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MikeA

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Everything posted by MikeA

  1. MikeA
    (This appears to be the feature-requests forum, but I've been wrong before. If I picked the wrong location please advise.) I would surely appreciate improvements to the Edit Text Style dialog, which could be made easier on the end-user. Dropdown menu for selecting styles Please consider adding a drop-down menu to this dialog's first panel (the one named, simply, "Style"). Purpose: select some other style for editing. It would be useful having the option to filter the display: all styles, versus paragraph styles only, versus character styles only, versus only styles presently used in the document. UI Font size : -) Text throughout Affinity Publisher's UI is small enough to make things, well, a bit hard on some of us. I'm glad I don't use a 4K monitor — if I did the UI would be so hard to read that I would probably not have purchased the program after using the trial version. Even on this laptop with its relatively small monitor, there is plenty of "screen real estate" to expand a dialog like Edit Text Style if a larger UI font were used. I've noticed that Publisher's Mac version has a way via Preferences to adjust the fonts in the UI. Not so the Windows version. So Windows version users are stuck with the small UI fonts, as-is. (I do already have fonts somewhat enlarged via Windows' own control panel. But enlarging them further using that control will not likely give good results.) Display of specific style information Describing all kinds of data—font, size, color (etc.)—simply as "No change" says nothing about the actual style data. This is unlike the style information displays in word processors or page composition programs I've used in the past. Even in the first ("Style") panel of the dialog, the summary information at the bottom of the dialog (in the "Style Settings" field) includes the actual typeface name only if you are editing "Base." In short: Understanding fully what's in a style has been made unnecessarily difficult. Please consider ways of improving this. Copying style data to the clipboard I'd hoped I could copy the information from the dialog's "Style Settings" field to the clipboard so that I could examine the style information using a more readable typeface, in a text editor or word processor. Each item in the field ends with a semicolon. So, I figured I could replace each semicolon with "newline"—voilà, more readable text. But the information within this field cannot be selected or highlighted (let alone copied). Please either add a "Copy" [to clipboard] button for the field, or at least make the text in it selectable with the mouse (or all of it selected at once by clicking in the field and pressing Control+A) so that the user himself can copy it to the clipboard and paste it somewhere else. Thanks.
  2. MikeA
    But more is needed. 30 years ago I was using Compugraphic typesetting equipment—now long on the scrap heap—whose ways of handling leader dots were quite advanced compared with modern software. For example, the CG system had an "insert space/insert character" feature that would automatically give leader dots (text at left margin, leader dots, page number at right margin) plenty of "air" so that they didn't look all jammed together. And they would be perfectly aligned. If perfect alignment is a bit much to ask for, at the very least a faster way of providing space between those leader dots would be in order. Or even to provide an option for a two-character leader dot such as "dot followed by space." I see that it's possible to improve the leader-dot spacing with Affinity Publisher by selecting the tab character and increasing its tracking quite a bit. It doesn't look bad afterward. But there doesn't seem to be a way to set this kind of spacing by way of the tab-stops controls or via a style. It's entirely manual work. Afterward you can copy and paste the manually styled tab character...and spend all day doing it over and over again in a long table of contents....only to have to do it all over again if you have to regenerate the TOC. (I tried doing the copying-and-pasting by copying text from a Publisher document, pasting it into my word processor, and doing it quickly that way—thinking I could then paste it back into the Publisher text frame. Nope. Didn't work. Additional controls and features for this purpose would speed up the work and improve the quality of tables of contents.
  3. MikeA
    I would probably never have figured that out. Thanks very much.
  4. MikeA
    >> already reported Ah, so it isn't just a feature I don't understand. Thanks.
  5. MikeA
    If you're talking about seeing them on a document page (and if you're talking about Affinity Publisher): Try first displaying the ruler — Control+R in the Windows version. Then you can drag guidelines out from the top or left edges. Works for me anyway. I find that if Show Guides is OFF, pulling a guideline onto the page turns Show Guides on again.
  6. MikeA
    Thanks. As for locked items: Once objects are locked via Control+L and then de-selected, most of the time they cannot be re-selected by clicking them or drawing a "marquee" around them. But I have found that sometimes they can be re-selected in either of those two ways — but there doesn't seem to be any pattern to when they can, or can't. Of course they can be unlocked in the Layers panel. But when they can't be clicked-on to select them, you can't find them quickly in the Layers panel by pressing Control+K. Makes finding them to unlock them more time-consuming. What are the “rules” for these locked objects — sometimes “making themselves available” for re-selection, and sometimes not?
