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I have just been putting the finishing touches to a web page design and went to add bullet points to some lists.

 

How do I do it?

 

Trying to add glyphs from Mac Character Viewer by placing the cursor and double clicking the glyph does not work (the only programme I have ever used where it does not). Is there a special way you do this?

 

And where are the bullet point lists in AD?

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Thanks for the reply. I don't have Edit/Special Characters on either the store version or the beta. I do have an item called Emoji and symbols.

 

When I click that it brings up the Mac Character Viewer (which I was doing before but through the Settings/Keyboard route). But clicking on any symbol, in any of the categories, results in a square box, in both versions - which is why I posted the question.

 

However, I have since found that clicking on any of the font variants in the side box for any one symbol places the symbol correctly.

 

So that has got me where I wanted to be and I was able to complete my design in time to send to my customer. But I would suggest that there is a bug somewhere there that won't allow the placement of the default symbol sets. Can you or anyone else reproduce this?

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  • Staff

Hi captain_slocum,

This is the menu item i'm talking about:

 

post-59-0-93101600-1431645695_thumb.png

 

It should open the Map Character Map / Viewer.

When an empty box appear instead of the character you selected it means that the font you are using doesn't include that particular character. And so it displays that box.

 

When you click on one of the characters in the Font Variation section in the Character Map, you are picking that character from the fonts installed on your system that contain that particular character. That's why it always insert it from there. This also means that you now have to font families in your text. One is the original font you were using and the other is the font that contains the special character you inserted.

 

This is the expected behaviour. There's no bug here.

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I don't have that menu item on my latest AD Beta or the Apple store version. It says Emoji and Symbols. What version are you using? And what operating system? (I am using latest Yosemite)

 

Also, I have to disagree with you that this not a bug and that it behaves as expected.

 

In Word for Mac, Pages or Notebook, if I open the character viewer, whatever font may be selected, clicking on the symbol in the main character viewer widow pastes it into the document, changing the font and displaying it in the font picker window of the application. It even does it in this forum window - look! ✄. I have reproduced this over and over again with every single app I own that accepts text input.

 

That does not happen in AD. Instead it pastes a square box (for each and every symbol in the whole collection). However, if you then click in the box on the right (Font Variation), it will place the symbol.

 

This may be what you intended, in which case I suppose you could argue that it is not a bug from your point of view if you designed it that way, but it is absolutely not expected behaviour from the users point of view when every other app does it differently and always has. So in my book, and everybody else's, it is a bug, as all Mac applications must conform to the Mac Font and Colour standards if you want to be taken seriously.

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  • Staff

Hi captain_slocum,

I'm sorry if somehow i sounded harsh. It wasn't my intent. I also completely forgot about the menu's name and character view dialog changes introduced in Yosemite. There's in fact some inconsistency in the way special characters are being inserted. Some work as expected, others add an empty space, and some add and additional box after the special character.

I'm logging this to be looked at. Please accept my apologies.

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No need to apologise, it is brilliant that this forum is well monitored and swiftly replied to. I do not mean to appear negative, I would like to see AD succeed in being an AI beater as much as you. I am enjoying using it and I will certainly be using it as my main app for producing static designs, much easier than AI and more features and better supported than Sketch.

 

I have used AD for three days now in a real world situation and I would like to make one comment. While features are important, and what everyone seems to get hung up on, what is more important to professionals is reliability, accuracy and consistency. We can work around a known missing feature but tear our hair out when things do not work as expected when the clock is ticking. In this respect I think AD has a little way to go yet, but I appreciate it is only version 1.2. For example, I find snapping an object to adjacent objects hit and miss - sometimes the guide lines appear, sometimes they don't. And selecting text can be awkward - sometimes I have to click a dozen times to get the cursor in a line of text. There are a few other instances of these small niggles. Perhaps some of it is me missing something, but these things should "just work" - that's why we use Macs. I have seen your roadmap and it is impressive, but could I suggest you pass on to the powers that be one more item to be added to it - make everything that is there already, work properly first time every time.

 

Best wishes and keep up the good work.

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Hi, captain_slocum, and thanks for your feedback. I mostly work on the text side of things. Can you tell me more about when it takes a dozen clicks to set the caret in a line of text? Do you have a recipe I can use to reproduce it? Are you using mouse, trackpad or tablet? Is it Art or Frame text? Is a particular font involved?

 

On snapping, Affinity does not try to snap to every single object on the canvas because in complex drawings there would be too many. Instead it keeps a list of 6 snapping candidates. If you switch Show snapping candidates on they will be outlined in purple. I'm guessing you aren't getting the snapping guide you expect because the object wasn't a candidate. You can make it a candidate by hovering the cursor over it for a few seconds.

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  • 4 months later...

Hi, it's perhaps a bit late to react. I didn't manage to include pictograms, emoijs etc. into a Text Object either.

