Optical alignment bugs

[MikeTO]

These are not new issues, they were this way in 1.10, too.

EDIT - I rewrote this after great feedback from Ken. Sorry for the confusion.

1. Affinity's default optical alignment settings define an en dash to be aligned both 50% and 25% which makes no sense so only the larger value is used. I think you intended that the 50% value would be for an em dash and there isn't an em dash in the default settings. This was previously logged as AF-3144.

2. If you select a font with bounds defined and set Type to Font, Affinity will render the text using the font's values but display the default values in the panel which is very misleading. It even lets you edit the values but editing them has no effect unless you later change Type to Manual. IMO it should show the font's values but disable them or it should show nothing at all.

1. Affinity's default optical alignment settings define an en dash to be aligned both 50% and 25% which makes no sense so only the larger value is used. I think you intended that the 50% value would be for an em dash and there isn't an em dash in the default settings. FWIW, Apple fonts that have optical bounds (OPBD) defined such as Gothic Text, Chancery, and Hoefler Text use 50% for em dash and 25% for en dash. EDIT: previously logged as AF-3144 but perhaps this detail could be added to that report.

2. If you select a font with optical bounds defined, set Type to Font, and then edit values, there's no way to get back to the font's values. For example, I formatted text as Chancery, set Type to Font, and deleted all the values. Setting Type to Manual or None and back to Font had no effect. Switching to a different font had no effect, the selected paragraphs now had manual overrides that can never be undone without figuring out what the font's original values are and re-entering them. IMO, setting Type to None and then back to Font should clear any manual overrides.

3. OPBD is deprecated now in favour of left and right bounds (LFBD/RTBD) so I tested with EB Garamond 12 SC which has these tags. Affinity uses the tags to render the text correctly, but the panel doesn't reflect what is being rendered as shown in the screenshot below. (For contrast, the bottom paragraph is EB Garamond 12 All SC which does not have these tags so it uses the default values.) It's impossible for the user to know what values the font has if the panel doesn't reflect them. And unlike OPBD fonts, editing or deleting values will be ignored for LFBD/RTBD fonts.

 

Edited August 13, 2024 by MikeTO
Edits in red

[Hangman]

1 hour ago, MikeTO said:

Affinity's default optical alignment settings define an en dash to be aligned both 50% and 25% which makes no sense so only the larger value is used. I think you intended that the 50% value would be for an em dash and there isn't an em dash in the default settings. FWIW, Apple fonts that have optical bounds (OPBD) defined such as Gothic Text, Chancery, and Hoefler Text use 50% for em dash and 25% for en dash.

Wasn't this one previously logged under AF-3144...

1 hour ago, MikeTO said:

If you select a font with optical bounds defined, set Type to Font, and then edit values, there's no way to get back to the font's values. For example, I formatted text as Chancery, set Type to Font, and deleted all the values. Setting Type to Manual or None and back to Font had no effect. Switching to a different font had no effect, the selected paragraphs now had manual overrides that can never be undone without figuring out what the font's original values are and re-entering them. IMO, setting Type to None and then back to Font should clear any manual overrides.

Edit: Ignore the previous comment, I see the issue now...

1 hour ago, MikeTO said:

Undo-ing optical alignment changes does not refresh the panel.

What am I doing differently here...

[MikeTO]

5 hours ago, Hangman said:

Wasn't this one previously logged under AF-3144...

My memory is really bad but I did search. For some reason, this search returns no results:

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/search/&q="optical alignment" "en dash"&quick=1&search_and_or=and&sortby=relevancy

However, I provided more information on what the default value should be in this post so perhaps this can be added to the bug report.

5 hours ago, Hangman said:

What am I doing differently here...

This was in relation to #4, undo does not refresh the panel. It took a while to figure out why you weren't seeing it but it's because you selected the text and I placed the cursor. But this has nothing to do with optical alignment, it was a coincidence that this was when I noticed it so I'll cross that out above.

Do you know if this has been previously reported? Position the cursor at the start or end of a line of text or before or after a space. Change an attribute - it doesn't have to be optical alignment, it can be a character style or even bold. Then undo - does the context toolbar or panel refresh? It does if you select a range of text or position the cursor between two characters (not including a space).

[kenmcd]

A couple caveats for your testing.

Not sure exactly which Apple fonts you are testing with, but all the ones I have looked at do not have any OpenType-compatible optical alignment features.

Apple Gothic, Apple Chancery, and Hoefler Text are all AAT fonts not OpenType.
Those particular fonts will not work in APub.
So do not use those to test as probably nothing is actually happening from the font.

Hoefler Text does have a opbd table, but it is not the same as an OpenType opbd table.

Regarding APub support for the opbd, lfbd, and rtbd OpenType features...
And I just tested APub using an OpenType features test font, and it does not appear to support the OpenType opbd feature - which could just be a limitation of the test font, or APub.
It also does not appear to support the lfbd and rtbd features.
The test font attempts to show if the application is processing the particular OpenType feature tags - and these three showed no effect.
So I guess it is only in the Optical Alignment panel.

These are supposed to be available in the user interface so I would expect them to be in Topography panel, but there is nothing there.
I was testing with EB Garamond 12, and Linux Libertine G (from LibreOffice).
And Catalyst Book (a commercial font which has lfbd).
Nothing appears in the Typography panel for any of them (which is kinda confusing).

So what ever testing you do you should probably not use any of the Apple fonts.
And just use EB Garamond 12, and Linux Libertine G.

[MikeTO]

19 minutes ago, kenmcd said:

Apple Gothic, Apple Chancery, and Hoefler Text are all AAT fonts not OpenType.
Those particular fonts will not work in APub.

You are correct, the Apple Chancery, Hoefler, and Gothic are not OpenType, they are TrueType and their OPBD table is not the same. They do work fine in Publisher though. FWIW, all fonts included with Sonoma are TrueType except for STIX, some of the Noto Sans variations, and LastResort which are OTF.

I apologize though, the optical alignment panel section doesn't refresh properly and I must have misunderstood what I was seeing. This panel section really needs some TLC. When I chose the font, I was probably just seeing the manual alignment values I'd entered previously. Oops.

So here is my revised bug report which is a lot shorter, especially since #1 was previously reported. Hangman is now probably going to tell me that #2 was reported previously, too. 🙂 

1. Affinity's default optical alignment settings define an en dash to be aligned both 50% and 25% which makes no sense so only the larger value is used. I think you intended that the 50% value would be for an em dash and there isn't an em dash in the default settings. This was previously logged as AF-3144.

2. If you select a font with bounds defined and set Type to Font, Affinity will render the text using the font's values but display the default values in the panel which is very misleading. It even lets you edit the values but editing them has no effect unless you later change Type to Manual. IMO it should show the font's values but disable them or it should show nothing at all.

There's also still the issue with undo but that has nothing to do with optical alignment so I'll start a separate post for that.

Thanks!

[MikeTO]

Just to close off the undo issue, I posted it in another thread. It wasn't just a panel refresh issue but an issue with undo not working properly.

 

[DWright]

I have bumped both of these logged issues.