  7. MikeA
    As I still can't upload screenshots to forum posts or comments I'm going to try a shared link on Google drive and see if that works. Newbie question, I guess... From time to time "ghost" frames appear outside document or master pages. I can't move or delete them. They aren't selectable via the Layers palette. Have I done something inadvertently to make them appear? If they're created by design, what is their purpose? https://drive.google.com/open?id=1z4K75zFoFWjE_-lPfn6-TEDwGumBxcFq
  8. MikeA
    If a text frame is selected with the Move tool File > Place opens a File/Open dialog that defaults to a file type of "Text files (*.txt...)". In this case it also displays *.docx files. And in this case no other file types are shown in the file-types dropdown menu — when the bug has occurred, that is. A Word file isn't a "text file" (IMO). So that "Text files" file-type item seems misnamed. If a text frame is selected with the Text Frame tool File > Place opens a File/Open dialog that defaults to a file type of "Affinity files" — when the bug has occurred. In this case .docx and .txt files are not displayed by default. In this case, the next file-type item in the dropdown menu is "document files" which does not include files of type .docx. This seems like an omission that could be fixed. A Word doc certainly qualifies as a "document," methinks. In this case (again, when the bug has occurred) you can't see *.docx files in the Open dialog unless you scroll through the dropdown file-type menu and select "Text files" which is now near the bottom of the list. But again, as a Word document is not a "text file", the .docx extension should be added to that item in the dropdown menu. But — when I close and re-open Affinity Publisher, the behavior of the Open dialog (following File > Place) changes for a while. Then, File > Place with the Text Frame tool selected defaults to a file type of "All Documents" — including *.docx and *.txt. At some point during the session with the program, however, for whatever reason the default display of file types in the Open menu changes unpredictably. I don't know how to provide precise repro steps, sorry.
  9. MikeA
    I'm long familiar with the master-page concept. Publisher's own ways of doing things, I don't know much about yet. I created a master page with two columns per page and added a text frame for each column. On the document pages, I see these text frames' sizes and positions are locked, which makes sense. The master pages also contain small text frames containing "Page #" (with "#" being a field). I want to remove the page-number information from one of the document pages. When the text frame is selected the status bar indicates that the item is locked and to edit it, I should unlock it. But if I right-click the object it has no Unlock command in its context menu. • What unlock command might the status bar hint be referring to? This appears to be the way to do it... Go to the document page in question. In the Layers palette, right-click the Master page associated with that document page. Select Edit Detached. Make the change to the page in question. Then press the orange Finish bar that appears near the top of the screen. • Is that the right way to do it? Or are there other approaches that are considered better?
  10. MikeA
    @walt.farrell I've just reviewed the course lesson referred to above. The presenter: 1. Starts dragging on-screen with the Artistic Text tool. 2. Lets up on the mouse button, then types a headline. 3. Selects the Move tool and ensures that the new text frame is selected. 4. With the text frame selected: changes its contents' — the newly entered headline's — font and color. 5. Displays the Text Styles panel. • (The panel shows that the new text's paragraph style is [No style].) 6. Presses the menu control for the style Heading 1. • (The resulting menu does contain Update Heading 1.) 7. Clicks Update Heading 1. This updates style Heading 1. So: she did not have to assign the style to the text before she updated it. Is it that the procedures are different in the Mac and Windows versions? Looks like it to me. Or did the procedure change when 1.8 was introduced? That I don't know.
  11. MikeA
    What I observed might be intentional. When you're specifying a formatting change, the program can't know if you want it only to format the "found" text and move on to the next occurrence, or if you want to format it and delete the "found" string. So — safer to leave it alone. I'm glad the \1 workaround exists when Regular Expression is selected.
  12. MikeA
    More playing-around with it . . . An example of when it didn't work: I typed ;h2 (followed by a space) at the start of certain text I'd planned to make into subheadings. Then: Find: ";h2" (followed by a space) (this is a normal search, not a regex search) Replace: (nothing at all) — and format as Heading 2 Click: Replace All Result: the paragraphs in question are styled Heading 2 as expected. The string ";h2" is not deleted. Same result if Regular Expression is set and the find and replacement strings are the same as above. When it did work: Find: ";h2" (plus one space) (regex not set) Replace: (nothing at all) — and no change to text formatting. It also worked in this case: Find: ";h2" (then 1 space) — set "Regular Expression" Replace: "\1" — and format as Heading 2 Click: Replace All Result: the string ";h2" followed by a space was removed AND the paragraphs in question were formatted as Heading 2.
  13. MikeA
    @walt.farrell Alas, the empty replace field isn't working for me. When a 'find' occurs, the replacement field is empty, and I click 'Replace,' the program ignores what's just been found and moves on to the next 'find'.
