MikeA
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Posts posted by MikeA
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I'm not referring to an Affinity tutorial video made by Serif, but to an online course that is visible only to people who've paid for the classes.
So I thought a workaround would be to place guidelines manually onto the master page, aligning them with the columns' boundaries. Then, in drawing text frames in document pages I could simply have them snap to the previously drawn guidelines.
But, same kind of result when trying to draw guides on the master page. The guidelines align (snap) precisely to the top, bottom, and outside edges of each column. They do not snap to the inside edges of each column (adjacent to the gutter). This is repeatable so I don't think it would be necessary to upload a Publisher document — and I'm unable to do that anyway in the forum, due to some forum software error. If other people cannot replicate this in the Windows version, if the forum software continues to have problems I suppose I could upload a file via email to Serif's tech support.
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(Apologies if this has been reported. Searches didn't turn it up.)
I'm taking a for-beginners online class in Affinity Publisher. The presenter uses a Mac and a pre-1.8 version of the software. I'm using Windows version 1.8.
One lesson includes creating two columns, with gutter, on a master page. Then on document pages, you are to draw two frames per page with the Frame Text tool, snapping each frame to a column.
On the presenter's machine, I can see the text frame snapping to all four sides of both columns. But when I draw out the text frames, the snapping happens this way:
1. Snap to top and bottom of both columns: Yes
2. Snap to left (outside) edge of left-hand column: Yes
3. Snap to right (outside) edge of right-hand column: Yes
4. Snap to right (inside) edge of left-hand column, adjacent to gutter: NO
5. Snap to left (inside) edge of right-hand column, adjacent to gutter: NOOn the presenter's screen, colored guidelines appear temporarily at locations 4 and 5 to indicate that the frame text tool has reached the precise snapping point. On my screen, no guidelines appear at those two positions.
Compared with what's happening on the presenter's screen, the two "NO" results were unexpected. Is there a snapping setting pertaining to columns that I need to enable?
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I see posts about this problem fairly often in the Capture One group on Facebook. If you're using Windows and if you're using its built-in image viewer, you're examining your images in a non-color-managed program. For an image viewer on Windows I use the freeware called Irfanview (irfanview.com), which is color-managed. I liked the program enough that I registered it even though I'm not using it for commercial purposes—I'm in and out of that program scores of times each week. If you download it, I recommend also downloading and installing its (free) extensions package.
And if you're not using these programs on a Windows machine, apologies for the unnecessary reply and feel free to use this comment for wrapping fish.
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Now that I try it both with and without Shift, I see that you're right. Shift is interfering and I will rely less on it from now on. Thanks for uploading that video—explained it very well.
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I've been taking a for-the-beginner online class in Affinity Publisher and have been following the presenter's suggestions about holding down Shift as I drag an object within a document, until the object reaches the center of the document. Then a colored guideline appears temporarily and I can snap the object to it. This works well if I'm moving objects vertically but not so well if I'm moving them horizontally. It's very easy—far too easy—for them to jump suddenly upward or downward during the horizontal moves. So when I ran across the Align Center and Align Middle controls in objects' context menus, I decided to start using those controls instead for precision. I have the feeling that if anything using the Wacom pen would be even less precise for this purpose than using a mouse.
• Is there a command that permits you to center an object both horizontally and vertically in a single stroke, as it were? As I go through the class exercises I'm finding I need to do it often enough that a single command, handling both positioning commands at once, would be super-convenient.
• Is there a way rapidly to center an object within another object without having to use the mouse? I've tried using the keyboard to "nudge" objects, but I find that when I do this, there's no visual feedback that I can see—no temporary guidelines that appear to mark centers or edges of objects (nor guidelines that appear to indicate the vertical or horizontal centers of the document itself).
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"Needs work." I hope Serif are thinking about improving this in the future. I guess for now it's impossible to locate a particular keyboard shortcut that way. Perhaps they could consider the approach used in Capture One: The keyboard shortcuts dialog has its own Search feature. You can type the name of a command and the program displays any matching command names, along with their keyboard shortcuts. The feature has its flaws but most of the time it's very convenient.
>> chocolate teapot
Permit me to steal that.
