I'm perplexed. Why the Float-Pin Offset?

[Viktor CR]

This is in reference to the Affinity Spotlight post:

https://affinityspotlight.com/article/be-more-creative-with-drop-caps-in-affinity-publisher/

Here we find the following tutorial,
which tells us (and it's actually necessary) to help Publisher find where the actual Top of the Line is, via Offset!!!

Why at all is that necessary??? 😯

Wouldn't it be better to just say "vertical align to Cap Height"?
Where that position is located, is well known to Publisher. No offset would be necessary,
which anyway would change with a change of the font.

[thomaso]

It doesn't seem to refer to the font but to the anchor as a text character whose height remains independent of the font used but only changes with the font size. Different fonts can have different caps heights and flow differently on a baseline grid.

In this example, the offset value is kept at 0 while the fonts are changed, resulting in different positions relative to the caps height of the text. Accordingly, this offset value would need to be changed with changing fonts if this position is to be maintained.

Also note that the pinning options are quite flexible with the menus and that pinned objects not only are variants of drop caps but may be anchored to any specific point within a text flow and should flow with that.

 

[Viktor CR]

Thank you for pointing this out!

That is rather unsatisfying, considering that also the "bottom" of the line is somewhere below the baseline.

For layout work, we need perceptual font-aligned pinning, meaning:

• Cap height
• X-height
• Baseline

[thomaso]

In particular for pinned objects used as drop caps the "Inline" pinning may work. It doesn't use an anchor like "Float" and can get set to align at the cap height, additionally it can auto-scale with the font size.

Edit: unfortunately "Inline" has no option like the wrap outline for "Float", it behaves like a text character.

Edited January 20 by thomaso