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My contribution to Publisher


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Hi,

several days ago I wrote about how much I am delighted by Publisher (and still I am) and now here are some of my suggestions about it (and in some cases they can be applied to Designer and Photo). Of course, there will be more of them but at this moment I can recall of these ones only:

FIND AND REPLACE

[This feature is crucial for me and the users of those four countries mentioned bellow.
If you don’t add this feature, we will be stucked with ID]

  1. Please, make drag ‘n’ drop of glyphs to “Find and Replace” dialog boxes possible. Here, in picture glyph1.png 1, you can see how it is done in ID, but I think drag ‘n’ drop is much better sollution. I tried a few times to do it but Publisher crashed. Once glyph is added to Find or Replace box, the font name and font trait must follow it.
  2. In picture glyph1.png 2, you see two rows with 4 glyphs each. The glyphs in the first row are part of Russian and Bulgarian alphabet and those one in the second row are part of alphabet used in Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro and Bosna & Herzegovina. All these glyphs are part only of italic fonts traits that support cyrilic and here they are in Minion Pro Italic. Nowadays, only ID supports Find/Replace of complete glyph character set. In Quark you can do it only replace only one by one, same as in Publisher and Designer. As you can imagine, without this feature Publisher will not be interested in these countries.
  3. As you can see in glyph2.png, ID offers alternative(s) next to the selected glyph so you can change it without searching in the glyph palette.

STUDIO

  1. In picture studio.png, we can see one of more ways how ID displays palettes. Here is just a list with their names and my opinion is that this is the best way how should Affinity apps must deal with palettes. A list of all palettes must be provided here. This way there won’t be any unnecessary palettes that occupy the precious space. When a palette name is clicked only one panel is opened – no “More…” button to open additional panel.
  2. Additional suggestion: “Colors”, “Swatches” and “Gradients” should be merged into one palette and “Text Styles” should be separated into “Paragraph Styles” and “Character Styles”.

STYLES

1.      My personal opinion is that these options shown in picture styles1.png are unnecessary. “Group” and “Show in both panels” are quite new terms and completelly confusing, at least for me.

2.      From picture styles2.png I can see that you accepted Quark’s way of preserving local formating. I think this panel is completelly unnecessary. ID’s approach to this “problem” is much more logical and intuitive. Here it is how it works in ID:

·        If you format some character(s) directly by applying font and font trait, it is lost when you ALT click on paragraph style to readjust the paragraph.

·        If you format some character(s) by applying a character style, this local formating is preserved when you ALT click on paragraph style to readjust the paragraph.

3.      As it can be seen in picture styles3.png, the most important option in “Character Styles” is dissabled. Why? In 99,99% cases I use only this option in character styles. I always create “Italic”, “Bold” and “BoldItalic” character styles in any new document without specifying “font family” or any other options. After that I assign them to the appropriate local formating. So, when I want to change the font in “Paragraph Style” the characters formated with character styles adopt the new font family and keep the local formating unchanged. It will be of great help if Publisher offer to create those three styles (the way I suggested) and automatically change the local formating of inserted text with them.

 

CONTROL PANEL

  1. There is another tool that is a must for any DTP app. In ID it is called “Control Panel” (a “Measurement Palette” in Quark) as you can see in picture Control Panel1.png. While in Quark it differs between Mac and PC version and is not very well implemented – it is a piece of art in ID. Everything is on its place, easy understandable and extra easy to work with.
  2. In picture Control Panel2.png you can there is a “Customize Control Panel” panel, where you can choose which options to be shown in “Control Panel”.

 

EXPORT SETTINGS

  1. Why there is a need to open another panel, as shown in ExportSetting.png, with “More…” to set additional options for every filter? Can’t they be joined into one?

 

SHAPE TOOLS

First, why don’t you join (in Designer and Publisher) “rectangle tool”, “elipse tool” and “rounded rectangle tool” together with other shapes, as it is done in Photo?

These shapes can be, also, improved this way:

1.      Working witn pictures

·        Hovering a picture over a shape, converts this shape into picture frame and can accept the picture.

2.      Working with text

·        Double click inside and shape, converts it into text frame and a text can be inserted inside the shape. Of course, the possibility to link it with another text frame must exist.

