Add option Paragraph composer

[Kambro]

It would be very valuable if Affinity Publisher would integrate the option of a paragraph composer and not only his line composer. This would avoid many rivers of white in the texts. It seems an essential feature.

Thanks in advance to the team.

[Peter Werner]

Agreed. For me, what still keeps me away from using Publisher for more projects instead of InDesign is primarily the lack of an equivalent to Adobe's multi-line paragraph composer and Adobe's much superior Optical Margin Alignment feature (in Publisher, activating that option without extensive manual tweaking just makes everything worse unless the font has specific information embedded, which most fonts do not).

I hate to say it, but especially text in narrow columns still looks signifantly better in InDesign. I'd be very happy if that changed.

[Aisthetikos]

+1

I recommend that too

[JimSlade]

That's the same thing the prevents me from totally switching to Affinity Publisher.

[Kambro]

It's a strange lack, if you remember the revolution caused by the addition of this option to InDesign.

[garrettm30]

I have been asking for this for a long time (by which I mean to say that I eagerly desire this feature; I do not mean to disparage the other progress Serif has made in many other welcome areas).

On smaller projects (those of fewer pages), I have taken to manually managing line breaks on a line-by-line basis in Publisher, and I am starting to feel that the end results are better than the paragraph composer in InDesign. But that can take hours for something like a short novel, and for the larger projects, I still go back to InDesign—and I complain about it the whole way. It is amazing how archaic InDesign feels now.

[JimSlade]

Paragraph composition has been around for several decades. 

[Kambro]

 

8 hours ago, JimSlade said:

Paragraph composition has been around for several decades. 

@JimSlade Hello,

Can you explain what you mean? I understood from @walt.farrell's reply that the option was not yet available on Affinity Publisher V2.

Best regards.

[fde101]

9 minutes ago, Kambro said:

I understood from @walt.farrell's reply that the option was not yet available on Affinity Publisher V2.

Correct.

I believe @JimSlade was referring to the fact that "something" has offered that feature for a long time now - likely in reference to TeX, as even QuarkXPress lacks this option.  While the existence of TeX means that the option is not exclusive to Adobe, there are relatively few products which currently offer it, even in the world of page layout software.

I would like to have the option available also, but I am not holding my breath, and there are other things that the Affinity apps lack which I personally would consider to be of a higher priority.

[Kambro]

I understand. Thank you.

[bbrother]

On 3/9/2024 at 2:07 PM, fde101 said:

I would like to have the option available also, but I am not holding my breath, and there are other things that the Affinity apps lack which I personally would consider to be of a higher priority.

I have a similar opinion.

But like the author of the request, I would like to see a paragraph composer implemented because it does great job with those awfull breaks showing up in paragraph.
When I see problems with spacing and hyphenation in my paragraphs while working in APub, and it hits me that I will have to spend a lot of time to correct them again, my face changes as follows:

😎 --> 😱

+1 for paragraph composer.

 

[JimSlade]

fde101's description of the state of the union is correct. 

Line composition does not produce professional looking justified documents. Just look at legal filings made in Word and how terrible they appear, even those in the Supreme Court.

But as long as people keep buying Word as it is, M$ has no incentive to fix the problems that have been in it for 30 years.

[PaoloT]

I've watched again to the tests I did at the end of the other thread, and I would say that the current composer is perfectly fine. Maybe the paragraph composer was needed before the modern OpenType fonts came out, but it looks like there are now other ways to achieve the same results. The comparison I did in InDesign and Affinity Publisher shows two nearly identical results (only different in a line, due to different hyphenation).

Paolo

 

[garrettm30]

17 hours ago, PaoloT said:

Maybe the paragraph composer was needed before the modern OpenType fonts came out

I’m trying to think how OpenType fonts can have any bearing on justification quality. Could you help me understand?

17 hours ago, PaoloT said:

The comparison I did in InDesign and Affinity Publisher shows two nearly identical results (only different in a line, due to different hyphenation).

In your recent comparison that you posted, those were examples of healthy characters per line count that is close to the ideal, such as you would see in a single column novel layout. In those cases, justification has more space to work out and tends to be better even on a line composer. There are still occasions where a paragraph composer would be advantageous, such as certain no-break sequences that have to be worked around, either automatically or manually, but yes, generally, a paragraph composer is of lesser importance in those contexts. In narrower column contexts, such as various multi-column layouts, acceptable justification is a greater challenge, and that is where a multiline composer could be a time saver.

[PaoloT]

2 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

I’m trying to think how OpenType fonts can have any bearing on justification quality

Just wondering if the inclusion of layout tables, taking care of horizontal (and vertical) position, isn't already giving the text a perfectly balanced spacing, even without having to compare adjacent lines. That is, if the positioning information contained in the font isn't already giving the best spacing for that font and size, and automatic rebalancing wouldn't be able to do any better, or just imperceptibly better.

Paolo

 

[Affinityconfusesme]

+1

[Bit Disappointed]

It's a reasonably obvious and regrettable deficiency in Publisher, yes.

[garrettm30]

6 hours ago, PaoloT said:

Just wondering if the inclusion of layout tables, taking care of horizontal (and vertical) position, isn't already giving the text a perfectly balanced spacing

If you mean something like kerning tables, those things have been in fonts for a long time. I don’t know much about the inner working of fonts, so I am probably missing something, but I don’t think OpenType gives us anything new in terms of justification.

[PaoloT]

1 hour ago, garrettm30 said:

If you mean something like kerning tables

It's not just kerning. OTF fonts include a series of substitution, positioning and justification criteria that allow for a finer management of spacing. In case they can make things clearer (or even more confuse…), here are the specs:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/chapter2

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/jstf

Somewhere they declare that these rules somewhat replace automatic positioning algorithms from the page layout programs ("clients").

Paolo

 

[MikeW]

5 hours ago, PaoloT said:

It's not just kerning. OTF fonts include a series of substitution, positioning and justification criteria that allow for a finer management of spacing. In case they can make things clearer (or even more confuse…), here are the specs:

...

Somewhere they declare that these rules somewhat replace automatic positioning algorithms from the page layout programs ("clients").

Paolo

Pretty much, modern Latin fonts (OTF or TTF) do not make use of the only references in those links that affect justification--the JSTF (the justification table) and the OT feature, jalt. But even so, the jstf doesn't necessarily affect what you are considering as justification. jalt also isn't involved in most all Latin fonts.

The jstf is used to substitute glyphs depending upon the surface layout parameters (width of frame space in conjunction with the layout engine's attempts at justification).

A better link to understand what the jstf is doing with glyph substitution, try this thread on TD:

https://typedrawers.com/discussion/3465/making-jstf-better