sfriedberg

There is a well-established bug with the Glyph browser and "math" fonts. When trying to display a math font, the glyphs are unreadably small, even with the largest setting available through the hamburger menu. However, I don't believe Gabriola is a "math" font. If it is triggering this bug, that's worth noting for Serif so they can track down exactly which OpenType feature(s) is responsible.

If the field to be replaced is at fixed locations on the page, then the master page works fine. If the field to be replaced occurs at 100 different places in the text flow, then master pages are of no help whatsoever. You might remember back about 35 years ago, when corporate data processing and customer relationship management had a hybrid child where it was "the thing" to send all your customers these obnoxiously customized sales letters. The writers would find really contorted ways to include your personal name and/or address in the body of the text just so their DP department could print off 100,000 letters each with a customer's first name repeated about six times per page. Fortunately, the fad for that is long over. But there is still a need for long-format documents to have fields replaced throughout the text. Lots and lots of business contracts and legal filings have boilerplate sections that need <Plaintiff> replaced with "John Smith", or <Product> replaced with "Illudium Q-86 Explosive Space Modulator". You do not want to manually walk through a bunch of find/replace operations on this stuff. You want to do exactly what you do for Data Merge: prepare a file with field-value replacements, do your QC and proofreading on the contents of that file, then process the boilerplate base document with the replacements file.

@larrystuartjr I know exactly what you are talking about, and at the moment Affinity Publisher doesn't have a good way to handle that. Today's version of Data Merge is targeting things like tickets, or completely repetitive catalog pages, where the merge fields appear once per replacement. Publisher really doesn't support custom (user-defined) fields which you could scatter at will throughout your document, so Data Merge can't integrate with what's not there. The workaround of "just use find/replace" is all the more annoying when you have a bunch of replacements to do, because the Affinity suite find/replace doesn't remember previous substitutions and totally lacks any way of saving/loading a group of substitutions for quick application.

I seem to recall something to that effect, but cannot find where I (think I) read it.

I agree completely and mentioned essentially the same thing back in October in this thread. I have some CorelDRAW files from which I generate four different types of output of the same content, for a variety of purposes. I do this by turning layers on and off. Some of them are global layers associated with odd number pages (e.g., cut marks), others are per-page layers (e.g., patterned fill).

I'm not sure why you think that would help better than an explanation. The only Publisher template file I have where I use them, I have four top level groups: Highlight, Math, Text, and Table. Under Highlight, I have master page header and footer paragraph styles and most heading styles, all inheriting a common font family from the group. Math has a hodgepodge of character styles needed to format inline math expressions, again all inheriting a (different) common font family from the group. Text is where most of the action is, with both paragraph and character styles, again all inheriting (yet another) common font family from the group. Unless your needs fall exactly in line with my needs, I don't think those would do you any particular good at all, even as an example. Frankly, I have not done anything with text style groups which could not be done with a character or paragraph text style, because C and P text styles can be based on either C or P text styles, and I'm not sure there is any such group-only feature. This is what Petar was getting at a few weeks ago. You can't apply a group style, so that actually makes them less capable than paragraph or character styles.

Completely agree that most items in the Affinity suite Layers panel are not layers. However, it's not unreasonable to display the hierarchy of layers and objects all together in a single tree. Many graphics apps do just that, and the result is not really significantly different than Affinity's Layers panel. However, I don't believe that all layers should be global. I frequently need an organizational tool that is local to a page and not simply a group of groups of objects. I am entirely happy with having every object belong to some layer (reassignment to a different layer being possible at any time). When, at some point in the future, we get scripting, you will understand why giving every object a well-defined layer is an important thing. Absolutely. CorelDRAW has both page layers and global layers, and I use them both extensively. CD doesn't have any real notion of master pages, but it does optionally support odd and even page layouts, where global layers can be configured to appear on one or both facings. [Added in edit] In the Affinity suite, I could see the utility of three sets of layers. Truly global layers. Master layers. Page layers. All three sets applicable to the current page would appear in the Layers panel, where their stacking order (Layers > Arrange) could be modified, their visibility turned on or off, etc. Affinity would have to sort out how things are presented. If master layers are presented the way master objects currently are, you'd be able to put page layers above or below the set of master layers, but not interleave them. I could see using an additional master page to contain a set of "global" layers, but as noted above assigning that second master page to every body page becomes tedious quickly. Better to have an option for truly global layers.