3.      Adding captions

  • By clicking on the outside part of the shape frame which is populated with text, table or picture – creates a caption frame. Caption can be entered on each side of the shape (top, bottom, left or right and rotated as neccessery) and must not exceed the shape length or width.
  • If the shape is empty then clicking on the outside part of the frame acts as “Insert a text on a path”.

 

GLYPH BROWSER

  1. “Font Name” and “Font Trait” in “Glyph Browser” must follow the selected “Font Name” and “Font Trait” as in picture GlyphBrowser.png. Also, a “Zoom” feature must be added for easier glyph detecting.

 

MOUSE CLICKS

Please, add when clicking on swatches:

  1. Left mouse click for assigning/changing the color of backgrounds and characters fills
  2. Right mouse click for assigning/changing the color of strokes, characters outlines and objects frames.

IN THE FUTURE

FOOTNOTES

  1. When you add this feature, please allow all footnotes in the document to be able to be selected with CTRL + A, as in the Word. Suprisingly, it can’t be done in ID and Quark. This feature can save us a lot of our precious time by giving us the oportunity to format all of them with one click.

 

WORD COUNT

  1. Just as shown in WordCount.png, but located somewhere on the screen where we can see the progress while entering text.
  2. Additionally, it can be organized in two rows where we can see:
  • the info for the whole document and
  • Info for the frame where the text is entered in the moment (if there are some unlinked frames).

Control Panel1.png

Control Panel2.png

ExportSettings.png

glyph1.png

glyph2.png

GlyphBrowser.png

studio.png

styles1.png

styles2.png

styles3.png

WordCount.png

All the latest releases of Designer, Photo and Publisher (retail and beta) on MacOS and Windows.
15” Dell Inspiron 7559 i7 Windows 10 x64 Pro Intel Core i7-6700HQ (3.50 GHz, 6M) 16 GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1600 MHz (8GBx2) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4 GB GDDR5 500 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD UHD (3840 x 2160) Truelife LED - Backlit Touch Display
32” LG 32UN650-W display 3840 x 2160 UHD, IPS, HDR10 Color Gamut: DCI-P3 95%, Color Calibrated 2 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort
13.3” MacBook Pro (2017) Ventura 13.6 Intel Core i7 (3.50 GHz Dual Core) 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3 Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650 1536 MB 500 GB SSD Retina Display (3360 x 2100)

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27 minutes ago, Petar Petrenko said:

As it can be seen in picture styles3.png, the most important option in “Character Styles” is dissabled. Why? In 99,99% cases I use only this option in character styles. I always create “Italic”, “Bold” and “BoldItalic” character styles in any new document without specifying “font family” or any other options.

The Affinity applications only allow Bold, Italic, Bold Italic, etc. for fonts that provide those variations. Therefore, until you have specified a font-family name, the Affinity apps will leave the font traits disabled, as they don't know whether they can be supported.

Without a font family, you get no choices:
image.png.4093efe056653bcf5b2a22cbfb211372.png

 

When you specify a font family the box is enabled, and lets you select from the variants supported by that font:
arial-settings.png.e2f6d54a133055eae958eb0aad1942ea.png

As you can see, Arial supports several variants.

On the other hand, DPCustomMono2 supports only Regular, so that's all that Publisher enables for you to select:
dpcm-settings.png.1a6c5fea7eaf7ee4e12246986087d01f.png

 

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
    Laptop 2: Windows 11 Pro 24H2,  16GB memory, Snapdragon(R) X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) 12 Core CPU 4.01 GHz, Qualcomm(R) Adreno(TM) X1-85 GPU
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 18.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sequoia 15.0.1

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Please, if you have ID, just see how it works and then put comments.

You understood me wrong, at all.

