Using an anchor style button within a paragraph w/ auto layout

[ceyerkes]

Hi! I was wondering how to handle using an anchor style button within a paragraph when autolayout is enabled:

Currently, I just manually change the text style within the paragraph to blue/underlined, create some space, and paste in the anchor icon - just wondering if there's a better way to do this. Thanks!

[nkrantz]

Hi @ceyerkes! What is the Link-style Button doing here? Does it redirect the user to a new URL on click?

[ceyerkes]

Thanks so much @nkrantz and @katieporter! That video is super helpful. I'll share with my team!

[ceyerkes]

Hey Nora! Reopening this, because I thought of another solution that I wanted to run by the Paste team. This is still a frustrating Figma issue (though the solution by @katieporter is a great workaround) and I'm looking into using font glyphs so that my components that use autolayout don't completely break when the copy changes. Is this something that's been looked into yet? I've read a few articles on the Figma website, and it seems like the most straightforward option, assuming we can find icons that match what we need. The ones that I use that are typically embedded in a paragraph are the anchor and info icons.

https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360040449513-Add-icons-to-text-layers-with-icon-fonts

https://forum.figma.com/t/multi-line-text-icon-in-line-auto-layout/13153

[ceyerkes]

Also - let me know if I should open a new discussion.

[shleewhite]

Thank you for bringing this option up! Using the external-link-alt glyph from Font Awesome, or even a glyph like ↗ could definitely work, but you would need to be clear when you hand off the design to engineers that they should use the Paste External Anchor component and not the glyph.

We’ve also tossed around the idea of creating a custom icon font for Paste iconography to solve for this use case, but for now, we’ve determined that the upfront cost and ongoing maintenance probably aren’t worth the payoff. But if this is something that you think you and other PDs would get a huge benefit from, definitely let us know!

[ceyerkes]

Ok sounds good! I brought this up in the DSYS Committee meeting earlier this week, and it sounds like it's something that other PDs would benefit from. I'm happy to throw it out there on the UX Channel too, to see what the interest is there is as well. It's really just two icons that I'm running into daily that I would love an icon font for (anchor and info), in case that reduces maintenance concerns?

Zhen also shared this resource for generating icon fonts, which I'll try out as well. Thanks!