Full-paragraph type composition

[Chrysogonus 12]

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 135]

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 259]

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 17]

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

[JGD 262]

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 14]

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 259]

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 24]

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

John

[garrettm30 259]

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.