Bug in Character and Paragraph Panels

[Mark Oehlschlager]

Currently working through Designer 1.7.0.3.

I believe I've found a bug in the behavior of the Character and Paragraph panels:

1. The panels do not auto-size to fit the sub-feature panels (e.g., Spacing, Tab Stops, Justification, etc.), and there is no scroll bar or other visual indicator that more panel features remain below the bottom edge of the Character or Paragraph Panel.
2. When one does scroll to the bottom of a foreshortened Character or Paragraph Panel, the panel window sticks and it's impossible to scroll back up to the top of the panel feature set.

[Chris_K]

Hi Mark Oehlschlager

The scroll bar appearance is based on your setting in the General section of the Mac OS system preferences. If you have a mouse connected scroll bars will always appear, with a trackpad you can only see the scrollbars when actually scrolling. You can change this in your system preferences to always show.

The current issue with these panels is they are quite long when everything is expanded so in smaller screens they would start to appear off the screen if it auto expanded with the sections. I ca speak with development to see if there may be a better solution here

Thanks

[Mark Oehlschlager]

@Chris_K

I've just noticed that another confusing aspect to this is the fact that there are scrollable frames within the sub-panels, and therefore in certain circumstances with a shorter Character or Paragraph panel one might find it difficult to "escape" and scroll to the top of the Character or Paragraph panel.

For example, with the Character panel window shortened, one might scroll down to expand the Typography  and Language and Optical Alignment sub-panels, only to find oneself stuck in the scrollable frame within the Optical Alignment sub-panel. 

Not sure what the best solution is here from a UI point of view. Perhaps making the sub-panel headers persistent even as the sub-panel content scrolls out of view, regardless of how many sub-panels are expanded? Perhaps, also, the default appearance of the Character and Paragraph panels is to show all the persistent sub-panel headers, but in a zipped-up or collapsed position?

[fde101]

This discussion reminds me of an old site that is no longer maintained but is still out there on the web for reference...

http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/controls.htm#CONTROLS2

http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/tabs.html#TAB23

 

[Mark Oehlschlager]

On further reflection, the over-riding UI design principle should be to keep things simple: reduce the urge to design ever-expandable control panels.

There are many reasons to be angry with Adobe right now, the subscription pricing model not least among them, but they've successfully solved a lot of UI problems along the way. Their Character and Paragraph panels are relatively compact and work well. Adobe Illustrator's Character panel accounts for the "Positioning and Transform", "Decorations", and "Language"  sub-panels of AFDesigner's Character panel in one, relatively compact window which requires no scrolling. The basic kerning preference (auto; optical; font metrics) is embedded as an option within the kerning pop-up menu. Illustrator offers a separate "OpenType" control panel which accounts for AFDesigner's "Typography" sub-panel.

I'm sure there are legal and philosophical-design reasons for not copying the Adobe interface exactly, but I would encourage Affinity to take some inspiration and guidance from the things that Adobe has done well in their UI design.

[A_B_C]

On 12/13/2018 at 2:51 AM, Mark Oehlschlager said:

For example, with the Character panel window shortened, one might scroll down to expand the Typography  and Language and Optical Alignment sub-panels, only to find oneself stuck in the scrollable frame within the Optical Alignment sub-panel. 

This is a real problem indeed, particularly on smaller screens.