Lining Figures (AD)

[smth]

Is there no option for lining figure styles in Affinity Designer? It looks like the logical place for this would be under styles > typography > figures, where there is proportional/tabular, but no oldstyle/lining. The font I'm using is Raleway, which uses oldstyle figures by default, but includes lining figures (I have used them in both InDesign and CSS).

[MEB]

Hi smth,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

You have to select a text object containing the characters to which the "property" apply (numbers in this case). See screenshot. Alternatively check Show all font features on the bottom of the Typography panel. You can access this panel going to menu Text ▸ Show Typography.

 

 

[EDIT] I realised you are looking for this option when creating a text style. Apparently there's no way to do it.

[smth]

Thanks. I didn't realise that panel existed. Would be handy to have those features available from "text styles", if possible.

[MikeW]

Yes, I have argued that the typographical features should be exposed to the paragraph panel as well. This should be rectified before APub is in beta. It certainly should not operate as AD, but AD should not, either.

[smth]

In the paragraph panel would probably be an improvement, but to be clear, I was proposing the (missing) features be included in "Text Styles".

[A_B_C]

What I don’t understand, is the inconsistency between the Typography Panel and the Text Styles Panel, from a UX point of view.

• By default, the Typography Panel will only show the Open Type features related to the selected text, and after ticking Show All Features it will display all features available in the font. But it will never show Open Type features that are not available in the current font.
• On the other hand, the Text Styles Panel will indiscriminately display all, or rather, most Open Type Features, regardless whether they are present in the selected font or not.

I would suggest that there should be an indication in the Text Styles Panel, if a feature is present in the selected font or not …  :(

[MikeW]

Yes. Understood about text style creation.

 

There are 4 panels associated with text. This is not efficient. There should be 2. All features should be accessed from either of those two.

[R C-R]

There are 4 panels associated with text. This is not efficient. There should be 2. All features should be accessed from either of those two.

While I think there could be a lot of improvements in text related UI features, I am not sure fewer panels is a good idea. On small screens like many laptops, cramming everything from the multiple panels in the current implementation into fewer of them could result in panels so large they would be hard to use without scrolling, a lot of disclosure triangles, & so on.

 

As it is, for some fonts the Typography panel already is so large that it takes considerable scrolling to see all the options.

[MikeW]

Nearly every other application manages to comfortably fit such things into a single dialog for paragraph and character style dialog boxes. AD should be no different. They would need changed how they are, of course, but it is doable.

 

But if the present scheme hits APub, there will be push-back.

[R C-R]

Nearly every other application manages to comfortably fit such things into a single dialog for paragraph and character style dialog boxes.

Hmmm. I can't claim to have used that many apps with extensive typography options comparable to those in Affinity, but among those I have used, "comfortably" is not a word I would use to describe how they fit everything into panels, palettes, or windows, at least for use on small screen computers. Typically, they use some combination of "inspectors," popups, tabs, scrollbars & such that are awkward to use & not particularly intuitive.