, colors & forms, AND, Synthesizers!

Macbook Pro 16” M1 2021, iPad Pro 12.9” M1 2021, iPad Pro 10.5” A10X 2017, iMac 27” 5K/i7 late 2015…

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5 hours ago, AffinityMakesMeSmile said:

We other three million continue to use Affinity with LTR.

And for your information Affinity even does not support LTR fully.  Example Indic Script. (Devanagari, Bengali, Assamese,  Tamil, Telegu, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, etc etc.)

Thank you for anything & everything.

‘‘কেউ শুধালে বোলো, আমি কাছের তো নই দূরের কেউ৷ সাগর বেলায় ধাক্কা দিয়ে মিলিয়ে যাওয়া প্রবল ঢেউ।’’ - নাদিয়া জামান

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7 hours ago, LondonSquirrel said:

I would mention QuarkXPress as it now natively supports RTL text in the 2023 edition. Prior to that, there was an Arabic plugin which cost several hundred $.

Yes, but in its first iteration, QXP has certain limitations with rtl scripts. Best to read what those limitations are before plunking down cash.

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On 4/26/2023 at 5:32 AM, LondonSquirrel said:

No, the word cursive is correct. Cursive means the letters join up. Ligatures are also joined up but they are different. There are articles out there about this, but even the main Wikipedia article on cursive scripts lists ligatures as a subclass of cursive scripts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive.

No, again, you're wrong. Maybe stop talking about languages you don't work in and use every day, or like, at all? This is the difference between cursive and ligature based: 

220px-The_Wheel_Taumfel.jpg
Ligature can be said to be a sub class of cursive, but that's still not necessary for most latin scripts. Ligature based scripts are necessary for most Abjad scripts because they can't be broken up as easily. when you write something like کشتنی it's made up of the letters ک، ش ، ت، ن and ی. I really wish for your sake you were right so you didn't feel obligated to keep replying and giving me unsolicited advice but it's a little different than what you're saying.

Affinity already supports cursive fonts and fonts with ligature based logic. 

Additionally that has nothing to do with rendering RTL text. So I don't know what you're talking about.

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3 hours ago, salik said:

No, again, you're wrong.

I'm not going to argue with you. I know you are wrong. FYI I've worked with RTL text for over 10 years and read and write Persian practically every day. If you don't know the different between LTR cursive and RTL cursive, I leave it at that. I won't respond any further.

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