Request: glyphs scaling option into the Justification palette

[Pierre Bellefeuille]

I would like Affinity to add the option to be able to scale the glyphs into the Justification palette. This option can be pretty useful when someone is using some justified texts, flush on both side, because it will help to get better white spaces between the words in some difficult situation, as an example with narrow colomns of text.

I am sharing with you here some specs I was using with success into some publications, see the joined picture where I placed (in blue) within Affinity Publisher's Justification palette the option I would like to be added. You can see a sample too of a document I created with these specs many years ago. In this sample page the width of the column if not too narrow, but more problems may occurs with the white spaces between the words where someone is using narrow columns where the text is justified, this latter is where the option of scaling the glyphs may come really handy.

[Murphy.r]

Form me too, glyphs scaling is very very important and optical kerning …

[SalfingerAndrew]

Yeah this would be amazing. Anywhere if there are plans / and or away around this?

[garrettm30]

I would use this feature if available. I usually do have a very small amount of glyph scaling in my justification.

Incidentally, the publishing work I do is also in French. The extra nonbreaking spaces that French has as compared to English means justification has to work a little harder to look good.

[Pierre Bellefeuille]

Normally, the typographic rules are no more than 3 words breaks. These breaks really help not to have to wide white spaces between the words.

[btribble]

Another vote for this. Text looks messed up compared to Illustrator when trying to rebuild my CV!

[sungkhum]

Yes, this is also important for complex-script languages like Khmer where there are no spaces between words. Glyph-scaling can really help make things look so much better and it is easier to read.

Affinity Publisher

 

VS.

 

InDesign (with glyph-scaling)

[garrettm30]

That is an interesting example. Glyph scaling would no doubt help, but in the mean time, I suppose you would have better results if you reduce the range variation of word spacing and increase the range of variation in letter spacing.

[sungkhum]

2 hours ago, garrettm30 said:

That is an interesting example. Glyph scaling would no doubt help, but in the mean time, I suppose you would have better results if you reduce the range variation of word spacing and increase the range of variation in letter spacing.

Because of the way Khmer words are formed (and other complex-text scripts), you can't use letter spacing - it just garbles the words:

So glyph-scaling is really the only option.

Edited October 3, 2019 by sungkhum

[garrettm30]

That is very interesting. Thank you for sharing.

[sungkhum]

It really would be great to have another option for publishing as InDesign really corners the market now but because of pricing is out of reach for many. If Affinity added this feature, it looks like everything else would work great in regard to Khmer Unicode support.

[Daniel Gibert]

I'm all aboard on this

In my case I do a lot of bilingual work (Two co-official languages here) and that means a lot of layout in two columns, usually narrow ones, and one of the languages (Basque) tends to have large words, so you could end with a column with multiple two or three word lines than usually can't be hyphenated (Or a customer that ask for no hyphenation at all).The size of the spaces in that cases is horrible and relaying on word/letter spacing only brings horrible results. Add the lack of GREP styles to manage some forbidden hyphenation on Basque that both InDesign and Affinity insist on commit and you can figure the rest.

[ThoughtBeast]

This was the one feature I was sad to lose in coming from InDesign. I eventually just gave up and used a ragged edge, but I would absolutely love to have this feature. 

[Headoverheels]

This is a deal breaker for me. Can’t properly justify text without it. Please let me know when this feature comes in. 

[Oboto]

This feature is absolutly necessary to make justified text look good in any situation!

[ThoughtBeast]

Even Scribus does this!

[fde101]

A bit of a pain I'm sure, but in the interim you can adjust the character scaling manually under the Character panel -> Positioning and Transform -> Horizontal Scale

[kamiC]

Yes, yes - We need glyphs scaling and optical kerning both are important and they are missed in Publisher.

[Igor23]

This feature would be amazing!

[Pitou101]

Do they add Khmer Unicode yet? Adobe can use it perfectly, why not Affinity?

[garrettm30]

3 hours ago, Pitou101 said:

Do they add Khmer Unicode yet? Adobe can use it perfectly, why not Affinity?

Although what is being discussed here could be of help with Khmer in one regard, what you are asking is more related to this thread: