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Suggestion Underline options - confusing dialog


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I'm sorry. I think I misinterpreted the purpose of your questions. Somehow I completely missed your specimen book when I answered you earlier. I think I am jumping around on different things too much today.

Here is a comparison of the underline in Vollkorn and Minion Pro at otherwise default settings in a fresh document.

1112905428_ScreenShot2019-06-28at3_14_44PM.thumb.png.2259747de896fcffba36bcfa58916187.png

I have not altered the leading from default, so the metrics of the font actually has the underline clash with the line below it. Note that this is not the fault of Publisher. The underline is about as low in Microsoft Word and Apple Pages.

I do like how Vollkorn prints. I just used it a couple months ago for a no-frills English biography, so I thought to use it again, but I ended up going a different direction because of the underline.

For narrow non-breaking space, if you mean U+202F, I see what you mean, and I'm glad you let me know about it. However, I just use the thinspace U+2009, since both Publisher and InDesign treat it as non-breaking. U+202F is often something of a problem character. I have wanted to use it online, but apparently browser support is not there, and usually thinspace is not non-breaking, so I'm left trying some cumbersome workaround.

 

 

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On 9/10/2018 at 7:05 PM, Jeremy Bohn said:

Never in my life would I have thought to call them decorations.

Although this is an older post; underlines under anchor tags ('hyper'links) in html are also called text-decorations in css stylesheets. So it's not only called like that in graphic design software obviously, so in that way it makes kind of sense.

 

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42 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

Here is a comparison of the underline in Vollkorn and Minion Pro at otherwise default settings in a fresh document.

1112905428_ScreenShot2019-06-28at3_14_44PM.thumb.png.2259747de896fcffba36bcfa58916187.png

I have not altered the leading from default, so the metrics of the font actually has the underline clash with the line below it. Note that this is not the fault of Publisher. The underline is about as low in Microsoft Word and Apple Pages.

I see what you mean. Very obvious when set multi-line and at a text size like that.
I had just compared them at 18pt side-by-side on one line.
Did not see the ascenders collision when just compared like that.
But again as much as I appreciate how the great work is in Vollkorn,
it really needs a book or text weight - it is just too heavy for me.
Actually I used the Minion Pro SemiBold to get a similar visual weight for the comparison.

Oh well. Back to the actual subject ...

APub needs the ability to adjust/modify the underlines.

 

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  • 6 months later...

I strongly support the suggestion that there just HAVE to be options to style the way characters can be underlined as well as having similar options for paragraph rulers.

InDesign does (has done for years to be exact) in fact a very good job regarding typographic finetuning in these respects and it would be quite a shame if Affinity Publisher continued to fall short of those typographic options. I admit that these are not of the kind of options which you just stumble upon when you begin page layout/design but once you know these are available it opens up a ton of creative possibilities to style your text on the page. You'll never want to miss it again...!

I remember very well what true revelation it had been for me when I finally discovered what was actually possible in InDesign by tweaking those options of underlining, strikethrough (on character basis) and paragraph rulers (on paragraph basis) – there is so much more to it than first meets the eye (or mind, at that).

So PLEASE study InDesign well in this respect and give users of Affinity Publisher similar control(s)!

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16 hours ago, Lorox said:

So PLEASE study InDesign well in this respect and give users of Affinity Publisher similar control(s)!

Having looked around a bit more I have to add to my comment/suggestion made above:

while it has served me very well in years past, the way InDesign handles the options of underlines and strikethroughs might not be – in respect to the actual specs of the font they are applied to –  what should really be expected in ways of font design. At least when you just go for the defaults. Here ( https://www.harbortype.com/blog/the-state-of-underlines-and-strikethroughs/ ) is an interesting blog post on the subject.

Yet, in that post Affinity Designer is stated to handle things quite right (but ONLY regarding the default handling, as customizing the appearance of underlines and strikethroughs is not possible so far. As it isn't in Publisher, neither and regrettably).

However, as it is there now seems to be a proper chance for the Affinity apps to do things right right from the start, should the developers – hopefully – decide to give users full control over the features in question. Having the defaults right in the first place should be a good place to take off from into the finer aspects of custom designing appeareances here.

So I'd say: look what you can already do in InDesign, give us Affinity users these options as well, but make it even BETTER! For example measurements like line thickness, offset and so on should (also) be available in units relative to the character size and not just in fixed units like points or millimeters. When using relative units, changes made to the text attributes (most notably a change of font size) would be immediately reflected in the appearance of the underlines and strikethroughs. This could save so much time as you wouldn't have to adjust everything by hand after making a character/word bigger or smaller (as it is inevitable when handling things like InDesign does).