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1 hour ago, carl123 said:
If you are getting an "error code" 7
It's a problem with the forum not you. Many people are affected.
It's currently being investigated
There's no error message. The 'select a file' dialog box appears, I select the JPEG in question and hit Enter. Thereafter: nothing. Not that I like bugs, but I'm glad it isn't just at my end. : ) Thanks.
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New user (Windows version 1.8). I'm trying to understand how the Search feature works in the Preferences dialog. For example, I know there's a keyboard shortcut for Spread Setup but I've forgotten what it is. In the Search field, I type spread, then press Enter. Nothing happens.
Then I type Spread Setup and press Enter. Nothing happens.
Just to see what will happen, I type Tool. The dialog box changes color a bit and the Tools preference item "lights up." I add an "s", making the search term Tools. Result: The highlighted Tools item in the dialog is no longer "lit up".
Then I thought: Maybe I need to select Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts first, then use Search. But when I begin typing into the Search field, the display reverts to the main screen of Preferences and I'm back to square one; there's no search result.
Clearly I'm not using the Search field correctly. But what's the correct use?
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Thanks, haakoo, for the animated GIF. I really need to figure out why my screen-shot uploads aren't working here.
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I'm new to the program (Windows version). I'm taking an online course in Affinity Publisher and something mentioned in the section on color swatches occurred to me when I read your question. I tried it and it worked—though there might be more efficient ways. There are some times when this fails, and I'm not sure why yet. At any rate, I got this procedure to work some of the time, as a test:
Created a rectangle and assigned a color to it (picked at random).
Duplicated the rectangle (for later testing).
Made sure both rectangles were un-selected (otherwise I might see only a local change and not a global one).
Went to the Swatches tab and from its menu selected Create Palette from Document > As Document Palette.
Once the palette had been created:
Made sure the new palette was selected in the palette tab's drop-down menu.
In the new palette's tab, located and selected the color I wanted to change, right-clicked, and selected Make Global from the context menu.
Then to see if a global color change could be executed:
Double-clicked the color swatch I'd just made into a global swatch. A small color dialog appeared.
For simplicity's sake, selected the HSL Color Wheel from the dialog's drop-down menu.
Picked a color from the wheel.Result: both rectangles' colors updated immediately. This suggests to me that the same could be done if you select one of the "modes" with sliders, so that you can select precise values.
Now I have to figure out why this sometimes doesn't work. When it fails, there must be some specific procedure I'm doing wrong.
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If this problem with uploading screen shots persists, is there some other way to include a JPEG or PNG file as an attachment to a post here? The "Insert other media" command refers to "insert existing attachment"—how does one upload a file from the local machine so that it becomes an "existing attachment"? (Sorry about the newbie question.)
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Unfortunately, my screen shot upload failed again. I've emailed it to the company in hopes they can add it manually. But it sounds as if it's a known issue.
I would echo Michail's question: what is the benefit? I wouldn't call it a deal-breaker...just something of an oddity. At the very least it demonstrates that you've made an odd mistake—say, the family cat walked across the keyboard and paused momentarily on the space bar when you weren't looking.
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1. Draw a text frame with the Frame Text tool.
2. Type some text into the frame. Make it short enough not to force the line to wrap.
3. With the cursor to the right of the right-most character, press and hold the space bar to insert multiple spaces.Result: Eventually the cursor advances past the right edge of the text frame and keeps heading to the right—until you type a non-space character. Then the line wraps. Not that anyone would likely do this as part of creating a document...but it does seem anomalous. : )
(Hoping the screen-shot upload works this tim
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6 minutes ago, Lagarto said:
But opposing the plugin dependency is also what made InDesign big at the time: it simply just blasted Quark off the business by offering everything in-built, and by delivering a perfectly crafted scripting API and open plugin interface that allowed designers and their programming-skilled partners to do amazing things without (at least recurring) charge.
I got out of that business before InDesign became a "thing" and never used it.
Adobe opposed a plugin dependency — yet supported plugin development by providing an open plugin interface? I'm not clear what that means.
