World-Ready Paragraph Composer

[Christer Hellholm]

I would like to see Affinity Publisher have built-in world-ready paragraph composer.

This function would generate a very nice text handling (both on screen and on printout). No unnecessary spacing between words.

Currently InDesign give us nicer text output - but a future Affinity Publisher with world-ready paragraph composer should give equal nice text output as InDesign.

[MikeW]

The World-ready composer isn't responsible, just the Paragraph composer versus single-line composer. World-Ready is for complex scripts including rtl languages.

Mike

[Mike Perry]

For those unfamiliar with InDesign, I will explain what a "world-ready paragraph composer" is. The world-ready simply means it works with a host of different languages, including those that go from right to left. Paragraph composer describes how it deals with how lines break inside paragraphs. The typical word processor only looks at one line at a time. It breaks the first line as best it could, then the second, the third and so forth. A paragraph composer like that of ID, is far smarter than that. It looks at the entire paragraph, trying to find the most appealing way to break lines so the entire paragraph looks good. For instance, it may discover that slightly squeezing a short word onto line 3 then allows a longer word to be included on line 4 without wrapping too soon or having a ugly amount of compression on line 4.

It can work wonders at making a document look better, particularly one with justified lines and no hyphenation. It can also reduce the need for hyphenation. And the best thing about it is that we need only turn it on for it to work its wonders. We don't have to play the niggling games layout designers once did with forcing a line to break early and seeing if the result worked.

I would go so far as to say that without a "world-ready paragraph composer," an app isn't really a professional one. And of course the beauty of the idea is that, if it's a built-in feature, then everyone from experienced professional to rank amateur can benefit. It's one reason why I encourage independent authors to look into page-layout apps. Their books will look much better.

 

[MikeW]

2 minutes ago, Mike Perry said:

...

I would go so far as to say that without a "world-ready paragraph composer," an app isn't really a professional one. And of course the beauty of the idea is that, if it's a built-in feature, then everyone from experienced professional to rank amateur can benefit. It's one reason why I encourage independent authors to look into page-layout apps. Their books will look much better.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that.

It would be interesting to see what Serif could come up with, but the Adobe paragraph composer is a copyrighted version of the Knuth-Plass algorithm and works in conjunction with the the patented HZ algorithm. Coming up with something that doesn't violate that, or step back to the TeX models (that also use versions of the preceding) would/might be a challenge.

I can compose justified text in Q just as well (single-line composer) as in ID with its paragraph composer.

Mike

[Christer Hellholm]

The patent shouldn't last that long – a patent should protect the technology in about 5 years, after that the technology should be freely available to everybody who want to use it. Adobe Paragraph Composer is much, much older than that (it is ca 15 years old. Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer is slightly younger [perhaps 12 years old]). Edit: the HZ algorithm patent expired in 2010! according to Wikipedia. Regarding Knuth-Plass algorithm: You can't copyright a method or algorithm, but you can patent a method or algorithm. The Knuth-Plass algorithm patent is also expired nowadays.

Besides, I wish that Affinity Publisher will be world ready from scratch. That will benefit all users, including scientific area where they often take upp source texts in foreign languages, for instance hebrew, arabic, ancient greek etc. It is much easier to support multi language (including LtR and RtL) from scratch than adding afterwords (Adobe had some serious problem for years when they added Hebrew and Arabic into InDesign afterwards (bugs that was very difficult to track etc).

Adobe still have some serious issue with Adobe World-Ready Paragraph Composer:

• Combining Adobe-World Ready Paragraph Composer with Story function (problem with hyphenated words).
• If you only use Adobe Paragraph Composer together with Story function, then it works very well…

[Fixx]

HZ/Knuth-Plass/paragraph level hyphenation is not coming to release version Serif has said. Hopefully they can include it in the next version.

[Christer Hellholm]

1 hour ago, Fixx said:

HZ/Knuth-Plass/paragraph level hyphenation is not coming to release version Serif has said. Hopefully they can include it in the next version.

I do not expect the HZ/Knuth-Plass/paragraph level hyphenation coming in the initial release. But I do hope it will appear in the next version. With this technology Publisher can seriously compete against InDesign - and all publisher user will get very nice text output.

[Abhi Paul]

I think Affinity should introduce the world-ready layout option in Affinity software like Adobe to solve the issue with Unicode and google fonts. FML fonts work smoothly in Affinity. Please look into this and add the world-ready layout option in the paragraph tab as soon as possible.