More obvious highlighting for Preflight Text Patterns

[Granddaddy]

Three years ago there was a request in the Affinity 1 forums for more obvious highlighting for Preflight Text Patterns. 

I'd like to renew @Loquos's  request here in the Affinity 2 forums.

It would be very helpful to have more obvious highlighting in preflight warnings for Text Patterns. Perhaps most people don't use that feature of Preflight given that Text Patterns options are all turned off by default.

I'm surprised how little appears in the forums when you search the phrase "Text Patterns". Surely people are trying to find extra spaces, multiple spaces, and straight quotes when text is pasted from elsewhere. It's especially difficult to find the very thin highlight for straight quotes (especially for apostrophes) in a large text frame.

Or have I missed something obvious?

[fde101]

58 minutes ago, Granddaddy said:

Or have I missed something obvious?

Regular expressions, which many users are incorrectly calling "grep" after one particular UNIX command-line utility which allows text files to be searched using regular expressions (and which various applications similarly incorrectly use in the naming of similar features).

You can search using regular expressions with the Find and Replace feature in Publisher; you just need to turn them on in the gear menu next to "Find".

 

Being able to provide a list of regular expressions to flag as potential preflight issues would indeed be a nice addition.

[MikeTO]

I agree that more obvious highlighting for preflight issues would be helpful. It's hard to find a single quotation mark that has a light grey highlight.

[Granddaddy]

An easy workaround to make the highlighting more obvious is to zoom into the document (say 200% or more on my 24" monitors) before double-clicking the entry in Preflight.