I can imagine certain users being downright delighted to be able to script home-grown solutions. I can also imagine plenty of users wanting to do their design work without also having to become developers. In which case, the presence of third-party tools — someone else does the heavy lifting development-wise — is a huge plus. As for recurring charge: Did plugin developers for QXP (or other page-composition programs) also go to some kind of subscription model?
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3 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:
Consider, for example, the possibility that I want to find all "i.e." and italicize them. Using a standard Find/Replace I could Find "i.e." and replace with Character Style: emphasis. If an empty "replace" box meant delete in all cases, then I would have to replace "i.e." with "i.e." + emphasis. WIth the current approach the user avoids having to type the string twice, or copy/paste.
Matter of preference, I suppose. I would gladly trade off the minor inconvenience of having to re-type "i.e." if what came with it was the ability to leave the replacement string empty and thus successfully delete the "found" string in a single pass. If that isn't the design, so be it, and the "(.*) and "\1" approach is effective instead.
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21 minutes ago, Lagarto said:
In that scenario, you'd need to run the regex tagging procedure multiple times.
Permit me to offer: ugh.
23 minutes ago, Lagarto said:But considering the fact that all page layout programs currently support more or less directly e.g. Word tables and end and footnotes, plain text based procedures are quite impractical in situations where the text uses such features.
Point taken.
23 minutes ago, Lagarto said:I do not think that this is at all a question of underlying architecture. It is just a question of allowing saving of mutliple regex expressions as a saved task that can be run in one go. Nothing but a UI and serialization thing.
I mis-spoke a bit. I was thinking about an underlying architecture that permits the development of third-party extensions. I don't think we can reasonably expect a given program's authors to have either the time or inclination to code every possible new feature someone might need. As Quark showed only too well, sometimes their own implementation of a feature was not so good, and along came someone else with a far better approach — and users were willing to pay for the extensions if they provided functionality not available in the program "proper" (or if the principal authors hadn't done a good job of it). Some extensions to QXP turned out to be ridiculous, buggy, and decidedly overpriced. But others were of the "can't live without it" variety.
Word's an example. A lot of people loathed and despised its ribbon-bar — especially when Microsoft made it impossible to switch back to classic view. I worked at Microsoft at the time and, trust me, a WHOLE lot of people who worked there absolutely hated that ribbon bar. Outlook's and Excel's ribbon bars weren't so awful. Word's was bloody-awful. But, when the Office group said "jump" the company as a whole pretty much had to respond "Ok — how high?" and there was nothing to be done about it. Then along came certain "MVP" developers with inexpensive add-ons that enabled people to restore classic view when they wanted it. It was a huge "plus" and I bought one of those things the first I heard of it. "Extensibility" is a good thing.
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5 minutes ago, Lagarto said:
Sorry, do not know. I noticed that InDesign speaks different language to some extent (it is also named directly as GREP so users familiar with that "dialect" are probably quite capable with InDesign). That means that I cannot directly use regex that works with InDesign. But yes, $ means end of paragraph, it just needed to be appended with "?" to actually limit the search to paragraph per paragraph based search. In InDesign this is achieved by \r.
That's interesting. I wonder what would happen if "$" were simply omitted from the regular expression search (in AP, I mean). Something to try later on...
I guess it explains more about expressions such as (.*?$). It caught my eye because if I were doing searches and replacements with Perl regular expressions it would be typical for the "$" to appear outside the ")" — or a line boundary would be specified as "\n" and might or might not appear within the parens — depends on the situation.
All these different approaches to regular expression use ... it's the kind of thing about which some cynic remarked: The wonderful thing about standards is, you can have as many of 'em as you want.
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>> [walt.farrell] The version you showed, with a captured string and a Replacement of \1 with formatting would work.
From what I'm reading earlier in the thread, I guess the program is designed to do this when the replacement string is empty:
• Find a paragraph starting with "<t>" or some other tag.
• Leave the "<t>" (or whatever it is) in place and assign, to the entire paragraph, the paragraph style named in the replacement instructionI tried this with the Word "clone" program I have here and it does work that way. That's a bit of a surprise. I would expect that if your instruction is "delete the 'found' string" — then it's to be deleted! I'm trying to think of a use case in which I would specify deletion and yet not want the deletion to occur. So far nothing's coming to mind. Well, if it's designed that way, so it goes. And then using (.*) and "\1" makes sense after all.
