Publisher - Split paragraph styles and character styles into separate panels

[bbrother]

It would be much easier to manage styles if paragraph and character styles where split into two panels.

[MikeTO]

Or maybe a divider line like the Pages panel has for masters and actual pages?

[walt.farrell]

4 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

Or maybe a divider line like the Pages panel has for masters and actual pages?

I'm not sure I see how that would help, Mike.

The separate icons should already provide information to tell you which you're dealing with, and once you've scrolled past the line that's all you're going to see, anyway, to tell you which you're looking at.

[PaoloT]

4 hours ago, bbrother said:

It would be much easier to manage styles if paragraph and character styles where split into two panels.

I personally tend to prefer the single panel. This prevents having to continually have to change panel, when applying styles to plain text. But I agree that some more differentiation between the two categories wouldn't disturb me.

Paolo

 

[anto]

I would add a style filter

[bbrother]

Typically, there are far fewer character styles than paragraph styles.
So in my opinion it would be easier to keep everything under control than scrolling up and down all the time.
I prefer to switch between panels rather than scrolling up and down.

[walt.farrell]

Anto's filtering idea would be simpler than two panels, and accomplish the same end-goal, I think.

[bbrother]

But with two panels it would be easier for indesign users to make the transition to Affinity..

[walt.farrell]

3 minutes ago, bbrother said:

But with two panels it would be easier for indesign users to make the transition to Affinity..

And harder for all the existing Affinity users. 

[PaoloT]

13 minutes ago, bbrother said:

But with two panels it would be easier for indesign users to make the transition to Affinity..

I can assure you that most InDesign users can overcome problems as big as this one.

Paolo

 

[bbrother]

1 minute ago, PaoloT said:

I can assure you that most InDesign users can overcome problems as big as this one.

You're right. But scrolling back and forth is not productive.

[Return]

Instead of the update style buttons on the context toolbar give it a dropdown menu to edit/copy/update style, etc.
And make this button also near the dropdown in the paragraph and character panels. (see first image)
Or just a rightclickmenu from the chosen style in their dropdowns.(see second image)



 

[Oufti]

It would also be easier if you could reorder styles (e.g. by dragging while pressing a modifier key).
 

[fde101]

All of you are completely ignoring group styles, which fit neither and both categories.  The filtering idea would need another button, and if you split the panel, you would need three of them, not just two.

I think if cleverly implemented the filtering option is the better choice here, rather than splitting up the panels.  However, I would argue that it would also be nice (not just for this one but for several of the panels) to be able to have more than one open.  Thus you could open two text styles panels, and set a different filter on each of them, to give you a similar effect to having had the panels split.

The Swatches panel is another candidate to allow more than one to be open - you could have one open to a document palette and another to an application palette for example.

Multiple copies of the Assets panel could be opened to different categories...

[MikeTO]

12 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I'm not sure I see how that would help, Mike.

The separate icons should already provide information to tell you which you're dealing with, and once you've scrolled past the line that's all you're going to see, anyway, to tell you which you're looking at.

I'm not saying this is the most important issue, it's functional and does the job. But I don't find the icons helpful. When scanning a long list of icons users must look for where the icon pattern changes and that will always take longer than locking your eyes onto a fixed divider.

Most of the time users don't need to scan for that pattern change, the No Style (character) is selected and it has a blue background. If I want to click my Date or Highlight character styles I can aim the mouse pointer to below the blue zone and by the time the pointer is there my eyes have locked onto the style.

But the blue selection area isn't fixed if a character style is already selected so my aim is sometimes off. And sometimes it's No Style I need to click. I believe a fixed divider would solve this. It's what Quark does, a unified panel with a fixed divider. Now Quark uses the world's thickest divider, unnecessarily repeating the modifier controls and taking up too much space, but nobody is going to miss the start of their character style list.

But this isn't that important to me, there are other features I'd rather have.

Cheers

[walt.farrell]

7 hours ago, MikeTO said:

and that will always take longer than locking your eyes onto a fixed divider.

So were you proposing a fixed division, then, between the paragraph and character text styles, with separate scrolling for each?

First, I did not get that understanding from your initial suggestion. I envisioned a simple line between the two sections, that would scroll with them.

But next, a fixed line would only work, I think, with a much taller Text Styles panel; perhaps one that is floating rather than docked. It's an interesting idea, but I think it would be quite limiting with a docked panel.

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

So were you proposing a fixed division, then, between the paragraph and character text styles, with separate scrolling for each?

First, I did not get that understanding from your initial suggestion. I envisioned a simple line between the two sections, that would scroll with them.

But next, a fixed line would only work, I think, with a much taller Text Styles panel; perhaps one that is floating rather than docked. It's an interesting idea, but I think it would be quite limiting with a docked panel.

I'd prefer just a divider in a single scrollable region because that would work well for me but a divider with two scrollable regions would be fine and may be better for others.

