Character map/Alternates/Glyphs

[Deb Holz]

Coming from a Mac, then switching to Windows about 3 years ago, I've come to rely on character maps and glyph palettes for special characters, since I never mastered Unicode keystrokes. I'm a longtime user of Illustrator at work but chose not to upgrade a number of years ago at home. I'm very excited about Affinity Designer but the inability to access OT and special characters is a non-starter for me. Will this be included at some future point?

 

Thanks!

 

Deb

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

• OpenType Features are accessible from the Typography dialogue (Ctrl + Shift + T)
• A few symbols are available on the Text menu, Insert Character submenu (en dash, em-dash, zero width space, etc.)
• Many more are not available, including Smart Quotes. 
• For now, Babel Map is a much better alternative to the Windows Character Map, as it allows you to paste more than one character at a time, and offers some search tools to find the glyph that you need.

I agree that some kind of Insert Symbol palette would be better than relying on third-party solutions. 

 

If your need is primarily for typing accented characters like àèìòù then I strongly recommend installing an extended keyboard to suit your particular language needs. I used the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator to develop a comprehensive PagePlus Keyboard for typing Pāḷi words with diacritics. It also supports a wide range of accented characters for most European languages: çţ etc. Once you learn the few dead keys, typing any accented character is much quicker than picking them from any character map. 

[Jonopen]

Feature roadmap for Affinity Designer:

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/842-affinity-designer-feature-roadmap/

 

'Text features' are mentioned in the list so maybe a character map will also be included. In the long term I believe 'Affinity Publisher' a comprehensive DTP program is being developed.

[Mark Ingram]

Text input has been improved for the next build which is due out in the next day or two.

[Deb Holz]

For symbols I often use http://www.copypastecharacter.com/classic. I'm looking forward to a richer typography environment as the program matures. Keep up the good work!