What is the point of leading override?

[mogsie]

I found that text following one style in my document was very tightly leaded. I couldn't understand it. The leading in the bar above was correct, but the leading was clearly not right. When I investigated, I found that the Leading Override in the style had somehow got set accidentally to a tighter leading. I must have touched it with the pointer at some stage. But the leading in the bar didn't change, so I was unaware. 

I create a style with 11 pt font on a 14pt leading. If I change the Leading Override to 12pt, it still shows 14 pt in the bar above. This is not right. And if I change the leading in the bar to 18 pt it makes no difference. But it continues to show 18pt in the bar. I now go into the text style and change the Leading Override to No Change, where it was in the first place, but when I go back in, it's still at 12 point and refuses to change. So I change it to Auto, and now it changes to 18pt, which is what is showing in the bar. I have to reapply the style to bring it back to 14 pt leading. (Auto to me means the leading set by the font manufacturer, so I wouldn't want to set it to that. It's very confusing.)

What is the point of the Leading Override in the text style dialog? If I want the change the leading, I change the leading. It should not be possible to use the Leading Override in the Text Style dialog. It should be locked out there.

The Leading Override is just dangerous. It secretly changes the leading in your style while telling you in the bar that the leading is how you want it.  Anyone who needs to override the leading for a particular line should have to do it in the Character dialog. It should not appear in the Text Style dialog where it is pointless and dangerous. Also, when the leading is overridden, the change should show in the bar above.

[loukash]

47 minutes ago, mogsie said:

It should not be possible to use the Leading Override in the Text Style dialog.

It's in the Position & Transform section for a reason: Users usually don't necessarily need to adjust these attributes unless they know what they are doing.

47 minutes ago, mogsie said:

The Leading Override is just dangerous.

Which likely why it's got the "aggressively" sounding word "override" in its definition…  

47 minutes ago, mogsie said:

It secretly changes the leading in your style

Not at all. It requires user action.

47 minutes ago, mogsie said:

when the leading is overridden, the change should show in the bar above

The context toolbar can only contain a subset of all available parameters, and even then it will still be very crowded on small displayes like 13" MacBooks.

To find characters in your document that have Leading Override applied, use the Find & Replace panel in Publisher and search for Format → Leading Override: Auto. This will highlight all text that doesn't have Leading Override applied, so logically all characters not highlighted do have Leading Override applied.
Vice versa, if you know the exact Leading Override value, you can of course search this value directly.

[mogsie]

6 minutes ago, loukash said:

It's in the Position & Transform section for a reason: Users usually don't necessarily need to adjust these attributes unless they know what they are doing

The point is not where it is. The point is that there is absolutely no point in having it in the Text style dialog. Why would you use the Leading Override in your style instead of just changing the leading in the paragraph spacing dialog?  Plus I might want to make sure that there is no superscript coming in from Word, for instance, so I would need to go into the Position and Transform dialog.

 

14 minutes ago, loukash said:

Which likely why it's got the "aggressively" sounding word "override" in its definition

So you set the leading and then override it immediately. That's just daft.

 

16 minutes ago, loukash said:

Not at all. It requires user action.

This user obviously acted accidentally, but the context toolbar lied to me so I didn't notice the error.

 

18 minutes ago, loukash said:

The context toolbar can only contain a subset of all available parameters, and even then it will still be very crowded on small displayes like 13" MacBooks.

It doesn't need to show anything extra. If the leading has been overridden in the style and is now 12 instead of 14, it should show the actual leading, not the leading as it used to be before it was overridden.

Overriding the leading should be a very occasional thing, and shouldn't be part of the style dialog at all.

[walt.farrell]

3 minutes ago, mogsie said:

but the context toolbar lied to me so I didn't notice the error.

The Context Toolbar is showing the Leading, which is for the Paragraph. If you want to see the Leading Override you need to look in the Character panel while you have the text selected, I think.

[thomaso]

57 minutes ago, mogsie said:

What is the point of the Leading Override in the text style dialog?

Its use for specific situations. One of the most simple is a character style inside a paragraph that varies in font size, for instance to visually emphasize certain words like product or company names or other keywords.

While the paragraph leading is a paragraph property the leading override is a character property. Accordingly this two leading options are in different interface areas on purpose. The Affinity interface may need a specific cursor position within a text to get the style properties at that position displayed in the interface. If you select an object that contains various values for a certain property then Affinity can't show them all at a time. Text style deviations get indicated by a '+' symbol in the Context Toolbar and the Text Styles Panel.

For instance: the orange character style has a font size of 18 pt while the paragraph is 12 pt with a leading of 120% = 14,4 pt. Note that the larger characters do auto-cause a larger leading in this case if/while/although leading override is NOT activated (= set to "Auto" = its value is displayed in round brackets):

If for that larger, orange characters the leading override gets activated = changed from "Auto" to the value of the paragraph leading (= 14,4 pt) then the leading override does maintain the leading for the entire paragraph and the deviating setting is indicated in the UI by a value with NO round brackets and in the Text Styles Panel.

23 minutes ago, mogsie said:

Why would you use the Leading Override in your style instead of just changing the leading in the paragraph spacing dialog? 

You should avoid using the leading override … unless you want to use it on purpose for specific situations. As mentioned already, all this character style options in "Position and Transform" should be used/modified selectively only for certain reasons. It may help to collapse this panel section via the triangle to its left to prevent you from accidental changes:

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[loukash]

40 minutes ago, mogsie said:

The point is that there is absolutely no point in having it in the Text style dialog.

