Adjusting tracking in lyrics

I can’t speak for Affinity, but in Acrobat Pro, I can open the PDF and edit text blocks individually. Select the block, copy the text, and change the tracking.

When you select “Edit PDF,” Acrobat boxes each syllable individually.

This is brilliant. I’m definitely going to use it when I need tracking changes.

I export as SVG because affinity still needs to hammer all the kinks out of their PDF import/rendering. Even with SVG (which imports very well) the fonts are still recognized and thereby editable. You thereby gain all of the fine typography controls which is nice.

I also use this to cheat sometimes when I want to use a particular font but it just isn’t quite heavy enough for my taste (but switching to “bold” is too much). I’ll select all of the lyrics and give them a 0.1 black “stroke” (ie- outline) to beef them up and make them a little darker on the page. This doesn’t work so well for PDFs intended to be viewed on a screen since most programs wont render the letters and their outline as a single shape until you zoom way in, but for printing it is an excellent hack and works like a charm. I use this whenever I need a smaller font then I’d prefer but know people would complain about it being too “light”.

I also use this technique for psalms that have certain verses that require more than one line, thereby messing up all the verse numbering after those verses. I’ll export the psalm with the incorrect numbers and then simply edit whichever verse numbers got out of sync. Just double click on the number, type the correct number in and then export.

Sounds good. Thank you for your thorough explanation.

I’ve never even used SVG, but if needed, I’ll know how to try things. I’ve not even done any of the layout in Affinity yet (still deciding between it and VivaPublisher, since VivaPublisher [edit: VivaDesigner] can round-trip to InDesign, something I don’t think AffPubl will ever be able to do).

Actually, a recent update includes IDML support.

Yes, you can import IDML from InDesign into Affinity Publisher, but you cannot export anything that InDesign can use (as far as I know). So it’s not possible to “round-trip” the files and collaborate with someone using InDesign. VivaDesigner is actually designed for that round-tripping and has almost full feature parity with InDesign.