Auto Hyphenation for Affinity Designer

[walt.farrell]

2 hours ago, Imonobor said:

So basically they refuse to add this simple, essential feature to Designer in hopes that people will buy an entire new program just for that feature, and even then, the workflow sucks ass, because you gotta open an entirely different program each time you want to enable hyphenation for a new textbox. When they already have the code in place for hyphenation to work in Designer after being enabled in Publisher. Am I the only one that sees how insane that sounds? You literally need to prove you own another one of their programs to use a basic feature in the first program....

...

And here's a heads up for you, Serif. No one will buy Publisher just because of that one feature

1. We do not know that they refuse to do it; only that they have not done it so far. There is no official answer of "no".
2. Publisher has many more enhancements for designs and workflows that use text; it's not just hyphenation. Multiple columns, for example. Or Linked Text Frames so text can flow between frames. Pinning objects within a text flow. Flowing text around objects. And more.
3. No, you don't need to open a different program just to enable hyphenation. You could do most of your work in Publisher, from creating the project up until final Export. It would only be at final Export time you might need to switch programs, and that would happen only if you need Designer's Export Persona. But until that point, you could probably do all your work in Publisher if you also own Designer and Photo.

[Imonobor]

10 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

1. We do not know that they refuse to do it; only that they have not done it so far. There is no official answer of "no".
2. Publisher has many more enhancements for designs and workflows that use text; it's not just hyphenation. Multiple columns, for example. Or Linked Text Frames so text can flow between frames. Pinning objects within a text flow. Flowing text around objects. And more.
3. No, you don't need to open a different program just to enable hyphenation. You could do most of your work in Publisher, from creating the project up until final Export. It would only be at final Export time you might need to switch programs, and that would happen only if you need Designer's Export Persona. But until that point, you could probably do all your work in Publisher if you also own Designer and Photo.

1. The fact that there are threads asking for hyphenation support in Designer dating back to 2015/2016 is as good as a "no". Besides, literally after enabling the option in Publisher and switching back to Designer, it stays active and working perfectly. That means it IS already implemented in Designer, they just hid the tickbox to enable it, as a form of primitive "DRM" to see if you purchased Publisher. It's only a matter of time before some hacky solution comes along to enable it without Publisher, but it might require shady addons from shady people on shady sites, putting Affinity users in danger of malware attacks just because Serif refused to add the damn tickbox. This is not okay.

2. I'll trust what you say about Publisher is true, since I've never used the program, I just know it has a Designer persona. It might be an awesome piece of software, and THAT SHOULD be the reason people buy it, not to enable features in other programs that require it as a proof-of-purchase or somesuch.

3. Why buy and work in Designer in the first place then if you can do everything you can do there in Publisher instead? Truth is, the programs have different goals; it's true that Publisher is more catered towards text manipulation, but that doesn't mean Designer can't have a simple feature such as Hyphenation, given the code is already in the program! My work is better suited to Designer, since I need to use complex vector graphics and effects in addition to text manipulation and I'd like to be able to do it one program, not 3. This is the reason I purchased Designer, because it implemented raster editing in addition to vector instead of having to rely on yet another program, and then they go and do things like this. It goes against their main strength and ideology.

[walt.farrell]

19 minutes ago, Imonobor said:

My work is better suited to Designer, since I need to use complex vector graphics and effects in addition to text manipulation and I'd like to be able to do it one program, not 3.

All the functions of the Designer Persona of Designer work in Publisher if you also own Designer. So you would have all the vector graphics and effects in Publisher, too. All you miss is the Pixel Persona and the Export Persona. For those, you would have to switch from Publisher to the full Designer application. (Of course, if you also own Photo, which is a superset of Designer's Pixel Persona, then you could stay in Publisher and you'd have the Pixel functions, too. Then you'd only need Designer for the Export Persona, if it's important to you.)

[Imonobor]

12 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

All the functions of the Designer Persona of Designer work in Publisher if you also own Designer. So you would have all the vector graphics and effects in Publisher, too. All you miss is the Pixel Persona and the Export Persona. For those, you would have to switch from Publisher to the full Designer application. (Of course, if you also own Photo, which is a superset of Designer's Pixel Persona, then you could stay in Publisher and you'd have the Pixel functions, too. Then you'd only need Designer for the Export Persona, if it's important to you.)

I see. This is useful to know, and I might consider buying the rest of the affinity suite for this kind of seamless integration, but that is beside the point. The point is that there is no reason for the auto hyphenation tickbox to be hidden in Designer, when the code is already in the program, the practice feels dishonest.

[walt.farrell]

2 hours ago, Imonobor said:

the practice feels dishonest.

It does not feel dishonest to me, but you're free to have your opinions, of course

In my opinion, there are several factors that may play a part. The two main ones:

1. Serif wants to have 3 separate applications, tailored for different audiences, rather than 1 monolithic application. The separation gives a cleaner interface, and means there is less for a user of a single application to learn to become productive. Given the inexpensive prices of each application, and the free updates, having 3 application may also generate more income for Serif, of course.
    