You don't know how others are using it.

41 minutes ago, mogsie said:

So you set the leading and then override it immediately. That's just daft.

For now I just assume that the "you" is meant rhetorically and you're not calling me "daft", alright?

[mogsie]

1 hour ago, loukash said:

You don't know how others are using it.

For now I just assume that the "you" is meant rhetorically and you're not calling me "daft", alright?

You assume correctly. I meant "one" but that's not how I speak. But why would you override the leading in the paragraph style? I just don't see the point of having it there.

[loukash]

24 minutes ago, mogsie said:

But why would you override the leading in the paragraph style?

I'll let you know when I need it. (Well, probably I won't but I mean it rhetorically )
There are many functions which I've never used yet, in virtually every graphic design application ever since I started experimenting with Aldus PageMaker 3 back in 1989 or so.

Until then, please have a look at the other examples in this thread from our fellow contributors.

[walt.farrell]

31 minutes ago, mogsie said:

But why would you override the leading in the paragraph style? I just don't see the point of having it there.

Perhaps because you can apply a Paragraph Text Style as a Character Text Style, too? You can certainly have it show up in both lists if you define it to do so.

[bbrother]

52 minutes ago, mogsie said:

But why would you override the leading in the paragraph style?

Simple. To add some breath to the text and make it more readable and atractive. It's good for reader’s eyes over longer periods of reading.

 

[walt.farrell]

11 minutes ago, bbrother said:

Simple. To add some breath to the text and make it more readable and atractive. It's good for reader’s eyes over longer periods of reading.

 

But for that, wouldn't you just use the Leading, not the Leading Override.

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, mogsie said:

But why would you override the leading in the paragraph style? I just don't see the point of having it there.

You wouldn't want to (except in the edge case that Walt mentioned, applying a paragraph style as a character style), but a paragraph style must include every character attribute.

It's just like superscript, you'd never want to use it for a whole paragraph but everything has to be included in the style definition.

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, mogsie said:

Why would you use the Leading Override in your style instead of just changing the leading in the paragraph spacing dialog?

You (as in the sense of one) would use it when it is wanted to change the leading of just one or more lines in a paragraph rather than in all lines of the entire paragraph.

The way I think of it, Leading Override is actually neither a character nor paragraph property but a per line property. There could be separate Line panel to make that more obvious but since there is only one line property it doesn't make much sense to me to do so.

[walt.farrell]

57 minutes ago, R C-R said:

The way I think of it, Leading Override is actually neither a character nor paragraph property but a per line property.

I don't think that's quite right, either.

It is a Character property, but it applies to whichever line of text  the character(s) happen to be on (that is, if they move because of text flow changes, the property moves with them), and whichever line(s) are affected will use (I thiink) the maximum value of any characters on the line that have the Leading Override applied.

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[R C-R]

10 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I don't think that's quite right, either.

It is a Character property, but it applies to whichever line of text  the character(s) happen to be on (that is, if they move because of text flow changes, the property moves with them), and whichever line(s) are affected will use (I thiink) the maximum value of any characters on the line that have the Leading Override applied.

The added emphases is why I think of it as a line property. IOW, it is impossible for it to affect just one character on a line of text without affecting every other character on that line. That is unlike any other Character property, is it not?

[walt.farrell]

5 minutes ago, R C-R said:

IOW, it is impossible for it to affect just one character on a line of text without affecting every other character on that line. That is unlike any other Character property, is it not?

Yes, it's unlike other Character properties, but also unlike them it may or may not have any visible effect.

For example, if you have 12 pt type on 14 pt Leading, and you applly a 15 pt Leading Override to one character on the line, and 16 pt Leading Override to another character on the line, the 15 pt Override will effectively be ignored because the 16 pt Override will take priority.

But if the text were edited, and somehow those two characters ended up on different lines, both might be effective. So, while it affects lines, it is still a Character property.

[R C-R]

4 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

For example, if you have 12 pt type on 14 pt Leading, and you applly a 15 pt Leading Override to one character on the line, and 16 pt Leading Override to another character on the line, the 15 pt Override will effectively be ignored because the 16 pt Override will take priority.

There can be only one leading override per line so obviously the larger one has to be applied to the entire line, regardless of how many other characters on that line have it applied -- therefore, it is not a property of any single character, so it must be a line property.

[walt.farrell]

15 minutes ago, R C-R said:

therefore, it is not a property of any single character, so it must be a line property.

Except that if the text were to change, say a character were deleted from the previous line, or added to the previous line, the character that forces the override might move to a different line.

So it is a character attribute, that affects the line the character happens to be in.

[R C-R]

13 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

So it is a character attribute, that affects the line the character happens to be in.

Making it a line attribute!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 😁

[thomaso]

5 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Making it a line attribute!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 😁

It gets applied to characters, not lines ... similar to text wrap, drop shadow, bleed size etc. which get applied to other objects than they affect.

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, thomaso said:

It gets applied to characters, not lines ...

But it still affects the entire line of text, not just the character(s) it is applied to. Thus, to me, it is a line attribute. I understand that others may not think of it that way.

[mogsie]

My problem is that when it's applied in the character dialog of a paragraph text style, it becomes a paragraph attribute. I don't like that.

[R C-R]

8 minutes ago, mogsie said:

My problem is that when it's applied in the character dialog of a paragraph text style, it becomes a paragraph attribute. I don't like that.

 Then why do that?