AutoCorrect for Designer

[MikeTO]

I really wish that Designer had AutoCorrect for two reasons - automatic smart quotes and ordinals. I type a lot of place names in Designer and a surprising number have apostrophes, and I type a lot of ordinals. Designer is the only application I have used in decades that doesn't have automatic smart quotes and I never remember that I have to do it manually. I only find out when I later import the drawing into Publisher where Preflight flags them.

I don't really need the rest of AutoCorrect in Designer but I'd really like these two pieces of it.

Thanks

[loukash]

Why not simply temporarily switch via Edit in Publisher when typing, rather than cluttering ADe with more niche functions that are outside of its scope…?

[Gripsholm Lion]

Because nice looking text is within the ambit of Designer and because some people have no need to buy Publisher.

[walt.farrell]

Just now, GripsholmLion said:

Because nice looking text is within the ambit of Designer and because some people have no need to buy Publisher.

And soon we would have Autocorrect, text columns, linked text frames, hyperlinks/anchors, automatic hyphenation, and a bunch of other Publisher-only functions that I can't recall at the moment that users of Designer have asked for. Where does it stop?

 

[Old Bruce]

2 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Where does it stop?

When the cost for each of the three applications is equal to the cost of buying the whole suite.

[Gripsholm Lion]

That is a specious "thin-end-of-the-wedge" fallacy.

Mike's modest suggestion would bring a little extra ease of use to Designer's text handling. For my use case, it would make it easier to maintain consistency with CSS typography properties. Not a deal-breaker, just a nicety.

[MikeTO]

5 minutes ago, GripsholmLion said:

Because nice looking text is within the ambit of Designer and because some people have no need to buy Publisher.

You summed it up perfectly. Professional type requires typographic quotes, straight quotes are amateurish. Designer should set professional type.

12 minutes ago, loukash said:

Why not simply temporarily switch via Edit in Publisher when typing, rather than cluttering ADe with more niche functions that are outside of its scope…?

Because I'm drawing thousands of tiny text frames and I can't switch to Publisher each time I type a few words into each frame, just in case I might type a straight quote.

It's just like the frequent requests for Find and Replace in Designer. If my Designer document has 1,000 tiny text objects and then I want to change the one with ABC to DEF, how am I supposed to find ABC? Switch to Publisher just to use Find?

[walt.farrell]

1 minute ago, MikeTO said:

Because I'm drawing thousands of tiny text frames and I can't switch to Publisher each time I type a few words into each frame, just in case I might type a straight quote.

It's just like the frequent requests for Find and Replace in Designer. If my Designer document has 1,000 tiny text objects and then I want to change the one with ABC to DEF, how am I supposed to find ABC? Switch to Publisher just to use Find?

So just do all the work in Publisher. The only thing you're missing is the Export Persona.

[MikeTO]

2 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

So just do all the work in Publisher. The only thing you're missing is the Export Persona.

That's the way I started but these diagrams have a different grid than the book itself and I ended up with too many snapping things going on. And I want to use parts of a diagram on one page and parts on another page. It just makes more sense to draw complex diagrams in Designer.

IMO this feels an oversight because Designer has automatic ligatures and every amazing OpenType feature but not automatic quotes which is an entry-level feature.

I can see why AutoCorrect in general was left out of Designer, it's not intended for typing lot blocks of text, but if you were creating an album cover for "You can't hurry love" by The Supremes it would be nice if Designer would enter a typographic quote instead of a straight quote. The user shouldn't have to remember that Designer doesn't have this feature.

[loukash]

6 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

it would be nice if Designer would enter a typographic quote instead of a straight quote. The user shouldn't have to remember that Designer doesn't have this feature.

Probably it's just me, hehe, but I've never used any quotation mark autocorrection in my 30+ years of DTP except when it was turned on accidentally. I prefer to enter all correct characters directly as I type because then I never need to go back and fix things that are auto-"corrected" wrongly.  

[walt.farrell]

37 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

That's the way I started but these diagrams have a different grid than the book itself and I ended up with too many snapping things going on. And I want to use parts of a diagram on one page and parts on another page. It just makes more sense to draw complex diagrams in Designer.

But you can do them in a separate document in Publisher, just as you're doing them in a separate document in Designer. It can even have Artboards, if you need them, rather than Pages (which I presume you know, but I haven't looked at that section of your manual lately  ).

 

[MikeTO]

3 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

But you can do them in a separate document in Publisher, just as you're doing them in a separate document in Designer. It can even have Artboards, if you need them, rather than Pages (which I presume you know, but I haven't looked at that section of your manual lately  ).

I know, but I'm doing this one the old fashioned way. Ingrained workflows are a hard thing to change. I was probably the last person to stop using a ram disk. 🙂 

[loukash]

6 hours ago, MikeTO said:

I was probably the last person to stop using a ram disk

I thought I was!