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@Lorox Thank you for sharing that article; it was an interesting read. A few quotes stand out to me:

Quote

Affinity software renders underlines and strikethroughs just right, following the specs exactly.

That is as it should be, and I was surprised to learn that many others do not. I am pleased to hear from a typography buff that Affinity apps are spot on. Kudos to Serif.

Quote

InDesign actually allows the user to customize every little detail of the strikethrough, but I see no reason why the default shouldn’t match the font designer’s choice.

(This was specifically about InDesign's implementation of strikethrough, but it is also a valid statement regarding underlines, which was discussed just above where this quote was taken from.) I think this statement summarizes the strengths and weaknesses in the InDesign versus Publisher discussion as regards underlines and strikethroughs. InDesign has ample customization on its side, while Publisher wins with the font designer.

If we were comparing two mature products, then I do feel I would prefer to have InDesign's approach, because I can always achieve what I need to with underlines, even if it means tweaking some settings. With Publisher, being faithful to the designer of the font is not necessarily helpful to the designer of the document. See for example my post at the top of this page. There I had an otherwise great font that I had to abandon because the underline position chosen by the designer was not ideal (it actually clashes with the text below at default leading). No problem at all in InDesign, but I had no recourse but to change font in Publisher.

HOWEVER (and I do mean to emphasize), if we allow for the fact that Publisher is a young product, as I think we should, then I can appreciate that the Affinity apps focused on starting with a solid foundation that respects specs. If they never take it beyond that, I will be disappointed, but for the time being I can accept and respect that Serif started where they should have in this matter.

As to why Adobe does not respect the default as the starting point, I can only speculate that there are many years of legacy design decisions that tied them down. This is an advantage to starting fresh.

Quote

Known for poor typography, Adobe Photoshop completely ignores all values. 

If InDesign and Photoshop are part of the same range of apps, then why the huge disparity? Quite obviously the answer is that they are truly separate apps with a very different history. Here too I can sing Affinity's praises, because their core design means that I can expect the quality of typography (or many other aspects) to be identical across the whole range.

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13 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

If InDesign and Photoshop are part of the same range of apps, then why the huge disparity? Quite obviously the answer is that they are truly separate apps with a very different history. Here too I can sing Affinity's praises, because their core design means that I can expect the quality of typography (or many other aspects) to be identical across the whole range.

Hi garrettm30,

I agree totally with you when you point at the Affinity apps being (relatively) new as compared to those by Adobe. That said it only seems natural to give Affinity/Serif some time to further improve their already great apps in order to add something like the (possibly advanced) features which have proven to be actually quite useful in InDesign & co. But then Adobe so far has had decades(!) more of time to come up with them... Yeah, we shouldn't forget that to be fair when we compare things.

The disparity of features within the same "family" of apps is actually something which has bothered me a lot during the time I've used the Adobe CS(!) apps (which, I admit, I still do for legacy reasons). This is certainly annoying – especially when you observe that those disparities don't get straightened or unified even after several major updates. Instead Adobe has seen it more fitting to add several special – and possibly rarely used in real life – features selectively to one or the other of their apps...

I really hope, Affinity/Serif having the benefit of a fresh and more coordinated start in terms of development will see to that things remain very closely related if not identical in handling things within Designer/Photo/Publisher.

Talking of this, I recently wondered why there doesn't seem to be a thing like "Snapshots" in Publisher (being the most recent app) whereas in Designer and Photo this feature has been there (I think) from the beginning? Even given that Snapshot’s functionality is IMHO not yet as perfect as it should be, it’s a useful feature nevertheless and it should really be available in Publisher, too... It would be a nice thing to have consistently a your hands in all of the 3 apps.

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It crossed my mind that maybe not all readers/contributors here are familiar with InDesign in general and with what InDesign’s options for underline formatting can achieve. And – that said – why I strongly suggest that similar options should be included in Publisher.

For clarification I'm showing a screenshot made using a German language version of InDesign CS 5:

The red rounded box around "9354x" is solely made by formatting the underline options as seen at the bottom and the "effect" can be saved as a character style for quick application to other characters, which I find extremely useful.

An easier or more elemental application of this technique would (e.g.) be "highlighting" text in some sort of coloured text marker style – with that rounded red box you actually have to add some "hard coded" space like a quarter m-space before and after the text you want surrounded by the red area).

You can also do similar things with the strikethrough option, but as the strikethrough is (in z-axis) placed above the text, its uses are certainly more limited.