 

However, I now use the following workaround  (until Affinity has implemented this feature)

It's a bit tedious but it works, as many things do with a bit of patience and effort.

 

- Open Apple's Page App (or any other text app that can handle pictograms.)

- Create a new document in Pages (a simple blank document is ok)

 

- On your desktop, click on the keyboard country flag in the upper right corner on your screen.

- Select "show emoji and symbols" from OSX's character map.

- Copy the desired pictogram(s) from the character map into your text in Pages.

 

- In Pages, select the pictogram(s) and enlarge the font size. Make it big enough

to make an image of it large enough to have enough quality.

 

-Press Option-Shift-4 simultaneously to make a screen dump of a part of your screen

-Drag with you mouse/pen a rectangle exactly around the pictogram as displayed in Pages and then release the mouse button. 

there should be a "Screen dump ..... .png" file on your desktop.

in Affinity

-Open this screen dump png with Affinity

-Select and copy the background layer. (should be the only layer there.)

-Switch back to the other image you are working on in Affinity and paste.

-You now should have a new pixel layer containing your pictogram(s), which you can move to the desired position, resize, etc. 

 

I have used this in Affinity Designer succesfully , but It probably works ok in Affinity Photo as well.

 

It's a bit tedious, but it works. if you think this takes too long, then you are probably not the the type of person to make Swiss watches :D

<-- wow! a pictogram.
 

Thanks for making Affinity!

 

    

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  • 3 months later...

I can't find bullet points and also don't have the 'Special Character' menu item mentioned originally in this post. Has anything changed in the last 6 months on how this is done? How can I insert bullet points - I'm not understanding from the discussion above. thanks

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  • 4 months later...
  • Staff

Hi advanirajesh,

Currently there's no other way to add bullets to text. Affinity Publisher (not launched yet) may improve things here. Meanwhile to insert a bullet, place the cursor where you want to insert it, go to menu Edit ▸ Emoji & Symbols, select Bullets/Stars from the left and double-click the one you want to insert. You can them copy/paste it if you need to insert more bullets in other places.

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advanirajesh,

 

If you mean creating bullet lists automatically, like can be done in some word processor & page layout apps, Affinity can't do that.

 

However, emojis & symbols are really just unicode characters (code points), so since almost any bullet shape you can imagine has a unicode character, if it is included in the font(s) you have installed on your Mac, you can access it & add it to your Affinity document as Madame described.

 

Since the appearance varies with the font, & not all fonts some other user might have installed on their computer might even have a character at that code point, if you want to insure that it looks the same on every device, you will need to convert it to curves before exporting.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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  • 10 months later...

I'm not sure if there's another way, but I use Edit>Emoji and Symbols.

 

 

I'm on the windows version and I don't see that. Like the original poster I'm working on a web design and need to add bullets to text to show styles for lists.

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I'm not sure if there's another way, but I use Edit>Emoji and Symbols.

 

 

 

I'm on the windows version and I don't see that. Like the original poster I'm working on a web design and need to add bullets to text to show styles for lists.

 

 

No, you won't see 'Emoji and Symbols' on Windows. It's specific to recent Macs, having apparently been introduced in OS X 'El Capitan'.

 

If you have a numeric keypad, you can use the Alt key sequence Alt+8226 (i.e. press and hold the Alt key, type 8226 on the numeric keypad, and then release the Alt key) to produce a Unicode U+2022 bullet character. For alternative methods of producing bullets and other special characters, please see my post here.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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  • 4 weeks later...

For the people on Windows you can add Unicode characters (which include bullets) using a shortcut.  The available characters are dependent on the type of font you have selected.  - The symbols in Arial font are different from the ones in Times New Roman, etc.  If you normally use Word  for document creation you can go into Word to find out what the shortcut is for each font.

 

Open Word, create a new document.  Then on the ribbon go to Insert>Symbol>Symbols.  In the Font drop-down, choose the font your using in Affinity Designer and scroll to the character you want to use and select it.  At the bottom of the Symbol pop-up screen you will see the "Shortcut key:" That is the command you will use in Affinity Designer to place the symbol.  For a standard bullet point in Arial the shortcut is the Alt key and 0149.  Use the number keypad on you keyboard, not the numbers at the top above the letters on your keyboard.  Hold down the Alt key and type 0,1,4,9 and then when you release the Alt key the symbol will appear.

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As noted in my previous post, the Unicode bullet character is U+2022. The bullet character that you get from the Alt key sequence Alt+0149 is Extended ASCII, not Unicode, and (like the Unicode bullet) it should be at the same codepoint for every font that includes it.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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No, you won't see 'Emoji and Symbols' on Windows. It's specific to recent Macs, having apparently been introduced in OS X 'El Capitan'.

 

...

 

Well Windows 8/10 systems have built-in these too, accessible via enabling the touch keyboard from the taskbar and then usable.

 

post-49706-0-54433900-1493475544_thumb.jpg

 

post-49706-0-40800700-1493475561_thumb.jpg

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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