Full-paragraph type composition

[Chrysogonus 18]

Like everyone else, I am absolutely thrilled about the beta, and can't wait to see how it develops.

One of the key reasons to use LaTeX or InDesign over Microsoft Word is their superior type composition. While Word simply dumps in text as it occurs, without regard to spacing or line breaks, these other programs look at an entire paragraph to remove rivers of type, reduce the need for hyphenation, and so forth, just as human type compositors do. In TeX, this is the Knuth-Plass Line Breaking Algorithm; InDesign has the Adobe Paragraph Composer (which it uses by default, but also has an option to turn this off with a single-line composer). Implementing this in Affinity Publisher would make it far easier to produce professionally typeset documents.

[Peter Werner 154]

I wholeheartedly agree, but someone on the Serif team commented on the forums here a few months ago that this won't be in the initial release and will come later. It's definitely one of the features I'm looking forward to the most.

[garrettm30 637]

I’m surprised how little discussion there has been around the forum about this. This is not exactly a workflow problem is as it is a more fundamental issue of quality of output. In cases where paragraph justification is required, InDesign and others like it will simply produce superior results in this regard than software that does not have some sort of multiline composer.

I’m surprised more people haven’t requested this feature. For me, as I do plenty of justified text, often in narrower columns with nonbreaking spaces (that is, where a basic single line composer shows its weaknesses), I could not recommend taking such a step backward from what we are able to do now in InDesign.

I would have thought that this kind of thing would be priority for professional layout software: naturally the first version of any software will have fewer features, but one would hope that it would do its few things well. As far as justification, it is more like Word than InDesign**. However, I can be patient with the developers in this: whereas I would think this to be a core feature when starting a new app of its kind from scratch, I suppose the reality is that Publisher is not truly starting from scratch: it is building on the foundation of Affinity Designer and perhaps to a lesser extent Affinity Photo, and clearly a multiline composer is far from a priority in those apps. With those as its foundation, I can understand that a multiline composer might not come right away. I just hope Serif understands how important it is for the quality to truly shine. Without it, I don’t think I could use Publisher for work requiring significant amounts of justification.

**To be fair, Publisher does currently handle justification at least somewhat better than Word, in that it has customizable word spacing and letter-spacing, so it’s got at least part of the solution, but the gappy spacing still remains.

[fireball 1]

It is a "must have" that Publisher provides an "automatic optical letter/word spacing" like InDesign does. I don't want to do this job manually when working with hundreds of pages.

Also mulitline composer is "must have".

Hope that this will be implemented. If not, I can't use Publisher.

[jamessouttar 19]

Multi-line composing is a nice to have, for increased productivity, but it‘s hardly a deal-breaker. It‘s perfectly possible to manually finesse Publisher‘s text setting as it is now (I even got it to do a nice job of ‘cogent‘ range left, although it was a bit laborious). I’m sure, in time, Affinity will address this if there is enough interest. Anchored tables and graphics would seem to be much more of a priority at this stage.

[ffca 23]

Bumping! Pleasing text composition is one cornerstone that sets professional typesetting apart. 

[JGD 312]

Also bumping. This thread must be kept alive, and every time a new Publisher update/beta comes out we should be checking in the release notes whether this feature is finally being put to its paces.

[markus dp 0]

+1

[TheOtherRoland 19]

Experiencing NDE...floating near the ceiling...

"Clear!"

[[[[*BUMP*]]]]

+1

(Don't worry, little thread. You will not die on my watch.)

[wolfii 1]

Being a LaTeX user long time ago, I really wish the Knuth-Plass Line Breaking Algorithm would become part of Affinity Publisher. If you want to provide InDesign import, I think it will be a must to ensure good results.

And texts really look so much better with it compared to the "traditional" line breaking.

[garrettm30 637]

In case anyone is wondering about the difference a multiline composer can make, I posted a side-by-side example from a very long (1500 pages) project InDesign in another discussion.

 

[jrkay 33]

Having seen this in InDesign I am pleased that it is envisaged as a future feature in publisher.

John

[garrettm30 637]

4 hours ago, jrkay said:

I am pleased that it is envisaged as a future feature in publisher.

I did not realize that it is in fact planned as a future feature except for Peter's comment above:

On 8/30/2018 at 1:57 PM, Peter Werner said:

someone on the Serif team commented on the forums here a few months ago that this won't be in the initial release and will come later.

Going by the date on that post, "a few months ago" would have been well before the public beta was released. I don't remember seeing any comment by Serif about whether this feature is planned. If any of them were able to comment that it is a feature planned for "someday," I could rest easy knowing that it will eventually be available, even if it has to wait for other priorities to be sorted out first.

[lexislav 41]

On 1/4/2019 at 12:31 AM, garrettm30 said:

**To be fair, Publisher does currently handle justification at least somewhat better than Word, in that it has customizable word spacing and letter-spacing, so it’s got at least part of the solution, but the gappy spacing still remains.

And that is still true. I really wish this would got more attention. I still keep all longer text projects in Indesign CS6 as it has much better paragraph composing results with much less effort.

+1

[garrettm30 637]

I have been meaning to comment on this for a few days since the idea occurred to me from another thread. I am posting my thoughts in this thread because this is where the feature is being discussed.

There seems to be a misconception among some that a paragraph composer only benefits justified text, but this is not true. In fact, it smoothes out the ragged right even in left-aligned text. To illustrate, consider the screenshot below, where I have made a text box in InDesign with filler text and duplicated it (so that it is the same size, same format). In the box on the right, I changed the composer from the default "Adobe Paragraph Composer" to the "Adobe Single-line Composer" (roughly similar to output in Publisher).

I highlighted the ragged section in each specimen with red dashed lines, where I have aligned them to the shortest and longest lines of text. This illustrates how ragged each approach is.

Now to be fair, I do want to admit that one could find examples where the difference is less pronounced (or even more pronounced)—or even examples where the result is identical. The paragraph composer considers several options and attempts to choose the one that is least ragged, while the single line composer just fits as much text on each line as possible and lets the text fall where it may. Sometimes the natural flow is in fact the best choice. The point is that the paragraph composer on average has better (narrower) gaps, as it tries to give the best results possible given the column width and text formatting.

The results can be improved by turning on hyphenation when it is appropriate to the design, and this is equally true whether text is left-aligned or justified. But there is a difference between left-aligned and justified text in this: justified text suffers particularly in narrow columns. The wider the column, the more room there is to average out the extra space across the whole line, to a point where it looks quite acceptable. But on left-aligned text, the entire space is kept at the end of the line rather than averaged out across the whole line, to the effect that the absolute width of the ragged gaps (the portions I highlighted) can appear just as drastic on wide columns as on narrow columns.

I hope by this example to point out that the benefit of a multiline/paragraph composer has broader application than narrow-column justified text.