All the latest releases of Designer, Photo and Publisher (retail and beta) on MacOS and Windows.
15” Dell Inspiron 7559 i7 Windows 10 x64 Pro Intel Core i7-6700HQ (3.50 GHz, 6M) 16 GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1600 MHz (8GBx2) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4 GB GDDR5 500 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD UHD (3840 x 2160) Truelife LED - Backlit Touch Display
32” LG 32UN650-W display 3840 x 2160 UHD, IPS, HDR10 Color Gamut: DCI-P3 95%, Color Calibrated 2 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort
13.3” MacBook Pro (2017) Ventura 13.6 Intel Core i7 (3.50 GHz Dual Core) 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3 Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650 1536 MB 500 GB SSD Retina Display (3360 x 2100)

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7 minutes ago, Petar Petrenko said:

Please, if you have ID, just see how it works and then put comments.

You understood me wrong, at all.

I didn't misunderstand you, Petar. I know what you're asking for. But Publisher isn't ID,  and doesn't work the same, and won't necessarily provide all the same functions. Question: Does ID simulate Bold, Italic, etc. for fonts that don't provide those variations? If so, that's a fundamental difference in font handling between Publisher and ID. Personally, I would like Publisher to provide that simulation, and I have suggested that, but it seems a low priority item for Serif if they're interested at all.

I was explaining why (as I understand it) Publisher acts the way it does in the area you've asked them to improve. Possibly Serif will agree to change it, but unless they agree to provide simulation of the traits for fonts that don't provide those variations, I wouldn't expect them to provide this, either.

 

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
    Laptop 2: Windows 11 Pro 24H2,  16GB memory, Snapdragon(R) X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) 12 Core CPU 4.01 GHz, Qualcomm(R) Adreno(TM) X1-85 GPU
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 18.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sequoia 15.0.1

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Really interesting points you mentioned.

I'll comment only some of them :)

FIND AND REPLACE (regexp)
Writing directly regular expressions is a must, search and click in a menu is not efficient when you know what you are doing, and people using this feature usually do. (But the menu is usefull for beginners who don't know each expression yet).

You use a lot Search & replace for glyphes, so yours requests seems a good addition/improvement.

 

STUDIO
+1
I didn't spend time learning keyboard shortcut for those when switching to ID, I have the main panels I used on a second screen, reduce the same way to only show the ones I need at the moment. (I override those shortcuts to use important scripts or other features I need. Some shortcuts need to much digits to do :)…I've got small hands!).

A revision of the colors palettes is needed, at least the document palette and the Pantone's one, etc. should be distincts to be able to choose colors and add the to the current palette without needed to display one and the other each time.

We need to add/import a palette in another one (not having 2 document palettes in a document).

STYLES

I hadn't time to test and read about the fine modifications for the use of those.
But my complain was about the "update style from paragraph" placed under "Apply style then next style" (greyed most of the time when it should be available). "Update…" should be with "Delete…" since that's an option we barely use but when creating documents.
Most of the time while working on text with set or fixed style we shouldn't modify, this option below "Apply next…" is a hazard.

CONTROL PANEL
+1
And a shortcut I miss from QXP: the one that put the cursor in the "select font option" (last time I checked it needed 2-3 key strokes to achieve in ID).

EXPORT SETTINGS
Or at least some sort of Export persona with main presets on another panel above like in AD and AP.

SHAPE TOOLS

3.      Adding captions specific/selected EXIF info
We don't use a lot of captions (client choice), but a requisite is copyright info. The way ID do it, with the possibility to add text before "© " we can delete/modify since it's not a variable, and position of the frame and Text style is a must.

It's an easy way to alway have the correct copyright when you replace an image, without zooming :) (We use the links panel to copy the caption if they are in the images, avoiding a variable in ID, that we would need to convert to text to adjust to the frame size).

FOOTNOTES
Not sure what you want to do… Aren't they already formatted by paragraph styles yet?

WORD COUNT
+1
When the layout is accepted by the client, we need to send him a version with calibration, and we add a layer (easily hidden) with those informations.
It would be easier than copying-pasting in a another app to cound characters.

 

 

33 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

The Affinity applications only allow Bold, Italic, Bold Italic, etc.

This stand for other apps, in this case we do some alternate characters styles. But mainly, fonts use bold, italic and bold italic, so it would be used in main cases.

 

Here we have a problem in APub. (Is it the one you talk about  @Petar Petrenko?)

