Paragraph indent request

[MikeTO]

Here are three paragraph indent attributes missing from Affinity that would reduce the number of paragraph styles needed to accomplish certain tasks.

• Flatten first indent: The first paragraph of the style won't be first line indented.

• Single paragraphs only: Single paragraphs of the style won't be first line indented.

• Flatten next indent: The paragraph following the paragraph in this style won't be first line indented.

[fde101]

For those first two, it seems to me this could be generalized to do quite a lot more.

Consider the way that styles inherit from other styles.  Imagine a base style with the indent, then a child style that only changes the indent (to zero).

Now move the child style into the parent style as part of a list of style variants which are part of the parent's definition and are applied conditionally, with various options to determine when they are applied: in this case, the variation is applied when the paragraph is the first consecutive paragraph to which the style is applied.

In principle, this would not only allow the concept to extend to things other than just indent, but would also allow for other conditions, such as:

• Paragraph spans multiple lines
• Paragraph spans multiple columns
• Paragraph spans multiple text frames
• Paragraph spans multiple pages
• Paragraph is first/last in text frame
• Paragraph is first/last in story
• Paragraph immediately follows/precedes a paragraph with style X

 

Or for character styles:

• Style run begins/ends paragraph
• Style run spans multiple lines
• Apply to first/last/middle N characters of style run
• Style run is applied to a merge field
• Style run is applied to a paragraph with paragraph style X

 

For either type of style, the idea would be to add an ordered list with the basic style as it is now at the bottom (always), and with additional style variants listed above it, each with some set of conditions for when it should be applied, each inheriting from the basic style (last item in the list), which in turn continues to inherit from a parent style.  The first matching variant "wins" and gets applied to the paragraph/style run/section of style run.

[Old Bruce]

I am not sure that this wouldn't result in undesired formatting.

Let us say that I have the settings so the First Paragraph in a Chapter is "Flattened" (the indent is set to 0 for this first paragraph) and the following paragraphs are indented. All good. Now I insert a numbered or bulleted list Paragraph Style after the fourth or fifth paragraph. Is the paragraph after the numbered lis now going to have its indent "Flattened", which is something I don't want.

I can see situations where this would result in a lot of work needed to fix the formatting all in an attempt to avoid having two (current) Paragraph Styles instead of one (New and Improved) style.

[MikeTO]

20 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Let us say that I have the settings so the First Paragraph in a Chapter is "Flattened" (the indent is set to 0 for this first paragraph) and the following paragraphs are indented. All good. Now I insert a numbered or bulleted list Paragraph Style after the fourth or fifth paragraph. Is the paragraph after the numbered lis now going to have its indent "Flattened", which is something I don't want.

That wouldn't happen because these three proposed features are just for paragraph styles, not regular paragraph attributes. This is how they work in apps like Scrivener.

[Edmund DelSol]

I still do not see 'Hanging Indents' in there, where the first line is NOT indented and the following lines WITHIN THE SAME paragraph are indented (to a variable amount set by user.)

[MikeTO]

5 minutes ago, Edmund DelSol said:

I still do not see 'Hanging Indents' in there, where the first line is NOT indented and the following lines WITHIN THE SAME paragraph are indented (to a variable amount set by user.)

Hi Edmund, you can do that today with Affinity. Set Left Indent to how much the following lines of text should be indented and set First Line Indent to 0.

[Edmund DelSol]

Thanks. I needed a leftmost (0) reference, with a tabbed (0.1"/2.5mm) start for the description and a (0.3"/7.5mm) tabbed indent for following lines.  So your suggestion clarified for me that I need to use both the 'Spacing' and 'Tab Stops' panels simultaneously. 

I'd be happy to participate in a contributor/reviewer capacity for at least the formatting part of the next official Publisher guide. The basics training could be strengthened.

[MikeTO]

36 minutes ago, Edmund DelSol said:

I'd be happy to participate in a contributor/reviewer capacity for at least the formatting part of the next official Publisher guide. The basics training could be strengthened.

If you're referring to my Publisher manual, it's an unofficial manual, I don't work for Serif. The official manual is the online help system. Feedback is welcome, just post it to the thread in the Tutorials section or message it to me through this forum.

Cheers,

Mike

[fde101]

16 hours ago, MikeTO said:

That wouldn't happen because these three proposed features are just for paragraph styles, not regular paragraph attributes. This is how they work in apps like Scrivener.

It depends on how you define "first paragraph" - if it is the first consecutive paragraph of the same style, then inserting an intervening style as indicated by @Old Bruce would by definition result in the next paragraph being "flattened".

If you define it as the first paragraph in a story, then you could have intervening paragraphs, but you would need to split up a story in order to flatten the next paragraph again, unless you had a way to indicate which specific paragraph styles should "reset" the behavior.