2. Before Publisher, it was reasonable to think that users of Designer needed to also use text in their designs. And (before Publisher) they might have extensive amounts of text, spread across multiple artboards. However, now that we have Publisher, it seems reasonable to me that Serif is encouraging users with significant amounts of text to use Publisher, rather than Designer. And if you do not have a significant amount of text, I'm not sure why you'd need automatic hyphenation. Thus, I don't see the need for that function in Designer. With that much text, Publisher feels like a better environment to work in, to me.

[Imonobor]

14 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

It does not feel dishonest to me, but you're free to have your opinions, of course

In my opinion, there are several factors that may play a part. The two main ones:

1. Serif wants to have 3 separate applications, tailored for different audiences, rather than 1 monolithic application. The separation gives a cleaner interface, and means there is less for a user of a single application to learn to become productive. Given the inexpensive prices of each application, and the free updates, having 3 application may also generate more income for Serif, of course.
    
2. Before Publisher, it was reasonable to think that users of Designer needed to also use text in their designs. And (before Publisher) they might have extensive amounts of text, spread across multiple artboards. However, now that we have Publisher, it seems reasonable to me that Serif is encouraging users with significant amounts of text to use Publisher, rather than Designer. And if you do not have a significant amount of text, I'm not sure why you'd need automatic hyphenation. Thus, I don't see the need for that function in Designer. With that much text, Publisher feels like a better environment to work in, to me.

I see where you're coming from and I do agree with many of your arguments, however, I don't agree that stripping such a basic feature, that every Illustrator or Inkscape user that is switching over is expecting to be in a vector editor, is making the program easier to learn. Even the dropdown menus for "Hyphenation language" are inside Designer, even though they don't do anything by themselves, which can only confuse a new user and send them on google searches that might lead them to threads like these (Hi, confused users from the future!), and to disappointment that they have to spend another 50 bucks for a basic functionality their previous software had out-of-the-box. Not everyone can afford this, especially not if they're still trying Designer out and deciding if they'd like to make the switch or not - this would only add points against. I'd argue that they're losing more money from customers lost to things like this than they gain from people who bought Publisher to have the extra functionality.

Furthermore, it might be intimidating for some people to learn a whole new program just to have a few more functions - I'm not saying it's hard to learn, but not everyone is so open-minded and willing to learn. People are comfortable with things they're familiar with, and if they're used to working in Designer (or other vector programs) on designs with lots of text, they'd see the act of switching their main program to Publisher as intimidating.

It's better to give you users multiple ways to accomplish the same thing, than to take options away for the sake of profit. I see it as selfish, which, as you said, is purely my opinion, but it might be shared by others too.

[walt.farrell]

10 minutes ago, Imonobor said:

however, I don't agree that stripping such a basic feature, that every Illustrator or Inkscape user that is switching over is expecting to be in a vector editor, is making the program easier to learn. Even the dropdown menus for "Hyphenation language" are inside Designer,

I don't think of it as "stripping out" a function. Designer was (I think) the first program developed in the Affinity suite. Publisher is the last, so far. Until Serif developed Publisher, no programs in the Affinity suite had Automatic Hyphenation. Thus, they did not remove automatic hyphenation from Designer; they just did not fully add it to Designer, which would be consistent with their partitioning of functions to give targeted application usage.

And possibly the inclusion of the Hyphenation Language control in Designer was a mistake, though I can see that it might be useful if one is moving a document from Publisher to Designer, and needs to add a small amount of text in a different language. Having the hyphenation language control allows making that kind of small edit to the document without having to go back to Publisher.

But in any case, Serif will enable the functions they want to, and we can only guess which ones that will be, or the rationale behind their decisions. It doesn't hurt to ask for a function to be included. I just doubt this one will be.

[Old Bruce]

1 hour ago, Imonobor said:

such a basic feature

Being able to put a stroke on a path that is use for Text on a path.

Linking two Text frames.

Having multiple columns in a single text Frame.

A basic Find and Replace for Text.

These are some I would like in Designer and they are available in Publisher. Other people have their own sets of Basic Features. And then there are all the things we cannot do with the Pixel Persona here in Designer that are available in Photo. Some of which I and others could say are Basic Features.

Do I wish they were available in Designer? Yes. Does their absence make me regret my purchase of Designer? No.

[Imonobor]

19 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Being able to put a stroke on a path that is use for Text on a path.

Linking two Text frames.

Having multiple columns in a single text Frame.

A basic Find and Replace for Text.

These are some I would like in Designer and they are available in Publisher. Other people have their own sets of Basic Features. And then there are all the things we cannot do with the Pixel Persona here in Designer that are available in Photo. Some of which I and others could say are Basic Features.

Do I wish they were available in Designer? Yes. Does their absence make me regret my purchase of Designer? No.