How it's working in ID:

  1. We select a font,
  2. we select a variant (if no font is selected when creating a character style, we can choose between all variants possible)

2018-09-08_144314.thumb.png.7f149268584df5e59e08508fec9450ad.png

It's the same in ID control panel (but it first displays all options when selecting the font family: Dax - light, Dax -Light italic…)

2018-09-08_143452.png.3ae9f902731e9c8304bf00b621314ed3.png2018-09-08_143455.png.ffe84bf0ba4d10b69c24cdab0a133af3.png

 

APub display variants as font family, we can't choose "Dax":

2018-09-08_143540.thumb.png.3b04528b038e5ec3f3f65ac791e3a0b2.png

2018-09-08_143840.png.72d6870bcb949d3701e7054cba397fd6.png

 

This could lead to have too many character styles, unless some feature can correct this or apply without error the corresponding bolder and italic version…
This is not easy, since there's lot of fonts and there's no consistenty for the variants (trials and errors for the last decades)  and a lot of old fonts in use (impossible to buy new versions of thousand of fonts we already have).

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2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I didn't misunderstand you, Petar. I know what you're asking for. But Publisher isn't ID,  and doesn't work the same, and won't necessarily provide all the same functions. Question: Does ID simulate Bold, Italic, etc. for fonts that don't provide those variations? If so, that's a fundamental difference in font handling between Publisher and ID. Personally, I would like Publisher to provide that simulation, and I have suggested that, but it seems a low priority item for Serif if they're interested at all.

I was explaining why (as I understand it) Publisher acts the way it does in the area you've asked them to improve. Possibly Serif will agree to change it, but unless they agree to provide simulation of the traits for fonts that don't provide those variations, I wouldn't expect them to provide this, either.

 

I use these character styles mostly in Body text and almost all fonts used for that have the base four traits, so I have never had a problem with it.

All the latest releases of Designer, Photo and Publisher (retail and beta) on MacOS and Windows.
15” Dell Inspiron 7559 i7 Windows 10 x64 Pro Intel Core i7-6700HQ (3.50 GHz, 6M) 16 GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1600 MHz (8GBx2) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4 GB GDDR5 500 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD UHD (3840 x 2160) Truelife LED - Backlit Touch Display
32” LG 32UN650-W display 3840 x 2160 UHD, IPS, HDR10 Color Gamut: DCI-P3 95%, Color Calibrated 2 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort
13.3” MacBook Pro (2017) Ventura 13.6 Intel Core i7 (3.50 GHz Dual Core) 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3 Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650 1536 MB 500 GB SSD Retina Display (3360 x 2100)

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4 hours ago, Petar Petrenko said:

STYLES

1.      My personal opinion is that these options shown in picture styles1.png are unnecessary. “Group” and “Show in both panels” are quite new terms and completelly confusing, at least for me.

2.      From picture styles2.png I can see that you accepted Quark’s way of preserving local formating. I think this panel is completelly unnecessary. ID’s approach to this “problem” is much more logical and intuitive. Here it is how it works in ID:

·        If you format some character(s) directly by applying font and font trait, it is lost when you ALT click on paragraph style to readjust the paragraph.

·        If you format some character(s) by applying a character style, this local formating is preserved when you ALT click on paragraph style to readjust the paragraph.

3.      As it can be seen in picture styles3.png, the most important option in “Character Styles” is dissabled. Why? In 99,99% cases I use only this option in character styles. I always create “Italic”, “Bold” and “BoldItalic” character styles in any new document without specifying “font family” or any other options. After that I assign them to the appropriate local formating. So, when I want to change the font in “Paragraph Style” the characters formated with character styles adopt the new font family and keep the local formating unchanged. It will be of great help if Publisher offer to create those three styles (the way I suggested) and automatically change the local formating of inserted text with them.

Thanks for your feedback, Petar. I'm just going to respond to a few of your points here, mostly to talk about what Publisher currently does and why, rather than to discuss potential changes.

"Group" styles are intended to help organise the Text Styles panel, if you choose the hierarchical listing. Some people have hundreds of styles so they need some way to group them. Group styles are not intended to be applied, may not even carry formatting, and are excluded from some parts of the UI (eg the context toolbar controls).

