Text Wrapping Panel does not exist in Affinity Designer

[crowcoder]

I'm trying to perform text wrap but the panel is nowhere to be found. To be clear, this is what I'm trying to do:

Text Wrapping Panel

I have reset the "studio". I've watched a bunch of YouTube tutorials with obnoxious background music. What am I missing please?

[Hangman]

Hi @crowcoder and welcome to the forums,

The Text Wrapping Panel is a Publisher-only feature as is the Help file you've linked to...

 

[crowcoder]

Thanks. My search results specifically mention Designer but I was wondering why "Publisher" was in the url. 

[walt.farrell]

16 hours ago, crowcoder said:

My search results specifically mention Designer but I was wondering why "Publisher" was in the url. 

Hint: try using site:affinity.help/designer2  as the search term if you're looking for Designer 2 help, not designer.

[R C-R]

8 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Hint: try using site:affinity.help/designer2  as the search term if you're looking for Designer 2 help, not designer.

Or maybe just just use the AD 2 Help > Affinity Designer 2 Help  menu item to access the help directly?

[walt.farrell]

15 hours ago, R C-R said:

Or maybe just just use the AD 2 Help > Affinity Designer 2 Help  menu item to access the help directly?

I took the question as more related to Searching. A search using Google or another web search engine will often give more complete results than Searching within the Help itself using the Help's search bar. But when searching via a web search, it's best to restrict the search engine results to those within the proper part of the application Help.

[R C-R]

54 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

A search using Google or another web search engine will often give more complete results than Searching within the Help itself using the Help's search bar.

In my experience, including the site:affinity.help/designer2 restriction on the search yields the same results as using the Help > Affinity Designer 2 Help  menu item. IOW, both restrict the search to results from the current version of the app.

Is it different for you?

[Oufti]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

A search using Google or another web search engine will often give more complete results than Searching within the Help itself using the Help's search bar.

In my experience, including the site:affinity.help/designer2 restriction on the search yields the same results as using the Help > Affinity Designer 2 Help  menu item. IOW, both restrict the search to results from the current version of the app.

Is it different for you?

If in both situations the search is done in the same place, the internal search engine is not as versatile and powerful than the web search engines… (which is exactly what @walt.farrell stated). 

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, Oufti said:

If in both situations the search is done in the same place, the internal search engine is not as versatile and powerful than the web search engines… (which is exactly what @walt.farrell stated). 

All I can tell you about that is for me the results are the same, discounting web engine results that are not relevant to the current version and/or app version. So, yes it is more powerful but not always in a useful way.

[Pšenda]

On 1/13/2025 at 12:55 PM, walt.farrell said:

not designer.

Publisher?

 

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

but not always in a useful way.

I completely disagree, it is either equally effective or much more effective. Especially in situations where you don't know exactly what (what exact term) you are looking for, because external search engines are able to use wildcard/meaning-similar terms in the search.

[R C-R]

54 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

Especially in situations where you don't know exactly what (what exact term) you are looking for, because external search engines are able to use wildcard/meaning-similar terms in the search.

But as I said, at least for me that often ends up including a bunch of irrelevant results, even when the  site:affinity.help/designer2 restriction is included.

[walt.farrell]

22 hours ago, R C-R said:

In my experience, including the site:affinity.help/designer2 restriction on the search yields the same results as using the Help > Affinity Designer 2 Help  menu item. IOW, both restrict the search to results from the current version of the app.

Is it different for you?

Doesn't Help > Affinity Designer 2 Help just take you to https://affinity.help/designer2 ? (Or one of its more canonical names, perhaps.) And then you have to search by typing a term into the Search box on that web page?

If so, in my experience, an external search (properly restricted to that site)  often finds more information than using the site's internal search function.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

If so, in my experience, an external search (properly restricted to that site)  often finds more information than using the site's internal search function.

If I enter just site:affinity.help/designer2 into the search field of my Safari browser, I get at least 10 pages of hits, the first page of which are simply links to the online help in each supported language, plus at the top 'rank' position some promotional stuff from Google intended for webmasters.

I have never taken it further than that.

[lepr]

44 minutes ago, R C-R said:

If I enter just site:affinity.help/designer2 into the search field of my Safari browser

Why are you specifying a site filter without actually providing a term to search for?

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

If I enter just site:affinity.help/designer2 into the search field of my Safari browser, I get at least 10 pages of hits, the first page of which are simply links to the online help in each supported language, plus at the top 'rank' position some promotional stuff from Google intended for webmasters.

I have never taken it further than that.

We're not talking about reaching the site, but about searching for something in the Help (that is, within the site). Use some search terms. See what you find when using an external search tool vs when searching within the Help using the Help site's search bar.

[thomaso]

5 hours ago, R C-R said:

at least 10 pages of hits, the first page of which are simply links to the online help in each supported language, plus at the top 'rank' position some promotional stuff from Google

You can easily fix both:

1. add the wanted language to the link, e.g. "/en-us.lproj/" to exclude non-English results.
2. use another, less commercial search engine to exclude promotional or non-Serif results.