Last but not least (in InDesign) there's also paragraph lines which can be edited accordingly and thus offer a ton of interesting and time saving formatting options (which can be saved as paragraph styles, accordingly).

Maybe it becomes a bit more clear now, why I would love to have Publisher offer that functionality as well.

Underline-formatting_InDesign.png

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5 hours ago, Lorox said:

Last but not least (in InDesign) there's also paragraph lines which can be edited accordingly and thus offer a ton of interesting and time saving formatting options (which can be saved as paragraph styles, accordingly).

Is this something similar to APub's paragraph decorations?

d.

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3 minutes ago, dominik said:

Is this something similar to APub's paragraph decorations?

d.

I would say so. For a long time, InDesign has had "Paragraph Rules" available as a paragraph-level attribute, that basically allowed to insert lines above and/or below paragraphs, with different settings such as line style, widths, offets, color, etc. More recently, they also implemented paragraph borders, which (along with the paragraph shading, which came at the same time) more directly is comparable to paragraph decorations in Affinity Publisher. So paragraph rules and paragraph borders are two separate interfaces, but in my mind there is not much difference in a paragraph rule versus a paragraph border only on the top or bottom. That is especially true in Publisher, since we can have multiple decorations applied to the same text.

So far, everything I used to do with paragraph rules in InDesign can be accomplished in Publisher via decorations. The main missing feature is the fact that there are generally fewer stroke/line styles throughout Publisher (where strokes and lines are concerned).

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3 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

So far, everything I used to do with paragraph rules in InDesign can be accomplished in Publisher via decorations. The main missing feature is the fact that there are generally fewer stroke/line styles throughout Publisher (where strokes and lines are concerned).

Thanks for the heads up. I highly value APub's paragraph decorations and can imagine that they get improved with more styling options over time.

Without knowing the programming details (and difficulties) I'd consider paragraph decorations a blue print to text decorations a.k.a. 'underline options' as they are the topic of this thread. This could be very interesting once it arrives :)

d.

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6 hours ago, Lorox said:

... The red rounded box around "9354x" is solely made by formatting the underline options as seen at the bottom and the "effect" can be saved as a character style for quick application to other characters, which I find extremely useful.

An easier or more elemental application of this technique would (e.g.) be "highlighting" text in some sort of coloured text marker style – with that rounded red box you actually have to add some "hard coded" space like a quarter m-space before and after the text you want surrounded by the red area). ...

The below is APub using Decorations and using Round Cap ends..

Capture_000394.png.c7f61d5c6c6ad763396c28f38069b8ff.png

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On 1/13/2020 at 10:53 PM, MikeW said:

The below is APub using Decorations and using Round Cap ends..

Thanks a lot for this example! I wasn't aware you can actually do that in Publisher – so this is really good news. (Guess I really must delve deeper into Publisher...)

 I do hope now that some of this functionality will be available with underline (and maybe strikthrough) options eventually. In my experience it comes in very handy if you can apply this kind of styling – like mentioned e.g. for a textmarker highlighting effect – to a word (or a couple of words) which are not a paragraph by themselves but rather part of or inside a paragraph. Accordingly you'd need it to be character based (like underline).

Anyway, it's good to see this for the time being.

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  • 1 year later...
15 minutes ago, VJS said:

I would think by 1.9.3 the underline function would allow for vertical adjustment so it's not blocking descenders, which varies from font to font.

It's not quite as bad as that: the position of the underline is defined by each font, and Publisher does respect that as far as I know. In theory, each font should be designed for the ideal underline position. In practice, that is not always the case, particularly as the "ideal" position is subjective. 

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1 hour ago, VJS said:

allow for vertical adjustment so it's not blocking descenders

Workaround:

See also other options earlier in that thread.

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garrettm30—I understand the font variance, as I've already mentioned, but I'lm able to do it easily in InDesign and it's not tied to the font as I can adjust it in any font I work with. And that's in InDesign CS6, a product released in August 1999! Twelve years later and I can't do it in an app that's supposed to be challenging InDesign?

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1 hour ago, VJS said:

garrettm30—I understand the font variance, as I've already mentioned, but I'lm able to do it easily in InDesign and it's not tied to the font as I can adjust it in any font I work with. And that's in InDesign CS6, a product released in August 1999! Twelve years later and I can't do it in an app that's supposed to be challenging InDesign?

It's hard to compare legacy apps like InDesign and XPress to clean-sheet apps like APub. Often times developers have to choose between using a built-in feature of the OS or "rolling their own" version of the feature to gain the flexibility to offer a bell or whistle. If APub is using the OS to handle its text it may not be easy to add custom underlines. I'm speaking only in general terms, I haven't worked on an app in years.