Show in both panels makes it easier to apply a character style to a paragraph, or a paragraph style to a range of characters. The idea is to make it easier to share and reuse formatting. Yes, this is a bit innovative. If you don't want to do this, just ignore the option.

The way applying styles works in ID is also how it normally works in Publisher. Applying a paragraph style overrides local formatting but does not override character styles. We also added the options to preserve local formatting, because some users asked for them, because apparently they use paragraph styles but not character styles. Normally we expect you to apply styles from either the text context toolbar, or the Character/Paragraph panel, or by clicking directly in the Text Styles panel, or by a keyboard shortcut. The options to preserve local formatting are buried in a menu where hopefully they won't bother anyone who doesn't need them. That menu isn't supposed to be the common way to apply or edit text styles.

Font traits in text styles work in one of two ways to give maximum flexibility. If the style sets the exact font family, then the Font traits control is populated with the traits which that font supports exactly. This gives you full access to everything the font supports, using the name that the font uses for it. For example, some fonts have a Black or an Extra-Bold as well as a Bold. Specifying both the font family and the font traits guarantee that an exact font will be applied, with no closest-match to second guess.

If the style doesn't set the font family, then instead the other controls become enabled which let you set the font weight, width and italic options in a more generic way. When the style is applied, Publisher will search for the closest match to these settings in whatever font happens to be in use. So you can use these controls to do exactly what you describe. You can have a character style called "Bold" which sets the font weight to Bold for every font. You just do it by setting the Font weight control instead of the Font Traits control. When Font traits are disabled, all you are losing is the list of named traits are known to be supported by the font.

We support several different ways of working. Use whatever you find is best for you, and don't worry about the others.

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4 hours ago, Petar Petrenko said:

SHAPE TOOLS

First, why don’t you join (in Designer and Publisher) “rectangle tool”, “elipse tool” and “rounded rectangle tool” together with other shapes, as it is done in Photo?

These shapes can be, also, improved this way:

1.      Working witn pictures

·        Hovering a picture over a shape, converts this shape into picture frame and can accept the picture.

2.      Working with text

·        Double click inside and shape, converts it into text frame and a text can be inserted inside the shape. Of course, the possibility to link it with another text frame must exist.

3.      Adding captions

  • By clicking on the outside part of the shape frame which is populated with text, table or picture – creates a caption frame. Caption can be entered on each side of the shape (top, bottom, left or right and rotated as neccessery) and must not exceed the shape length or width.
  • If the shape is empty then clicking on the outside part of the frame acts as “Insert a text on a path”.

 

 

You can change a shape into frame text by clicking on it with the Frame Text tool. Of course, you can then link it with other text frames. Alternatively, if you click on the shape's edge with the Art Text tool, the shape turns into path text. In both cases you can still change the shape with the Node tool, and the same works for curves drawn with the Pencil or Pen tools. We don't use double-click for this, mainly because double-click already switches to the Node tool, but also because we'd need to guess whether the user wanted frame text or art text.

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5 hours ago, Petar Petrenko said:

FIND AND REPLACE

  1. Please, make drag ‘n’ drop of glyphs to “Find and Replace” dialog boxes possible. Here, in picture glyph1.png 1, you can see how it is done in ID, but I think drag ‘n’ drop is much better sollution. I tried a few times to do it but Publisher crashed. Once glyph is added to Find or Replace box, the font name and font trait must follow it.
  2. In picture glyph1.png 2, you see two rows with 4 glyphs each. The glyphs in the first row are part of Russian and Bulgarian alphabet and those one in the second row are part of alphabet used in Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro and Bosna & Herzegovina. All these glyphs are part only of italic fonts traits that support cyrilic and here they are in Minion Pro Italic. Nowadays, only ID supports Find/Replace of complete glyph character set. In Quark you can do it only replace only one by one, same as in Publisher and Designer. As you can imagine, without this feature Publisher will not be interested in these countries.
  3. As you can see in glyph2.png, ID offers alternative(s) next to the selected glyph so you can change it without searching in the glyph palette.

