Affinity Designer 1.7.1.404 - show, hide hidden characters

[4dimage]

Hi,

maybe i'm too stupid - but this is driving me mad.

I know (guess ?!) that in an older version of AD i was able to show or hide special characters like whitespace, paragraph etc. via a command from the dropdown menu (i guess Text or View ?!).

Now i have made a new document in v1.7.1, inserted a text, but i can't deactivate the display of these special characters (Figure A) ). I searched the whole menus but i can't find the command to hide these.

Am I blind ?

E.g. in Affinity Publisher this command is located in "Text"->"Sonderzeichen einblenden" (sorry, don't know the english menu item). Figure B)

 

Can someone help me please - thanks!

 

Figure A)

Figure B)

[Old Bruce]

Sadly I have this too, on Mac. here is the topic I started;

 

[dutchshader]

one way to lose the special characters is to open the designer file in Publisher and uncheck show special characters and save the file.

open in designer and they should be gone.

[Mark Oehlschlager]

@dutchshader is correct.

For some inexplicable reason, invisible characters can only be controlled from within Publisher, not from within Designer or Photo. The solution to your problem is to open the file in Publisher and turn off invisible characters before saving and returning to Designer.

Showing/hiding Invisible characters, like text frame linking, is a common text setting feature that should be standard in all three Affinity apps.

[Old Bruce]

2 hours ago, dutchshader said:

one way to lose the special characters is to open the designer file in Publisher and uncheck show special characters and save the file.

open in designer and they should be gone.

I thought you had solved it for me but then in new documents I still see them so it is not a real solution for this bug.

[R C-R]

12 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

I thought you had solved it for me but then in new documents I still see them so it is not a real solution for this bug.

FWIW, I can't duplicate that behavior -- for me, new documents in Designer or Photo never show special characters, nor is there any way I can find to make them visible other than opening them in Publisher, enabling that feature, & then saving the file.

[Callum]

14 hours ago, Mark Oehlschlager said:

@dutchshader is correct.

For some inexplicable reason, invisible characters can only be controlled from within Publisher, not from within Designer or Photo. The solution to your problem is to open the file in Publisher and turn off invisible characters before saving and returning to Designer.

Showing/hiding Invisible characters, like text frame linking, is a common text setting feature that should be standard in all three Affinity apps.

This is a known issue and is logged with our devs to be fixed.

[3joern]

@Callum in Designer 1.10.1 still had this issue, open a new document add text and there is always a § at the text end and · between the spaces.

Can't find a menu or setting for "special characters" in Designer 

[4dimage]

And I stil can't find the settings in Designer 2. This is not funny...☹️

[Ideagonal]

On 11/9/2022 at 8:14 PM, 4dimage said:

And I stil can't find the settings in Designer 2. This is not funny...☹️

It is not. No hidden characters in Affinity Designer 2... Someone thought they are not needed.

[jmwellborn]

On 6/26/2019 at 2:25 PM, dutchshader said:

one way to lose the special characters is to open the designer file in Publisher and uncheck show special characters and save the file.

open in designer and they should be gone.

@4dimage and @Ideagonal  if you have Publisher 2 you can resolve the issue this way.

[Ideagonal]

Ups, sorry, didn't read the whole theread. I want just the opposite, I want to show hidden characters in Affinity Designer, now I can, I didn't know about opening designer files in publisher!

Thank you, although the command in designer is much needed.

[4dimage]

To be honest - it's ridiculous even to think about, if this feature "may be somehow usefull, in some cases, only for some apps, but not for alle users, or isn't it, o dear my head hurts..."

This feature is has to be an absolutely basic setting for all three Apps! They already "solved the problem" in Publisher since version 1. And all three Apps rely on the same sets of Classes. If not at least since v2 - congrats....

When to use it ?

If you get copy texts from your clients (typical Word crap) they often contain a bunch of trailing and leading whitespace, manual linebreaks instead of proper paragraphs and indentation filled up with spaces instead of proper tabs, crappy manually indented "list" with fancy bullets etc.

Most time my first action is, to clean up all messy characters and make the whole text a proper sequence of simple paragraphs before setting up any own Affinity text styles.