I think the root of the issue is that the combined panel can lead to a very long list. I have 32 styles listed for my book but don't need to see 14 of them all the time. A divider would be enough for me but others might prefer or need other solutions. For example, it would be good if the index styles didn't appear in the list unless you're editing an index, the same way TOC styles work - that would remove 9 styles for those who add an index. A favourites list to hide infrequently used styles would also address the length of the list and combined with manual reordering as somebody suggested above would be the ultimate solution. MS Word for Windows offers this with its Quick Styles Gallery (favourites) and manual reordering. (I think Mac users have to jump through hoops to reorder.)

Samples is a great feature because with lists this long it lets the eye quickly lock onto a target but I had to turn it off because I found it annoying. I think the issue with it is style names are truncated much sooner than they need to be - this screenshot shows how much dead space there is to the right of the style name.

Nobody would want a style name that long but with samples and indents text gets scaled earlier than it should. For example, my styles Photo Main and Photo Primary look very different even though they have identical character formatting, and important styles such as Body Indent are tiny while unimportant ones such as Footer are large. Photo Secondary is one character too long to be displayed the same as Photo Main because of the aggressive truncation. I dislike this so I have Samples off which makes visually locking onto a style to click it a bit harder.

 

There's a lot here but I'd be happy with just a divider line.

[anto]

16 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

I think the root of the issue is that the combined panel can lead to a very long list. I have 32 styles listed for my book but don't need to see 14 of them all the time.

Continuing with your suggestion and combining it with the filter I suggested, you can filter only by the styles used. That is, you click on either paragraph style or character style and see only the styles that are used in the document.

Or something like filter for fonts: All, Paragraph, Character, Used.

[walt.farrell]

11 minutes ago, anto said:

Or something like filter for fonts: All, Paragraph, Character, Used.

Possibly also a "recently used" which might be kind of a stack with most recently used on the top?

12 minutes ago, anto said:

That is, you click on either paragraph style or character style and see only the styles that are used in the document.

I wondered about that, too, but I'm not sure that would work, as it sounded to me like Mike has 32 styles actually defined/used in his document.

[MikeTO]

That's right, I have 32 styles actually used in the document so a filter that showed only actual styles used wouldn't be helpful for my use case.

Microsoft's approach isn't bad, the Styles pane shows all styles but the Quick Styles Gallery shows a list that you can curate and order, at least on Windows. The macOS version is more limited. I give Microsoft credit for this because the goal is to be able to apply a style as quickly as possible. For me, I need to be able to apply just half a dozen regularly so the long list gets in the way. It's not a huge deal, my suggestion for a divider got a bit more attention than I thought. If I could get just one thing changed it would be to hide the index styles, they just get in the way.

[fde101]

Just to point it out, the styles can also be selected using drop-down lists on both the context toolbar (when editing text) and on the Character and Paragraph studio panels.  The drop-down lists do separate the Character and Paragraph styles from each other, so while it does mean one more click (to open the drop-down), using these might help to eliminate the scrolling.  Or, you could use the Text Styles panel for the paragraph styles, and one of the drop-down lists for the Character styles (or vice-versa)...

[MikeTO]

3 hours ago, fde101 said:

Just to point it out, the styles can also be selected using drop-down lists on both the context toolbar (when editing text) and on the Character and Paragraph studio panels.  The drop-down lists do separate the Character and Paragraph styles from each other, so while it does mean one more click (to open the drop-down), using these might help to eliminate the scrolling.  Or, you could use the Text Styles panel for the paragraph styles, and one of the drop-down lists for the Character styles (or vice-versa)...

Thanks, I know those are there but while I loved the style controls in Context Bar type palettes in the 90s I much prefer the Text Styles panel. Part of it has to do with the order of controls which makes no sense to me (char attributes, char style, para style, para attributes). I just ignore it and use the panel.

[MikeTO]

@walt.farrell I know I said this (a divider) isn't important but it's been stuck in my craw and I figured out the reason. It's not setting a character style that's a problem, a divider would be of only general help, it's setting No Style for character style. With separate panels my mind would know to aim for the top of the panel without thinking about it. With the unified panel, I have to look for where to aim because the big blue selection rectangle is what my eye locks onto and it's not always in the same place relative to the No Style option.

Here are two views of my Text Styles panel. In the left example I need to click 3 rows up from the big blue target. In the right example with the list scrolled down to get past the index clutter, I'd have to click 8 rows up. No Style isn't in a predictable place for something I use so often and it doesn't pop. I find myself searching for the pattern change from ¶ to a. A divider solve it but another option might be to add an icon like ID does to convey that the option removes the applied style.

 

 

[bbrother]

I would also like to have more control over the order of the styles.
Change the order freely, group styles in folders, rename these folders. This would make it easier to navigate and find specific styles.
Overall, giving more control to the user is the way to go.

[jaxfh]

Agree, sometimes it's just confusing having them all together. And since Affinity is now working on the Panels and Dialogues, it would be nice to touch this one too.