Optical alignment

[Tony Pritchard]

In Affinity Publisher I find the left alignment over done. The A and W in particular hang out the left edge by too much. I see that one can manually adapt this. My concern is that if one changes the left alignment how this impacts the right alignment. I have produced a lengthy book. I am concerned that any change on the left alignment will start the text reflowing. At the moment the ATWY is set at Left 20% and Right 20%. If I change the left to 10% should I compensate on the right alignment eg 30%. Is this how it works? I hope you understand what i mean. I've attached a screenshot of the Optical Alignment area.

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[thomaso]

If you need to maintain the text flow when switching the Optical Alignment to "Manual" then a possible workaround might be to add some Tracking to the affected words by creating an according Character Style (with tracking only) + using "Find & Replace" > "Regular Expressions" to search for words at the beginning of a line & starting with the according characters & apply this character style to the found results via "Replace" > "Format".

 

[Tony Pritchard]

5 hours ago, lacerto said:

I do not think that there is a way to compensate effects of optical alignment setting for the text flow and wrapping, so I suppose the only way to try to correct this is decreasing one percent by one the "Left" adjustment and only to the point where the change does not result in rewrapping (or at least not in every place). The "Right" adjustment would occur only if capital A, T, W or Y would appear as the rightmost character in a row, so not probable if your text is not in all uppercase, and even then, increasing the "Right" setting (which could theoretically compensate the decrease of the "Left" setting), it is unlikely that the changes in optical alignment would happen so that you would have identical optically aligned characters both at the start and end of each affected text line).

Btw, I agree that the default (20%) for these letters is too much. I am not sure how "optical" is defined, and whether it is something that gets analyzed real-time based on font metrics (or even rendered appearance???) but in Affinity apps e.g. non-serif fonts like Arial get basically similarly optically aligned, as fonts with serifs (e.g. Adobe Caslon which I tested). In InDesign, optical alignment is basically recommended to be set according to leading, and the effect is much more subtle there, and grotesque (non-serif) fonts get differently aligned than fonts with serifs. Typically only the tips of serifs get aligned off the text frame, and as alignment happens automatically (not by user-defined characters and percentages), there is obviously less control, but generally the effects of the feature are more balanced and "intelligent". In InDesign optical alignment related to frame edges is probably somehow connected to the apps capability to apply optical kerning, that is: it happens somehow dynamically, analyzing the shapes of glyphs, either "optically", or using metrics.

Thanks Lacerto. Useful confirmation. I tried both 10% and 5%. The optical alignment still feels over compensated. There is an overflow in each case. So some judicial editing plus Thomaso's tracking suggestion.

[Tony Pritchard]

4 hours ago, thomaso said:

If you need to maintain the text flow when switching the Optical Alignment to "Manual" then a possible workaround might be to add some Tracking to the affected words by creating an according Character Style (with tracking only) + using "Find & Replace" > "Regular Expressions" to search for words at the beginning of a line & starting with the according characters & apply this character style to the found results via "Replace" > "Format".

Thanks Thomaso. Some useful suggestions here. I think there might have to be a balance between judicial editing and maybe in extreme cases minus tracking the line back. either the way there is some experimentation ahead. 

[Terentyev Publisher]

After one of recent updates Optical Alignment became impossible. In old and new files, it is impossible neither to enter the Characters frame in the existing options, nor to edit the empty frames in the newly added options. Neither in Text Styles, nor in Character > Optical Alignment. What shall be done to make it solved?

Publisher 2 2.5.3

Big Sur 11.7.10

[walt.farrell]

@Terentyev Publisher: It would be more helpful to have the complete application window in the screenshot, not just a portion of it as you showed.

Can you share a file?