Back in the day, there was a lot of custom coding going on because the various operating systems were so limited. But things have improved a lot so developers of clean-sheet apps try to use use out-of-the-box features rather than writing custom code. Sometimes these decisions mean you can't add all of the bells and whistles that you want but the tradeoff is performance, stability, and future proofing your app.

Developers of legacy apps face a different dilemma - you have to decide if the OS version of a feature you custom coded a decade ago is good enough to abandon your own code. That might mean upsetting some users if you have to lose a particular bell or whistle.

Download a free manual for Publisher 2.4 from this forum - expanded 300-page PDF

My system: Affinity 2.4.0 for macOS Sonoma 14.4, MacBook Pro 14" (M1 Pro)

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2 hours ago, MikeTO said:

It's hard to compare legacy apps like InDesign and XPress to clean-sheet apps like APub. Often times developers have to choose between using a built-in feature of the OS or "rolling their own" version of the feature to gain the flexibility to offer a bell or whistle. If APub is using the OS to handle its text it may not be easy to add custom underlines. I'm speaking only in general terms, I haven't worked on an app in years.

Serif’s legacy apps are for Windows only, and they rely heavily on built-in OS features. The Affinity apps are designed to be ‘platform agnostic’, with shared core code and an OS-specific UI layer.

Alfred spacer.png
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15 hours ago, Alfred said:

Serif’s legacy apps are for Windows only, and they rely heavily on built-in OS features. The Affinity apps are designed to be ‘platform agnostic’, with shared core code and an OS-specific UI layer.

I have no inside knowledge of how the Affinity apps are coded, but building a cross-platform layer means you get to choose which OS-specific features to use and which to ignore. Serif may or may not be relying on the OS for font handling. In the nineties every OS had poor font handling so almost all page layout apps used their own font handling code. But now the OS's do a credible job in this area so it's possible that a clean sheet app, even one with an OS-abstraction layer to support multiple platforms, might leverage the OS for this stuff.

My point was only that it's hard to compare the design choices of a legacy app like XPress or InDesign to a brand new app. 

Download a free manual for Publisher 2.4 from this forum - expanded 300-page PDF

My system: Affinity 2.4.0 for macOS Sonoma 14.4, MacBook Pro 14" (M1 Pro)

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17 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

Serif may or may not be relying on the OS for font handling.

Or they may have simply said, so far, that they will trust the font designers to know what is best for their fonts.

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The respective OSs are used to obtain all the fonts' metrics. Applications like Affinity applications, QXP, CorelDraw, etc., use as much of the information as is or as a basis for alteration. This doesn't apply to Adobe applications as they have and use their own font subsystem. 

Font designers, even major foundries, do not and cannot accurately account for all usage and make certain compromises. 

Applications should allow certain modifications of such things as, in this case, underline positioning. 

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Thanks to everyone for responding and I appreciate the information as I've learned some new things.

I do layouts for books with lots of photos so my needs can be very demanding. I have been impressed with the last Affinity Publisher (AP) updates as I can now do almost all the work I used to do in InDesign. Because InDesign CS6 is only a 32-bit app (the only one of the suite not 64-bit), I've been stuck at 10.14 Mojave for this one reason. However, your input has been very helpful. I'm not sure, though, that I can use AP for those projects because there's a lot of pre-flight & packaging that needs to be done before I can send the finished product to be printed since I haven't seen anything like that in AP.

 

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6 hours ago, VJS said:

I'm not sure, though, that I can use AP for those projects because there's a lot of pre-flight & packaging that needs to be done before I can send the finished product to be printed since I haven't seen anything like that in AP.

Although I might be a bit reluctant myself to use Publisher (yet) for really extensive projects like complete books, I'd say that concerning preflight and packaging there ARE features in Publisher now which seem to do these jobs in a decent way. Haven't really put them to the test personally, though, with something really substantial...

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9 hours ago, MikeW said:

Font designers, even major foundries, do not and cannot accurately account for all usage and make certain compromises. 

Applications should allow certain modifications of such things as, in this case, underline positioning. 

Absolutely so! There's no reason a designer should be satisfied with just the way underlines are "built in" a font. Maybe the font's generic way will be OK for 90% of the cases you'll actually apply an underline, but there's those 10% where you want to do something really special – when you know that InDesign had allowed you to do exactly what you're imagining and Publisher (as the newer, more modern app it is) keeps your options to just a very small fraction of those you remember having under your fingers it's certainly disappointing.

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