Is it possible to find glyps automatically by selecting letter in text?

[duon]

Affinity designer great, im wanted to rid off Illustrator, but im using text a lot, with alternative glyphs. Is it possible to find glyph automaticaly by selecting letter in text? Beacause it extremly time consuming to find letter manually. Glyph browser is not able to find letter even if i type it to search. Thank you very much

[Oufti]

Welcome on these forums!

If you're using macOS, you could use its integrated Glyph selector instead of Affinity's. 

 

[duon]

hi outfi, thank you for answer (and for the aswer before, because you were anwering me again:) i really appreciate it.

unfortunetly this doesnt work. 🌐 key can find letter but thasts it. it cant fint letter in selected font, just plain letter.

this is example of font i want to use with letters with different thicknes. in Ai i just select letter and software automatically find it in browser.

[walt.farrell]

What font is that?

[Dan C]

3 hours ago, duon said:

Is it possible to find glyph automaticaly by selecting letter in text?

Unfortunately Affinity apps don't natively support this feature within the Glyph Browser, my apologies.

This has been requested previously on the Forums and is something our developers may consider adding to Affinity in a future update.

I'll be sure to add your 'vote' to this feature in our internal development log for you now.

I hope this helps

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, duon said:

 🌐 key can find letter but thasts it. i

Off topic I know, but what is this  🌐 key & where do I find it on my Apple extended keyboard?

[Old Bruce]

If you want to find d type the letter in the search field and it should find (I will wager it depends on the font's construction) all the d glyphs.

[duon]

4 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

What font is that?

Its called Trixie.

8 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Off topic I know, but what is this  🌐 key & where do I find it on my Apple extended keyboard?

I have it on bottom left (macbook pro) its globe+fn key

3 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

If you want to find d type the letter in the search field and it should find (I will wager it depends on the font's construction) all the d glyphs.

 

unfortunatly, this doesnt work (at least for this font). when i type d into search field, it looks like in attachement picture 

4 hours ago, Dan C said:

Unfortunately Affinity apps don't natively support this feature within the Glyph Browser, my apologies.

This has been requested previously on the Forums and is something our developers may consider adding to Affinity in a future update.

I'll be sure to add your 'vote' to this feature in our internal development log for you now.

I hope this helps

it would be great. i have no coding skills, but it looks like easy-to-do feature

[walt.farrell]

12 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

If you want to find d type the letter in the search field and it should find (I will wager it depends on the font's construction) all the d glyphs.

In my experience the labels used in the search are the Unicode names like Latin Small Letter d, which may make searching for d relatively simple but it's less easy to search for L, a, t, i, n  or any other character that is common in the glyph names.

[R C-R]

4 minutes ago, duon said:

I have it on bottom left (macbook pro) its globe+fn key

Thanks. There is no key marked as such on the Apple extended keyboards (the standalone ones with a separate keypad & 19 function keys along the top row.) There is a 'fn' key but it just changes the function of a few of the top row function keys. So I'm not sure what that key on a MBP opens, but I'm guessing it is the Mac Character Viewer window, right?

If so, that does have a search field that for example will work to show the "d" character, which can then be double-clicked to insert it into a text field, but the search field in the Affinity Glyph Browser doesn't do that, or as you show even filter the results to 'd' characters. From what I can tell, it only works for word-like searches like "macron" or "option" to show glyphs with that word in their names, & only for a selected font family. Not entirely useless, but close.

[R C-R]

23 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

In my experience the labels used in the search are the Unicode names like Latin Small Letter d, which may make searching for d relatively simple but it's less easy to search for L, a, t, i, n  or any other character that is common in the glyph names.

If you mean the Affinity Glyph Browser, one of the problems with doing that kind of word-based search is it will also find glyphs with names that include other characters after the d. Try it with Arial to see what I mean.

[kenmcd]

9 hours ago, duon said:

Is it possible to find glyph automaticaly by selecting letter in text?

If the font has the OpenType feature Access All Alternates (aalt),
the selected glyph will be shown as selected in the list in the Typography Panel.
Most newer fonts have aalt included now.
It could also be highlighted in another OpenType feature list.
Depends on how you selected them.

In InDesign (and probably IL) when you highlight a character and a small box appears with all the alternate characters - that is accessing all the alternates.
Adopey does this whether the font includes aalt or not.

aalt just gathers-up all the look-ups from the other OpenType features.

So which Trixie font are you using?
Is that FF Trixie?
FF Trixie does have aalt.

 

Note: Character Viewer (Mac) and Character Map (Windows) only show characters (with a Unicode code point) not all the alternate glyphs (which typically have no code points; sometimes they may be up in the PUA).

[duon]

18 hours ago, kenmcd said:

So which Trixie font are you using?
Is that FF Trixie?

oh, i thought i aswered you... thank you for informative answer. i have FF Trixie. in AI it works perfectly (in know it is small detail, but it helps a lot)

[kenmcd]

@duon  Bad news - aalt is not going to show all the alternate glyphs.

I took a closer look at the fonts today and many of the alternate glyphs are not available by using OpenType features, so they will not appear in the Typography Panel as alternates.

Each character has seven alternates - and those alternates are controlled by the OpenType Contextual Alternates (calt) feature. The calt feature is On by default so the pseudo-random alternates appear automatically.

But, the seven alternates do not all appear in other OpenType features.
Thus they will not appear in Alternates or other features in the Typography Panel.

So the bad news is they will only appear in the Glyph Browser.
Luckily the alternates follow directly after the character in the glyph order.
For example "A" is followed by the seven alternate A glyphs.
Type the Unicode code point in the Search box.
For "S" type "0053" and it will take you to the S plus the seven S alternates.

 

Hopefully Affinity will add your requested feature (it has been mentioned before).

 

Note: Are you seeing any of the Stylistic Sets or other OpenType features in the Typography Panel?
I can see all the OpenType features and test them in font editors, and my fonts work fine in LibreOffice, but the features do not appear correctly in APub.
(I was testing with Trixie HD Pro Heavy, and Trixie HD OT Heavy)

UPDATE: Trixie HD Pro Heavy font works fine in QuarkXPress 2024 also.
So my guess at this point is APub does not support the look-up types used (like the problems with FF Chartwell).
Have to keep investigating...
Or it just chokes on the large number of look-ups and classes.
Dunno.
Whatever... it appears the problem is APub not the font.

[kenmcd]

These are all the OpenType features in Trixie HD Pro Heavy which should appear.
But do not.

Access All Alternates
Case-Sensitive Forms
Contextual Alternates
Fractions
Historical Forms
Lining Figures
Localized Forms
Ordinals
Scientific Inferiors
Slashed Zero
Standard Ligatures
Stylistic Alternates
Stylistic Set 1
Stylistic Set 2
Stylistic Set 3
Stylistic Set 4
Stylistic Set 5
Stylistic Set 6
Stylistic Set 7
Stylistic Set 8
Superscript
Titling

 

[duon]

hi @kenmcd, thank you for your comprehensive answer. i need to look at it closer since a lot of thing you mentioned are brand new to me... however im using Trixie HD Pro Heavy and it work perfect in Illustrator. it looks to me that it works pretty good in Affinity also, but seaching for glyphs in browser manually for almost every letter is very time consuming.