  14. MikeA
    >> bottom of the Text Styles panel The sheer number of things I'm capable of missing (or incapable of seeing) continues to astonish me. I suppose I could try blaming the sizes of objects in the UI (I'm glad I don't use a 4K monitor or I might not be able to see much of anything in the UI). Agreed — it would be useful to know how (if at all) the versions differ on the two platforms. For now I'm going with user error, but I'll watch that section of the video again, this time without trying to follow the steps, to see if I missed something obvious.
  15. MikeA
    >> bottom of the Text Styles panel The sheer number of things I'm capable of missing (or incapable of seeing) continues to astonish me. I suppose I could try blaming the sizes of objects in the UI (I'm glad I don't use a 4K monitor or I might not be able to see much of anything in the UI). Agreed — it would be useful to know how (if at all) the versions differ on the two platforms. For now I'm going with user error, but I'll watch that section of the video again, this time without trying to follow the steps, to see if I missed something obvious.
  16. MikeA
    Granddaddy: How did you tag my name in that comment earlier in the thread? I gave it a shot in a previous reply by editing my previous reply and adding "@" in front of your name, but that didn't produce a tag or reference. Thanks.
  17. MikeA
    Walt: you've solved it. This is partly user error—mine, in assuming I'd run across a bug—and an apparent difference between what worked in the Mac version in the online course, and what works in the PC version. Either that or I was an idiot and did not follow the online course's steps properly — in which case it's 100% user error and I must now go off to the wilderness and do penance (which is appropriate anyway, considering that we've entered the Age of Social Distancing). The course is Publisher for beginners by a company called Affinity Revolution. They have short tutorials on YouTube and longer classes offered for Affinity programs via their web site. This beginner's class probably wouldn't be helpful for someone who'd already been using Publisher for a while but it's useful for someone like me, who'd never before worked with Publisher. And it was priced very reasonably. As for other operations with styles: Is there such a thing in Publisher as "create new style from current formatting" or simply: create new style?
  18. MikeA
    Walt — this is what I observe in the presenter's video. (She's using the Mac version, probably 1.7 or earlier—it's definitely not 1.8.) As I watch, she: 1. Selects a paragraph. 2. Sets it to NO paragraph style. 3. Formats it manually. 4. Presses the menu arrow for Heading 2. (Equivalent to right-clicking a style name in the Windows version.) 5. The "Update Heading 2" menu item appears within the resulting context menu. 6. She clicks "Update Heading 2" and that style is updated per her manual formatting. When I follow along using the Windows version, and following her steps exactly, I do not see the "Update Heading 2" menu item. It simply isn't in the context menu. In her version, it is in that menu. But perhaps we're not talking about quite the same thing, I dunno. When you say "You need to have the text style applied" do you mean a paragraph style or a character style, or both?
  19. MikeA
    There's a thread here about searching and replacing text that includes the following suggestion: To find and delete text, select "regular expression" In the text within the Find field, don't use parens. Use "\1" alone in the Replace field. This does work. For example I had ;h2\s+ for the "find" expression and "\1" alone for the replacement. All occurrences of ";h2" followed by 1+ space(s) were deleted. Yes, it works, but it seems like a bit of a hack. So... • Is there another approach to execute a global find-and-delete operation throughout a long collection of text in linked text frames? In nearly all of the word processors and text editors I've used, an empty replacement field means: "delete." Is there some reason it shouldn't also mean "delete" in Publisher? (Not meant as a rhetorical question.) • I found that with the cursor at the start of the text, sometimes pressing the Find button caused the cursor to advance to the first "found location," and sometimes the cursor remained at the start of the text. This appears intermittent and I can't predict when it will happen. I'm assuming it is a bug. If it isn't a bug, what would the reason be for the "variable" behavior?
  20. MikeA
    The same thing is occurring as I go through other lessons in this online course. For example, the instructor has provided a sample text file that is inserted into a set of linked text frames. The frames are set up (not linked initially) on the document's master page. Then the text file is placed into the first text frame on a document page. Then the frames are linked together and the text flows throughout the document. The text contains a number of single-line paragraphs that are to be turned into subheadings. The procedure is: • Select a one-line paragraph and highlight it. • Set it to no paragraph style. • Change its size, typeface, and color. • Locate Heading 2 in the text styles list and open its context. • Select Update Heading 2 from the menu. But there isn't an Update Heading 2 item in the context menu. It isn't that the item is there but "greyed-out"; it just isn't there at all. What to do?