For example with the link below (note: no search keyword the site only) I get more than 200 results (I stopped scrolling) which are 1.) in English only and 2.) without promotional or non-Serif results.

site:https://affinity.help/designer2/en-US.lproj/

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=site%3Aaffinity.help%2Fdesigner2%2Fen-US.lproj&ia=web

Edited January 15 by thomaso
URL (thanks to R C-R)

[R C-R]

4 hours ago, lepr said:

Why are you specifying a site filter without actually providing a term to search for?

Because that is what I thought @walt.farrell meant above:

Quote

Hint: try using site:affinity.help/designer2  as the search term if you're looking for Designer 2 help, not designer.

I tried to make that as clear as possible here, when I said:

Quote

If I enter just site:affinity.help/designer2 into the search field of my Safari browser

 

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, thomaso said:

For example with the link below (note: no search keyword the site only) I get more than 200 results (I stopped scrolling) which are 1.) in English only and 2.) without promotional or non-Serif results.

site:https://affinity.help/designer2/en-US.lproj/

For that, I get a Safari can't find the server "site:" error. Are you sure you meant to include "site:" in the URL?

[thomaso]

9 minutes ago, R C-R said:

For that, I get a Safari can't find the server "site:" error. Are you sure you meant to include "site:" in the URL?

Oh, sorry! I pasted my search term instead of the URL. This should work:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=site%3Aaffinity.help%2Fdesigner2%2Fen-US.lproj&ia=web

If wanted you can change the default search engine in the Safari Preferences > Search.

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, thomaso said:

If wanted you can change the default search engine in the Safari Preferences > Search.

I know how to do that but Google works fine for my needs.

As for that long search term, first it seems ... excessive to expect anyone to use that, & second, it truncates to "site:affinity.help/designer2/en-US.lproj" & produces lots & lots of results which basically duplicate what I can get more quickly by using the help menu search field, because when using what you suggest I need to keep pressing the 'show more results' button to see the full list.

I do not see any advantage to that.

[thomaso]

8 minutes ago, R C-R said:

As for that long search term, first it seems ... excessive to expect anyone to use that, & second, it truncates to "site:affinity.help/designer2/en-US.lproj"

URL versus Search Term: The longer (corrected) link in my post is the URL for a search with the specific search engine "DuckDuckGo" which reduces promotional search results. If someone uses that search engine anyway a shared URL maybe shorter of course. – The actual search term is what you pasted as "truncated".

4 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I do not see any advantage to that.

As mentioned, the advantage is to avoid your mentioned disadvantages of 1.) search results for multiple app languages 2.) promotional stuff. Note the quote before my response:

5 hours ago, R C-R said:

I get at least 10 pages of hits, the first page of which are simply links to the online help in each supported language, plus at the top 'rank' position some promotional stuff from Google intended for webmasters.

[R C-R]

17 minutes ago, thomaso said:

As mentioned, the advantage is to avoid your mentioned disadvantages of 1.) search results for multiple app languages 2.) promotional stuff. Note the quote before my response:

I get both of those advantages by using the builtin help. But regardless, my main point is if the OP uses the AD builtin help it will not yield any results for Text Wrapping Panel or any other feature that does not exist in AD.

So for example, just entering "Text Wrapping Panel," "Text Wrap" or anything similar in the Help menu's search box will say "No results found" which should be enough to at least strongly suggest it is not a feature of AD & will save a lot of time vs. using an external browser or whatever.

[Oufti]

Not sure if it's worth arguing with you, but anyway…

As already said above, an advantage when using external search engines is that they are more tolerant than the Help pages search engine. 

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

So for example, just entering "Text Wrapping Panel," "Text Wrap" or anything similar in the Help menu's search box will say "No results found" which should be enough to at least strongly suggest it is not a feature of AD & will save a lot of time vs. using an external browser or whatever.

Following your reasoning, should I conclude from the test here under that it's not possible to put text around an image in Publisher (where the wrap function exists)? I wonder where is the loss of time…

From left to right: Affinity help search; Google; DuckDuckGo.

 

Keyword for 1st screenshot above ="text around image". Keyword for 2nd screenshot here under ="text wrap".
Both using the restriction to the appropriate help pages: "site:affinity.help/publisher2/en-US.lproj"

On 1/14/2025 at 6:32 PM, Pšenda said:

[using external search engines] is either equally effective or much more effective [than using the Help pages search engine]. Especially in situations where you don't know exactly what (what exact term) you are looking for,

Quod erat demonstrandum.

 

 

[R C-R]

1 minute ago, Oufti said:

Following your reasoning, should I conclude from the test here under that it's not possible to put text around an image in Publisher (where the wrap function exists)?

??? What does this have to do with using the search field in Affinity Designer 2's Help menu to search for what the OP was asking about? What could possibly be quicker & easier to use that when looking for features or functions in AD.

[Oufti]

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