In AP's regex parlance, does ^ mean start of paragraph and $ mean end of paragraph?
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>> You could also import all chapters as separate documents into the same layout, but is there a specific reason to keep them as independent documents?
When I worked at a shop where customers supplied files in multiple formats, we didn't have the luxury of specifying precise file formatting or other preparation. We had to work with the material as-is. It's a perfectly understandable and sensible approach on the authors' parts to prepare books — and especially newsletter articles — as single files. I doubt many of them would have been happy with us if we'd said "We need you to go back and convert everything into a single large file." We wouldn't have been thrilled to have to concatenate all of the material into a single large file either. (I don't remember our ever having done that.)
In my opinion the software shouldn't force users to work in a given way and only that way. The developers might find it reasonable, but it doesn't do much for users with varying needs.
>> Also, a general note on (lack of) support for tags when importing text files: aren't tag based import filters basically a plain text based feature?
They were when I was working with XPress Tags files. (I don't know how it works with InDesign.) At that shop we received a lot of plain text material that needed formatting. Because plain text can be heavily — and very rapidly — manipulated outside a page composition or word-processing program via scripting, it can be (not always "is," but "can be") a highly efficient approach. I'm talking about scores of files updated via script in a few seconds. Perl and other such tools are very quick.
>> If so, they are not practical as there is plenty of stuff in Word format that is worth to be imported directly
They might sound impractical. But, run a complex script routine on dozens of input files in seconds rather than minutes. It might well change one's opinion about what is and isn't practical.
We could never predict how customer data would be supplied. If it arrived in some esoteric format that no program supported, we would have to strip it down to plain text and "massage" the text — say, by adding XPress Tags — for import into the page composition program. Those jobs became rather expensive for the customer due to the additional processing time.
And a customer-supplied Word file, even if ideal in some respects, might contain any number of problems that all had to be corrected via search/replace or 100% manual formatting. Word alone isn't, of itself, necessarily a saving grace.
>> Batch-based regex support with formatting criteria would allow much the same without requiring any scripting skills, and that would be kind of a minor revolutionary thing and I really hope this will happen at some point.
It would certainly move the program along, yes. An entire automated formatting routine stored for immediate access and use would be excellent.
>> It should be fairly easy to implement, compared to creating a scripting API with full access to document object model.
I hope for users' sakes that the underlying architecture makes that feasible. Would it be easy to implement if there aren't any "hooks" for it in the present design? Possibly not. (I'm not doubting that AP has a suitable architecture; I don't know anything about what's underneath the bonnet.) Someone from AP, replying to mail I sent, noted "It's early days yet." I do get that. They're just getting started...
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I was talking with a guy who's written extensively about publishing tools. He's a bit miffed about AP's lack of InDesign or QuarkXPress-style tag reading during text import. It might be that AP doesn't plan to try going head-to-head with InDesign in all aspects of the publishing business, such as book pagination. Absent a tagging system in AP, QXP and ID will remain more desirable. For shorter documents not requiring automation — could be a far different story. AP's graphics-related features are very impressive.
If a book contains 20 chapters with 6 paragraph styles per chapter plus two kinds of "hard" formatting (italics and boldface), you're looking at 160 separate instance of typing out the regular expressions and manually entering the style assignments into the Replace dialog. That strikes me as a lot of work that screams for automation. In the absence of a batch operations feature or at least the ability to save search/replace instructions for quick recall — doing this correctly requires that you make zero errors when you're typing the instructions out 160 times. Otherwise you end up having to undo a mistake and re-do it.
That's why the idea of using Word as an intermediate format appealed to me...in theory at least. Tagged text -> Perl script -> HTML file -> import into Word (with the CSS instructions actually creating the necessary paragraph styles) -> save as .DOCX -> import into AP document. Admittedly it'd be a workaround and not a solution, until a read-tagging-during-import feature is added.