I never said I regret my purchase of Designer because of the absence of this feature. Quite the opposite actually, I like the software enough to see the potential for improvement and try to help said improvement by laying out my arguments on why implementing said feature would be a good idea.

For other users however, the lack of this and the features you mentioned might prevent them from getting as far as purchasing the software, just because the software they're coming from has these features and they're used to having them. This is why I think this "segmentation" of features is counterproductive for Serif, instead of beneficial.

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I don't think of it as "stripping out" a function. Designer was (I think) the first program developed in the Affinity suite. Publisher is the last, so far. Until Serif developed Publisher, no programs in the Affinity suite had Automatic Hyphenation. Thus, they did not remove automatic hyphenation from Designer; they just did not fully add it to Designer, which would be consistent with their partitioning of functions to give targeted application usage.

And possibly the inclusion of the Hyphenation Language control in Designer was a mistake, though I can see that it might be useful if one is moving a document from Publisher to Designer, and needs to add a small amount of text in a different language. Having the hyphenation language control allows making that kind of small edit to the document without having to go back to Publisher.

But in any case, Serif will enable the functions they want to, and we can only guess which ones that will be, or the rationale behind their decisions. It doesn't hurt to ask for a function to be included. I just doubt this one will be.

You say they never added it, but that's simply not true. The code for automatic hyphenation is inside Designer and is working perfectly fine after activating the option in Publisher (hell, even copy-paste works). This means they did add it, but purposely left out the way to activate it. That can be considered "stripping a feature out" or even blocking it behind a paywall.

[ramonbuzon]

Hi all, I opened this thread a long time ago demanding something that hasn't been fixed yet... I would have loved to hear the Serif maintainer's justification as to why it hasn't been implemented yet, but instead there are user opinions justifying that this it is not necessary as it is already offered by Publisher, or that it is due to a deliberate decision by Serif and therefore they should not give explanations about it... I am afraid that they underestimate Designer users.  There are actually very few of us who actually write here and our sole purpose is to suggest improvements to this great tool.  Would an official explanation be possible or should we continue for more years with this open thread?

[walt.farrell]

4 hours ago, ramonbuzon said:

Would an official explanation be possible

Serif have stated that they generally do not comment on Feature Requests, so it's unlikely.

[Imonobor]

7 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Serif have stated that they generally do not comment on Feature Requests, so it's unlikely.

I hope they at the very least read them... Else this entire forum would be pretty useless.

[walt.farrell]

3 hours ago, Imonobor said:

I hope they at the very least read them... Else this entire forum would be pretty useless.

Yes, they have said they read them and factor them into their planning. But there is no guarantee what they will decide to implement, or in what order.

[ramonbuzon]

@walt.farrelldo you work for them?  are you part of their staff?  Could you please tell them about this thread?

[Alfred]

32 minutes ago, ramonbuzon said:

@walt.farrelldo you work for them?  are you part of their staff?  Could you please tell them about this thread?

I think it reasonable to infer that Walt wouldn’t refer to Serif as “they” if he were a member of staff! That aside, all Serif employees have a ‘Staff’ badge below their avatars, and they (and only they) are forum moderators.

[Imonobor]

56 minutes ago, Alfred said:

I think it reasonable to infer that Walt wouldn’t refer to Serif as “they” if he were a member of staff! That aside, all Serif employees have a ‘Staff’ badge below their avatars, and they (and only they) are forum moderators.

And yet it's not unreasonable to believe someone with 25.3k posts since 2017 is more than an insanely hyped fanboy (I'm saying that without a hint of offense). Perhaps staff members have "user" accounts for one reason or another (the same goes for yourself, 19k posts? Dayum.) Anyway, let's not get offtopic with conspiracy theories. If either of you is actually a current employee of Serif, it means staff actually reads and considers these requests adequately, even discussing things with the community. If that's the case, thank you. If not, still thank you for the discussions.

[walt.farrell]

13 minutes ago, Imonobor said:

And yet it's not unreasonable to believe someone with 25.3k posts since 2017 is more than an insanely hyped fanboy

Or someone who has too much time on his hands, enjoys trying to help, and uses participation here as a learning experience

[Old Bruce]

4 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

uses participation here as a learning experience

As do I.

[Megnusin]

There's very little use for paragraph justification without automatic hyphenation.

[ttl]

I have accidentaly discovered and surprised that there is not possible to set Hyphenation options in Designer. It makes no sense to exclude this part (one of fundamental) of paragraph settings in Designer and rely only on Publisher. I think that there are reasons to have it also in Designer. For example product packaging designs (boxes, bags etc.) often includes text parts (sometimes very long) where Hyphenation is needed. One-page documents people often prepare in Designer although I prefer Publisher for this kind of document.

[MikeTO]

I don't understand the omission of hyphenation from Designer either. I understand the need to differentiate the products but even a photo editor like Photoshop has auto hyphenation.

Fortunately there is are workarounds. Edit the document in Publisher and turn hyphenation on. Or create your text styles with hyphenation on in Publisher and import the styles into Designer.