Aligning Text to the Grid in Affinity Designer

[rad]

Letters with a round form should extend past the grid line (see 2.png for correct alignment). AD aligns the rounded forms to the baseline instead (3.png).

 

Grid

8 / 2

 

Text field height:

24

 

Leading/Baseline:

16 (illustrator) 

-4 (AD)

 

I might be doing it the wrong way, so if there's another way of doing it, let me know.

[MEB]

Hi rad,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

Apart from the different units (you are using pt in Illustrator and px in Designer) do you have Snap to Grid enabled?

This seems to be working fine for me. (on the Mac). Will have to check on Windows. 

[R C-R]

To be honest, I never knew about baseline overshoot until I saw this topic & wondered what it was about, so that is one more of the plethora of things I have learned from participating in this forum.  :)

 

That said, I checked with over a dozen different fonts in AD on my system & the overshoot looks correct (like the first screenshot) to me for all of them.

[Aammppaa]

It looks like AD snaps both to the baseline and the bottom of the object.

 

Since these can be very close to each other, it makes the snap that you want hard to achieve, unless you zoom in.

 

 

[Takkle]

Hi everybody!

I’m about to replace Illustrator with AD in a large infographic-project, where lots of numbers need to be aligned to the grid, but with their baselines.

 

I have the same problem as @rad, characters need to be aligned to the baseline, not the bounding box. How do I need to setup the snapping, so it snaps to the baseline, like @Aammppaa suggests? Cant figure it out... 

[MEB]

Hi Takkle,

Welcome to Affinity Forums

This should only happen if you are using the Artistic Text Tool (which aligns the text to both the bottom as well as to the baseline). If you use the Frame Text Tool it should align to the baseline only (unless the frame text has only one line and its bounding box is aligned to the bottom of the text - in that case double-click the bottom handle to align the bounding box with the baseline on the latest Beta only).

[R C-R]

43 minutes ago, MEB said:

This should only happen if you are using the Artistic Text Tool (which aligns the text to both the bottom as well as to the baseline). If you use the Frame Text Tool it should align to the baseline only.

I am using Affinity Designer v1.55. For me, depending on the snapping options I have enabled, both Frame Text & Artistic Text will align horizontally to the top, bottom, & centerline of another text's bounding box, as well as to their text baselines. This can cause the difficulty in snapping to baselines @Aammppaa mentioned.

 

However, if I disable 'Snap to object bounding boxes' in the Snapping Manager, they will only align to their mutual baselines. This eliminates the need to zoom in to make sure the alignment is on baselines. Saving a snapping preset with Snap to object bounding boxes disabled makes this somewhat easier to use.

[MEB]

This thread is about aligning text to the grid and that's what i'm referring to in my reply above.

[R C-R]

I am not sure if @Aammppaa was confining this issue to aligning text to grids. But be that as it may, even if I have only Snap to Grid enabled in the Snapping Manager, the top of the bounding boxes of both Artistic & Frame text will snap to grid lines, as well their text baselines aligning to their mutual baselines or to grid lines. Frame text will also snap the centerline of its bounding box to grid lines & the bottom of its bounding box to grid lines.

Edited August 24, 2017 by R C-R
Edited to add bounding box bottoms

[MEB]

Look at the clip Aammppaa posted. He is snapping to the grid. Same for the screenshots posted by the OP.

Of course if you have Snap to Grid enabled the bounding box of the text frames both top, center and bottom plus the baseline will align to the grid as well. That's by design. The same happens with any vector object. You are confusing the option Snap to object bounding boxes (which in this case is to align/snap the text frame with the bounding boxes of other object's bounding boxes) with with the alignment of text frames (bounding boxes) with the grid.

[R C-R]

10 minutes ago, MEB said:

Of course if you have Snap to Grid enabled the bounding box of the text frames both top, center and bottom plus the baseline will align to the grid as well.

So how do you force only text baselines to snap to the grid? If I turn off snapping completely, nothing snaps to anything else. If I turn on snapping & only enable Snap to Grid, as you say, text frames will also snap to the grid & we are right back to the issue of baselines & bounding box bottoms potentially being so close to each other that it is very difficult to align baselines, for both Frame & Artistic text.

 

What am I missing here?

[MEB]

There's no way to control the baseline snapping separately from the text frame bounding box. You either have all enabled or disabled. In any case baseline alignment is mostly relevant to the Frame Text Tool (blocks of text) and so the top or bottom of the frame box don't interfere that much with baseline alignment/snapping no matter if you are aligning with the grid or other text frames. In the latest Beta the Artistic Text Tool frame already matches the top and bottom of the text too (which doesn't happen in the current version 1.5.5), so the alignments/snapping should also be more clear. It's true that for the Artistic Text Tool frame the bottom of the frame and its baseline can become to close, that's why i suggested to use the Frame Text Tool instead of the Artistic Text Tool in one of the posts above if you need to align single words/text frames by their baselines (the bottom of these frames don't match the bottom of the words as in the Artistic Text tool so that problem doesn't exist).

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, MEB said:

There's no way to control the baseline snapping separately from the text frame.

Thanks. That was not clear from previous posts.

 

That said, may I suggest as a workaround, foregoing snapping to the grid completely? What I have in mind is to disable both Snap to grid and Snap to object bounding boxes. This will still allow baseline alignment, so by considering the baseline of any one text block (Frame or Artistic) as the 'master' baseline (& possibly locking it), it is easy to align the baselines of other text blocks to it. Surprisingly, it also still works if all the other snapping options (snap to guides, spread, & so on) are disabled, making it just about goof proof.

[MEB]

R C-R,

Feel free to create a thread in the Feature Requests section with any improvements/suggestions you may find useful as they may become lost here.

[R C-R]

I apologize for not being clearer about this. I was suggesting a workaround as a 'goof-proof' (error free) text baseline alignment method, one which only (?) works because baseline alignment works even when snapping is enabled but all the snapping options are disabled. I don't know if this is by design or a bug, but either way it works!

 

That is good enough for me. 

[lukejanicke]

MEB and RCR, you both solved my problem: Frame Text Tool, autosized, then also use there bottom middle anchor point for exact numeric control over position. My use case is numbers on mathematics axes.

 

 

[Lorentz]

This does seem to be a recurring issue. I'm having the same problem regarding changing text size. The font says it's still 15, but it's very noticeably smaller than previous text of same font. Also the text is not snapping to baseline despite me turning off and on multiple times.

[SuburbNews]

Please help - I have my baselines setup - older text boxes are adhering to the faint grey lines like writing in a textbook on the lines, however my new text frames are not obeying the same rules, in other words the text (paste text from clipboard or filler text) have mind of its own and wont sit one the line but gradually move up and up and further away, what am i missing.... 10minutes later ... aha ... i had too many tabs open under Paragraph gherefor the baseline neva showed, now sorted tnx but no option to delete my comment here

Edited October 9, 2023 by SuburbNews

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, SuburbNews said:

but no option to delete my comment here

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums, and congratulations on resolving your problem.

You can't delete posts, but if you click on the ... icon at the top of the post you should be able to Hide it.

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

You can't delete posts, but if you click on the ... icon at the top of the post you should be able to Hide it.

Not sure but that may not be available for new forum users.