This is the reason why i allways turn on invisible chars, to check the whole mess and clean it up. Afterwards it's usefull too when it comes to special characters for column and page break and to visualize tabstop indentation, fill chars, and so on.

But sometimes it's simply disruptive to have all the control chars visible when simply check the overall clean appearence of a layout.

An easy way to show/hide special characters is not "a nice to have" - it's simply a basic function in every professional graphics software. It's like select or deselect an Object, show/hide rulers or guides, textframe borders etc. If you need them show them, if not hide them.

This should be a no brainer!

[Mark Oehlschlager]

The expectation seems to be that all documents will be brought into Publisher for typographic control, but I don't understand why Serif would enforce that workflow, as it's unnecessary and inefficient.

The big distinction between Publisher and Designer/Photo is the question of whether or not the project is a book form. Multipage book form? Use Publisher. One or two-panel card or leaflet? Designer and Photo become relevant options. And so why don't we have the same typographic controls within Designer/Photo as we have in Publisher?

• Show/Hide invisible characters
• Threaded text frames
• Hyphenation controls (if you're offering Justification controls, why not Hyphenation?)
• Etc.

It may be that Serif are not programmatically against bringing more typographic controls to Designer/Photo. It may just be a practical matter of time and the ordering of to-do's. I hope the reason is not some misguided notion that including these controls in Designer/Photo would somehow hurt sales of Publisher.

[4dimage]

4 minutes ago, Mark Oehlschlager said:

I hope the reason is not some misguided notion that including these controls in Designer/Photo would somehow hurt sales of Publisher.

You are absolutely right!

Even if all three Apps share many common, basic features there are good reasons not to combine them into one "monster" app. The feature set would simply be overwhelming. So it's a good practice to break up key functionality into different apps so the user can focus on the work. The cool thing about Publisher is the studio functionality and overall the ability to seemlessly move a document between all three apps. That's outstanding!

But some users are more focused on drawing or photography and don't have a need for a more complex layout app like Publisher. So there is a specialized app for everey purpose.

I would always buy them all (so did I with Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign for decades).

[Ideagonal]

12 hours ago, Mark Oehlschlager said:

I hope the reason is not some misguided notion that including these controls in Designer/Photo would somehow hurt sales of Publisher.

But that wouldn't make sense. You differentiate Affinity Designer from Publisher by adding much requested tools (and don't adding them to Publisher of course):

• Mesh tool -> done
• Shape builder -> done
• Blend tool
• Trace tool
• Simplify/smooth path
• Distort path (add noise)
• Real vector brushes
• Spray symbols

These are very specific illustrator (I don't mean the app) not layout tools. But don't take away such a basic, standard, common feature as Hidden characters.

[Ideagonal]

11 hours ago, 4dimage said:

The feature set would simply be overwhelming.

I agree. For me, it is way more convenient because I focus on layout or drawing and for me is a different kind of mental focus.

Maybe you could have a Publisher Persona in Designer? The panels, workspace... all shifts into publishing-layout mode. I don't know...

[reactionradio]

Still no fix for this on latest version.
I use Affinity for creating text based images - images of text with some design elements, but I find the permanently on view hidden characters a distraction.
I don't have publisher to defer to, so this needs sorting with a simple on off process.  

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, reactionradio said:

Still no fix for this on latest version.
I use Affinity for creating text based images - images of text with some design elements, but I find the permanently on view hidden characters a distraction.
I don't have publisher to defer to, so this needs sorting with a simple on off process.  

Hi and welcome to the forum.

Designer 1.x was not intended to show the symbols for special characters so you should never see them unless you're opening a file created with Publisher that had them turned on. If you don't have Publisher, did you download a Publisher file and open it at one time?

But regardless, this is changed in the latest version, in version 2. Designer now has the Text > Show Special Characters command. If you're still using 1.10 you will need to upgrade to version 2 to get this.

Cheers

[reactionradio]

Thanks for your assistance. Now to figure out why the Xenon brush pack won't install within the software...

[R C-R]

11 minutes ago, reactionradio said:

Now to figure out why the Xenon brush pack won't install within the software...

If you mean Affinity Designer, since they are raster brushes, you must switch to the Pixel Persona to see & use them.