As for something like this:
Find: <t>(.*?$) Replace: \1, format with Title
Could you give yourself much less to type, repetitively, by doing this sort of thing:
Find: <t> Replace: (with nothing) and format current paragraph with style named Title
Concerning the other replacements — e.g., Find: <i>(.*)</i> and Replace: \1 (format with italic) — I would suggest non-greedy matches for those rare situations in which a greedy match would give you some grief. Thus:
Find: <i>(.*?)</i> Replace: \1 (format with italic)
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>> No, I just mixed the things.
So when you specify that a string is to be deleted and you're assigning a paragraph style at the same time, it does delete the text string?
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»» you can still import your custom tagged plain text (or even html tags) and then use simply Search and Replace to remove the tags and apply equivalent paragraph and character formatting to text
That would become a lot of work if we're talking about a long document with complex formatting — the kind of work I'd hope to avoid. I've done that kind of thing in the past when I had to. It was tedious and time-consuming. In such cases it's as if the computer isn't helping so much as hindering — creating more work for you rather than less. When you can run scripting within a program to help automate such a task, that helps ease some of the pain.
»» There might be a bug in Publisher as it currenly does NOT remove the tag even if the Replace field is left empty, if the replacement contains a style criterion
Sounds like a bug, all right.
If you want to be rid of the tags entirely — when formatting during the replacements is not an issue: Assuming the program supports character classes and "greedy" matches, this should work (not tested on any real-world document in AP, but I've done this kind of thing many times in the past):
Search for:
<[^>]+?>That is: find "<", then 1+ of anything that isn't ">", up to — but no further than — the next occurrence of ">" ... and for "replace" use: nothing at all. This would kill ALL of the elements at once — <p>, <p class="xyz">, <h1>, <ul>, et al. The expression could become more complicated if you also want to remove all closing tags and/or those like "<br/>" in a single pass.
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I tried a couple of Word "clone" programs. LibreOffice was buggy...won't take the time to troubleshoot. Uninstalled it. Next was a demo version of an inexpensive program called SoftMaker Office TextMaker. No bugs so far. (I know, I know — give it time...) Next step: Small HTML file containing CSS definitions such as:
p.test {}Right — just "{ }". Absent the braces, this doesn't work. The test document contains such text as:
<p class="test">something here</p>
This does create a paragraph style "test" in the TextMaker file. Don't know yet about character styles. Having already devised tagging schemes for plain text that became XHTML files, I can see that it wouldn't be difficult to do the same again. The scripting (Perl) is a bit tedious, but once it's done it's done and then you have your HTML file. Open it in the Word (clone) program, import the styles of a previously set-up .DOCX file, and this might be workable after all. Well, for self-authored text. Tediously re-tagging someone else's manuscript would be...ugh.
How AP treats incoming Word styles is another matter. No clue on that yet. And no clue yet whether AP will accept — or choke on — .docx files created in TextMaker.
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54 minutes ago, Lagarto said:
Otherwise InDesign's and Publisher's inherent support for applying complex formatting for coherently structured highlighted catalog-kind of paragraph separated text using the (ideally looped) "Apply P1Style, then Next Styles" commands are quite effective as they work without any kind of tagging.
Hmm. Hadn't even thought of whether AP's "next style" command would be effective for this purpose. Yes, if that worked during text import it would be handy (assuming that's what you meant).
e.)
Publisher 1.8 (Windows): text frame tool not snapping to all column guides
in V1 Bugs found on Windows
Posted
A few minutes after I wrote my previous reply, I found that the snapping did begin working at least on document pages. Just what I did to make it start working, I don't know. Will it continue working in this document? No ... now only a few minutes later it has stopped working.
This kind of "Now you see it, now you don't" bug can drive a person to despair. I have just run across an intermittent bug whereby formatted text cannot be used to update an existing text style—the "Update <name-of-style>" menu item is absent from its expected location within the target style's drop-down menu. I am becoming dismayed by the number of intermittent bugs I'm running across. Trying to understand how to work around them is consuming more and more time.
>> I can certainly snap to column guides placed on masterpages within a regular page,on all sides of each column.
As I say: At first the snapping didn't work. Then it worked for a few minutes. Now it doesn't work again.