STUDIO

  1. In picture studio.png, we can see one of more ways how ID displays palettes. Here is just a list with their names and my opinion is that this is the best way how should Affinity apps must deal with palettes. A list of all palettes must be provided here. This way there won’t be any unnecessary palettes that occupy the precious space. When a palette name is clicked only one panel is opened – no “More…” button to open additional panel.
  2. Additional suggestion: “Colors”, “Swatches” and “Gradients” should be merged into one palette and “Text Styles” should be separated into “Paragraph Styles” and “Character Styles”.

CONTROL PANEL

  1. There is another tool that is a must for any DTP app. In ID it is called “Control Panel” (a “Measurement Palette” in Quark) as you can see in picture Control Panel1.png. While in Quark it differs between Mac and PC version and is not very well implemented – it is a piece of art in ID. Everything is on its place, easy understandable and extra easy to work with.
  2. In picture Control Panel2.png you can there is a “Customize Control Panel” panel, where you can choose which options to be shown in “Control Panel”.

EXPORT SETTINGS

  1. Why there is a need to open another panel, as shown in ExportSetting.png, with “More…” to set additional options for every filter? Can’t they be joined into one?

GLYPH BROWSER

  1. “Font Name” and “Font Trait” in “Glyph Browser” must follow the selected “Font Name” and “Font Trait” as in picture GlyphBrowser.png. Also, a “Zoom” feature must be added for easier glyph detecting.

Totally agree with these points.

iMac 27" with macOS Mojave (German)

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23 hours ago, Petar Petrenko said:

GLYPH BROWSER

  1. “Font Name” and “Font Trait” in “Glyph Browser” must follow the selected “Font Name” and “Font Trait” as in picture GlyphBrowser.png. Also, a “Zoom” feature must be added for easier glyph detecting.

If you click the padlock icon Lock Font and Traits, the Glyph Browser will track the text selection. You can change the size of the glyphs by using the hamburger menu at the top right of the panel.

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53 minutes ago, Dave Harris said:

If you click the padlock icon Lock Font and Traits, the Glyph Browser will track the text selection.

This is one of the interesting implementations, Dave. However, I would have two suggestions to improve it.

—————————

A. The function of the padlock switch should be inverted, for it is semantically odd. At the moment, the padlock switch acts like a link switch or sync switch. Enabling the switch will link or sync the Glyphs Studio to the current selection. It will not lock the Glyphs Studio to the font that is selected in this Studio. So to correct this, you should either use a link icon, or you should invert the function of the switch. I hope you can understand what I mean.

Furthermore, in the light UI, it is very hard to see whether the switch is engaged or not.

—————————

B. More importantly, I would suggest that the padlock solution should be handled a little differently. How is this supposed to be used? From my point of view, I imagine to use this switch only when I am dealing with two different fonts, for in any other case I can just sync the Glyphs Studio to my selection.

Now suppose I have a “Standard” font applied to my text frame and a custom-made “Expert” font that contains just the glyphs that are missing from my “Standard” font (many license agreements prohibit changing the licensed font file, so you will need to use “Expert” fonts of one or another sort). In such a case it must be possible to …

  • … load the “Expert“ font into your glyph browser …
  • … set the text frame to the “Standard” font …
  • … type some string of text into your text frame …
  • … insert a special glyph from the “Expert” font by using the Glyphs Studio …
  • … and resume typing in your “Standard” font!

At the moment, however, inserting a special glyph will change the font within the text frame to the font that contains this glyph. So I will resume typing in my “Expert” font. Which is highly undesirable. Currently, I will always have to type beyond the point where the special glyph has to be inserted, go back, and click the desired glyph in the Glyphs Studio. :(

Maybe I am missing something obvious here, but I am not sure whether changing the font will make any sense, when the padlock function is used.

—————————

Thanks for considering,

Alex

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22 hours ago, Dave Harris said:

 

You can change a shape into frame text by clicking on it with the Frame Text tool. Of course, you can then link it with other text frames. Alternatively, if you click on the shape's edge with the Art Text tool, the shape turns into path text. In both cases you can still change the shape with the Node tool, and the same works for curves drawn with the Pencil or Pen tools. We don't use double-click for this, mainly because double-click already switches to the Node tool, but also because we'd need to guess whether the user wanted frame text or art text.