Nearly a year later, I have a tip to relate. This technique was not working for me on a particular document. Specifically, adjacent paragraphs with pinned tables and/or diagrams were overlapping. I tracked it down to setting a Exactly leading on the paragraph style. When paragraph leading is set to either Default or "At least" the intended leading, then things behave properly, at least with baseline grid set to the intended leading. Presumably an Exactly leading disregards the height of all objects in the paragraph. Knowing about this could save some time and frustration. More detail: I had a group of paragraph styles with font size 12pt and leading Exactly 15pt. The paragraph style in question inherited both properties from the group.

@Krout I am with you all the way. I have a company-supplied machine with Windows 10 (fancy-schmancy Aero/theme features turned off) and a personal Windows 7 machine (which will remain that way as long as I can manage it). On the Windows 7 machine, I've modified the start menu shortcuts for the Affinity suite apps with the unsupported --no-dwm-warning command line parameter. This works fine for me, although you have to launch the Affinity apps from the start menu; you cannot click on an Affinity file to launch the corresponding app on W7. We can place a certain amount of responsibility at the feet of Microsoft, as they did not allow DWM and Aero to be separated in Windows 7. It's the DWM functionality that Affinity wants to access, IIRC.

I ran into this myself a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to create a new style group and move some styles into the group. Nope. Have to recreate the styles directly as members of the group. Inconvenient. [Added in edit] Perhaps I should be explicit that I am talking about text (paragraph/character) styles, not object styles.

Hey @Fdfd, at least on artboards which are the same size, paste in place seems to work for me. Select content on the source artboard, copy/cut, select the destination artboard in the layers panel, paste. The content is placed at the same location in the destination artboard as it had in the source artboard. If you are selecting the destination artboard by clicking somewhere within it, that's going to throw things off. If you cut and paste between artboards of different sizes, I don't know what you get.

+10 Object styles are one of my most heavily used features in CorelDRAW, and no, Symbols are not even remotely a substitute when dealing with different shapes that need the same stroke, fill, line endings, etc., consistently throughout the document. In fact, in a document I am working on right now, I have a myriad of little artboards with somewhat cryptic looking graphs. It is an incredible waste of time to visit all the artboards, open up all the groups, select all the lines, just to make a consistent change of line width. In CorelDRAW, I would create one graphic style, assign it to all those lines (actually, I would do two: one for the segments without arrowheads and one for those with, but even then I'd arrange for the properties of the former to be inherited by the latter), and then change all the related lines in the entire document by changing one graphic style property. Diagram-02413.svg Frankly, I remain somewhat baffled that the Affinity Suite only provides "preset behavior" for what it calls object or graphic styles. Having graphic styles behave like text styles is pretty much standard across the industry. Even LibreOffice Draw, which I do not consider an especially capable vector graphics application, does this perfectly well. Having said that, in the Affinity Suite graphic styles have the potential to be much more powerful than any other application I currently use. Because you could capture not just basic stroke and fill properties, but the entire Appearance panel and Effects as well.

Can you post a sample document that has this problem, so people here can look at it closely?

Not for everyone. There is a long tradition of using the baseline grid to control baselines for all text lines. Back in the days of real cast lead leading, if you had an image or ad insert of variable height, you would want the text following the insert to resume aligned with solid copy text in adjacent columns or pages. This is totally different from the use of a grid to facilitate snapping in a WYSIWG document processor. When using a baseline grid, it is expected that paragraph leading for all paragraph styles in use will be an even multiple of the baseline grid spacing. Indeed, as you have observed, the baseline grid enforces that result in practice, regardless of the leading settings for your paragraph styles. To allow some nuance with larger-than-normal header spacing, the baseline grid spacing is sometimes set to 1/2 or 1/3 of the standard body paragraph leading. It is either a bug, or a feature, depending on your particular requirements, that fractional baseline grid spacing allows text baselines to become mis-aligned with solid copy text in adjacent columns or pages. If you consider it a bug, then leave baseline grid spacing equal to the standard body paragraph leaving, and give up nuanced amounts of leading. Or turn off baseline grid. For some types of objects in AffPub, you can set "ignore baseline grid" which is sort of analogous to "ignore wrap text". If you are unhappy with baseline grid interaction with paragraph style leading, just wait until you struggle with the interaction of baseline grid and tables.

And the problem is amplified when Serif doesn't give us the ability to control which drive/directory/folder is used. I want to control where stuff is stored on my machine. Downloading three copies of stuff and having it all stashed on the (deliberately!) limited C drive is an unnecessary, and unpleasant, experience.