Drop caps feature suggestion

[MJBFI]

On 8/12/2019 at 7:31 AM, garrettm30 said:

If you don't mind this tangent, I would like to add my comments to your statement that "the Bible is the most demanding book to typeset." Most of our other projects I have been attempting to do in Affinity Publisher with various workarounds when needed, but Publisher is not ready for the Bible project for these reasons in my view:

1. Drop caps limitations, as in the current thread
2. Lack of text variables based on style - for creating automatic running headers
3. No multiline composer
4. Lack of "book" feature - that is, being able to have a long publication split into several separate but coordinated documents

We would have to add lack of footnotes as a limitation, but fortunately we are not using footnotes in this edition.

The amount of work necessary to work around these limitations would be enormous on a publication this large (just nearly 1500 pages).

Thanks garrettm30. I wholeheartedly agree the current limitations would mean an enormous amount of work, but it does not mean they are insurmountable.  Without a need for text variables or multiline composer, it can be done. 

[MJBFI]

On 8/11/2019 at 9:48 AM, Tourmaline said:

Use the A (artistic text tool) and type in 1. Use the Drop cap on the 1. Artisitc tool 5 and drop cap and artictic tool 0 Drop cap, all same size. With alignment you can align the way you like. All 3 digits same size. You can group them.

 

Thank you Tourmaline.  Admittedly, I am new to Affinity Publisher, so I don't know what I don't know.  What I've done so far is use the Text Tool to add a number 1-150 and then align it to the left and lower grid line of the corresponding text.  Is this harder or easier than your recommendation?  I'm happy to try anything.

[fde101]

On 7/4/2019 at 3:29 AM, Lagarto said:

Here's similar effect tried to be achieved in Publisher: the upper paragraph uses dropped caps 2 lines high, the French quotation mark is correctly recognized but the apostrophe following the "L" cannot be included

If you don't have a lot of these, you could try adding the drop cap part as artistic text and pinning it?  Granted it's even more work but it just might be a way to get the effect you are looking for in the interim...

[lacerto]

(...)

[garrettm30]

On 7/3/2019 at 2:04 PM, garrettm30 said:

I have been looking for how to control how many characters are included in the drop cap, and there doesn't seem to be a way

As of beta 1.8.0.499, my wish has been granted. The simple checkbox for auto next to the number of characters is elegant in simplicity. Now we have two different methods to choose from depending on the needs of the document.

Thank you Serif

[dominik]

15 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

The simple checkbox for auto next to the number of characters is elegant in simplicity.

Hi @garrettm30,

may I ask what 'auto' does? I could not figure it out.

Thanks,
d.

[garrettm30]

1 minute ago, dominik said:

may I ask what 'auto' does? I could not figure it out.

Auto is not technically new, but rather it just activates the way 1.7 handled drop caps previously without giving the choice. It basically tries to adjust the number of characters included in the drop cap when punctuation is involved. Here is an example:

 

In the first paragraph, the new ability to specify number of drop cap characters was used, and it was set to 1. Normally that might look great, but here the first character is a quotation mark, and so it does not work right. In the second paragraph, the auto checkbox is activated. There, rather than needing to put in the number of characters, Publisher tries to guess, and in this situation it guessed correctly. I assume auto should be the most helpful choice in most situations.

But as we discussed above, there are cases where it does not work like we needed, so the new ability to manually enter the number of characters is a welcome change.

 

 

[dominik]

4 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

In the first paragraph, the new ability to specify number of drop cap characters was used, and it was set to 1. Normally that might look great, but here the first character is a quotation mark, and so it does not work right. In the second paragraph, the auto checkbox is activated. There, rather than needing to put in the number of characters, Publisher tries to guess, and in this situation it guessed correctly. I assume auto should be the most helpful choice in most situations.

Many thanks for explaining. I thought of something like this but just didn't try with a quotation mark ... and thus didn't find anything.

d.

[Katie Bowes]

I was looking for an answer regarding speech marks and drop caps.

The discussion got a bit beyond my ability. I've come from Indesign also.

I'm wanting to have an initial drop cap, with a speech mark before it. The speech mark can be slightly bigger than the usual font, but I'm not liking the massive speech mark at the very start of the chapter. That's what I would like to fix.

Please may I have moron instructions please?

Thanks.

[garrettm30]

@Katie Bowes I do not quite follow you. By "speech marks" do you mean quotation marks? If so, you could try making the quotation mark to be a superscript, so it would be smaller than default. You can even do this by style. Here is a demonstration:
 

 

In the demonstration above, here are the key elements: I am using Initial Words, and the end character is the same quotation mark in question. Then the initial words style it is linked to a character style I made, called "Little quote." That style is defined to have the "Super/subscript" position set to Superscript.

If you don't want it to be automatic, you could simply select the quotation mark character and manually make changes. You could set it to superscript, or you could scale with the horizontal and vertical scaling, and then fix the position with the baseline shift.

[Katie Bowes]

Thank you for trying to help me. I seem unable to detach the quote marks from the first letter drop cap and everything just changes together. I'm probably getting lost further up the chain somewhere. I've watched the styles videos but perhaps need to go back and watch them again. Something has gone wrong somewhere.

[Efvee]

It would be very nice if auto could do something like this with speech marks:

[Katie Bowes]

Efvee yes! This exactly. I could do it in Indesign, but I'm too new to Affinity and it's too complicated to do here. Too sad. I wish I had known that before I bought it. I use it for my print books and it's the only reason I ever used Indesign. Gutted.

[Efvee]

Hello Katie,

I managed to get the following result by changing the font size on the speech marks and then moving them up with baseline shift. A little tricky but doable.

[Katie Bowes]

I can't seem to separate my speech marks from the Drop Cap letter for some weird reason. I've watched so many videos over the last couple of days but still can't seem to make it happen.

[MikeW]

2 hours ago, Katie Bowes said:

I can't seem to separate my speech marks from the Drop Cap letter for some weird reason. I've watched so many videos over the last couple of days but still can't seem to make it happen.

Here's a sample publication. The DC Speech Marks paragraph style makes use of the DC Initial Words character style for sizing and positioning of the Speech mark. If there are other speech marks needed, they would be added to this character style.

There is also another DC style for when a paragraph doesn't start with a speech mark.

Mike

DC-Sample.afpub

[Efvee]

Hello Katie,

Here is a video showing how to do it. Once you have it the way you like you may save the settings in a character style. (See Mike's sample document above.)

[Katie Bowes]

Thanks guys, especially Efvee for the video. I finally think I've cracked it! Really appreciate your help.