Thank @Dave Harris for your answers. It is amazing what you have implemented in Publisher. I' m really satisfied with it and impatient to buy the retail version.

I'd like to ask, would you be so kind and make inserting pictures into shapes as easy as converting the shapes into text frames?

Also, it is interesting to know what do you think about other suggestions I mentioned and you didn't respond to. Are some of them interesting to the team, or maybe you work on some of them?

All the latest releases of Designer, Photo and Publisher (retail and beta) on MacOS and Windows.
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Woooow, this option is amazing!!! Just like ID displays glyphs.

Waiting to add "Find / Replace" with glyphs as I mentioned above -- and I am going to format the disk and install only Affinity apps. No Adobe, no any other similar..

alternates.png

All the latest releases of Designer, Photo and Publisher (retail and beta) on MacOS and Windows.
15” Dell Inspiron 7559 i7 Windows 10 x64 Pro Intel Core i7-6700HQ (3.50 GHz, 6M) 16 GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1600 MHz (8GBx2) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4 GB GDDR5 500 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD UHD (3840 x 2160) Truelife LED - Backlit Touch Display
32” LG 32UN650-W display 3840 x 2160 UHD, IPS, HDR10 Color Gamut: DCI-P3 95%, Color Calibrated 2 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort
13.3” MacBook Pro (2017) Ventura 13.6 Intel Core i7 (3.50 GHz Dual Core) 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3 Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650 1536 MB 500 GB SSD Retina Display (3360 x 2100)

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2 hours ago, Petar Petrenko said:

I'd like to ask, would you be so kind and make inserting pictures into shapes as easy as converting the shapes into text frames?

Are you wanting something different from the existing Layer > Convert into Picture Frame?

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
    Laptop 2: Windows 11 Pro 24H2,  16GB memory, Snapdragon(R) X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) 12 Core CPU 4.01 GHz, Qualcomm(R) Adreno(TM) X1-85 GPU
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4 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Are you wanting something different from the existing Layer > Convert into Picture Frame?

Yes, I would like it to be easier -- just as with converting a shape into text frame with double click.

I think, it would be nice if a shape is automaticly converted into a picture frame when you drag a picture over the selected shape.

All the latest releases of Designer, Photo and Publisher (retail and beta) on MacOS and Windows.
15” Dell Inspiron 7559 i7 Windows 10 x64 Pro Intel Core i7-6700HQ (3.50 GHz, 6M) 16 GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1600 MHz (8GBx2) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4 GB GDDR5 500 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD UHD (3840 x 2160) Truelife LED - Backlit Touch Display
32” LG 32UN650-W display 3840 x 2160 UHD, IPS, HDR10 Color Gamut: DCI-P3 95%, Color Calibrated 2 x HDMI, 1 x DisplayPort
13.3” MacBook Pro (2017) Ventura 13.6 Intel Core i7 (3.50 GHz Dual Core) 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3 Intel Iris Plus Graphics 650 1536 MB 500 GB SSD Retina Display (3360 x 2100)

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5 minutes ago, Petar Petrenko said:

I think, it would be nice if a shape is automaticly converted into a picture frame when you drag a picture over the selected shape.

I think I would disagree with that happening automatically. Suppose, for example, I had planned to clip the image using the shape? I might be annoyed at getting a picture frame instead. 

If you wanted it to work the same way as text frames and shapes you should require that the user convert the shape by clicking on it with the Picture Frame tool.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
    Laptop 2: Windows 11 Pro 24H2,  16GB memory, Snapdragon(R) X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) 12 Core CPU 4.01 GHz, Qualcomm(R) Adreno(TM) X1-85 GPU
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 18.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sequoia 15.0.1

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On 9/8/2018 at 6:51 PM, Dave Harris said:

The way applying styles works in ID is also how it normally works in Publisher. Applying a paragraph style overrides local formatting but does not override character styles.

A big problem that it does not work, neither in APub nor in ADes. Try to select several paragraphs and you would not be able to override local formatting and keep intact character styles! I repeat it again: this is a huge problem. Because you cant manage long stories properly. It is very odd and i would say corrupt concept of Affinity team how they approach managing and applying text styles. And that is what keeps me from using Affinity products on a professional basis.

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