  21. MikeA
    I reported this to Serif via email (I wanted to send a screen shot and chose email because I can't add screenshots here due to some forum bug). If anyone has the time to test this, it would be useful to know if anyone else can replicate it. The problem: trying to update an existing paragraph style fails because the "Update <name of style>" command is absent from the menu where it's expected. Procedure: from https://fonts.google.com download the font named Lobster (the one having only a single variant, not the similarly named font having four variants). This should display the font: https://fonts.google.com/?query=lobster (Not my favorite sort of typeface but it's called for in a class I'm taking.) After installing the font: In Affinity Publisher, use the Artistic Text tool to create a small amount of text and format it using the Lobster typeface. Go to the Text Styles panel, locate "Heading 1," and right-click it. If the bug occurs, the menu will not contain Update Heading 1 at all. In my test document I then added text in a new frame, this time using the Text Frame tool. I assigned Arial to the text — and again the Update Heading 1 menu item did not appear. I deleted that text frame, made another one, formatted the text inside it using Arial—and this time the Update Heading 1 menu item did appear. In what way were these two operations different? I have no idea. To keep testing...I added another text frame and used a typeface called Aleo (also downloaded from https://fonts.google.com). With that block of text selected, the Update Heading 1 menu item does appear as expected. This is baffling. Is the disappearing menu item caused by a font problem of some sort? Or is there something I'm doing wrong in assigning formatting to text?
  22. MikeA
    Dan C.: Thanks for the explanation. Permit me to suggest an idea I'm stealing from Capture One. (Thanks also to Granddaddy for your reply.) Coding an improved Search feature probably means a lot of work. But perhaps this requires less work: In the keyboard-shortcuts dialog, add a 'save' button to make a file with a table or list of all commands that can be bound to keystrokes[*]. Include whatever shortcuts are already bound to commands. The program then launches the system default browser and displays the temporary file, which will be easy to search within the browser. The same output filename can be used each time to avoid a buildup of temporary files. Each execution of the 'save' command overwrites the previous such file. Or — save the collection of commands + keyboard shortcuts as a PDF file, then launch the system's default PDF viewer (if none, then in a browser). Or — have the program save the information in an .afpub file, then open the it as a new document within Affinity Publisher itself (as before—use the same output filename repeatedly). In short: a solution that could be useful until there's a better Search feature. Then again, a save-list-of-commands-and-shortcuts-to-file feature would be useful as a permanent addition to the program. ___ * The frosting on the cake: Provide an option to organize the output by menu –or– to list the commands alphabetically within the output file.
  23. MikeA
    My first goal in learning Affinity Publisher is to make a few small books of photographs—my own, and friends' photographs. After seeing a photographer's enthusiastic endorsements of a service called MagCloud (a division of Blurb) I decided to give that company a try. They have packages that enable you to make very short books at low cost—a good way to experiment. From what I've seen of the photographer's samples on the MagCloud site, they do a good job, including with black and white images. MagCloud doesn't offer a template in Publisher format, but creating probably wouldn't be difficult even for a newbie like me. My major point of confusion has to do with their color space requirements. My source images will be exported as 8- or 16-bit TIFF files from a raw converter (Capture One), likely converted to sRGB—I don't know if Adobe RGB would be overkill in this case. Friends' photographs will all be JPEGs—again, sRGB. MagCloud states that they expect RGB image files, but insist that all typography must be done "in CMYK color space" (their wording). I don't know why they insist on it. After all, they also say their process converts the entire PDF submitted to them to CMYK before they print the work. How to proceed here? If I start with a new Affinity Publisher document set to CMYK, what happens to RGB images placed within it? Does Publisher immediately convert them to CMYK? Or do they remain in the RGB color space? (I know already that Publisher has an option, when exporting to PDF, to convert to CMYK while still preserving the images' existing color spaces. Or would it be better to stick with RGB all the way through and simply blend colors using the CMYK sliders within Publisher*? MagCloud's own tech support people don't seem to be able to explain these things very well, so I haven't heard yet why they insist on CMYK for just the text within the source document. It might have to do with a need to specify something other than "hard" black for the typography. Apparently the four-color process doesn't like "hard" black. But the reasons for their requirement remain a bit murky. (They also say they don't support spot colors. This also makes me wonder what rendering intent I should choose, assuming Publisher has that option during exporting.) - - - - - - - * But surely setting color values that way isn't the same as converting a document to CMYK.
  24. MikeA
    That's a great tip, about double-clicking the side handles. I've been wondering about that. Had I but looked at the status bar... Thanks again.
  25. MikeA
    How strange. I can't imagine what... well never mind what I can or can't imagine. Seems to be a bug. And you're right — I enabled the Only snap to visible objects option and the snapping now appears to work. I would not have thought of this; the column guides don't strike me as 'visible objects' — but I won't argue with success. Thanks very much. And thanks also to walt.farrell.
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