ludovicchabant

Here's an example .docx file, by the way. Test Affinity Publisher.docx

I'm trying to separate "working on the text" and "working on the layout", where I can start doing the layout (especially text styles) before the text is completely finished, and reimport the text when it gets updated. It's also useful for sending "work in progress" PDFs to people to review along the way. How do people typically work when in a team of 2 or more people? Surely the layout person doesn't have to wait for the writer to be 100% finished, with the text locked, before starting to work on the graphic design, text styles, and general page arrangement? Even if I was to work in a "waterfall" way (writing first, layout second), I'm still wondering how that works for things like magazines, for instance. People using InDesign would typically have a template for a magazine, with all the graphic style of the magazine "baked in", and you just need to import the articles' text into it: it will automatically adopt the chosen graphic design (by matching incoming text style names to the style names in the template), so that it's almost a one-click process (barring any text flow issues). How do you do this in Affinity Publisher? FYI, deleting the text before re-importing the file doesn't change anything. If you do a "Place..." with a text frame selected, Publisher already removes all the text for you automatically before placing the new text, so that part's working as intended.

I'm still trying to understand how one can re-import text in a publisher document, so I tried with Google Docs on macOS this time: Make a test Google Doc, and export it as .docx. Import in Publisher. Text styles look OK. Change one of the styles (like, say, Heading 1) to have red text instead of black. Edit the Google Doc and re-export it as .docx. Re-import the new file into the same text frame. The text disappears. I expected the text to reimport, preserving the red Heading 1 text. It looks like all the text was re-imported with all text styles applied directly at the character level (so none of the text is just "Normal" or "Heading 1"... it's all "Normal + <lots of overrides>"), which is wrong IMHO, but also for some reason the character colour was set to "none", making all text invisible. I'm using Affinity Publisher 1.7.3 on macOS 10.14.6.

Hi there -- I'm pretty sure these are bugs. Note that I'm using LibreOffice because I don't own Microsoft Office. Steps to reproduce: Make a document in LibreOffice using a couple of styles, like Header 1 and 2. Save the document as .docx (since that's the only format Publisher understands so far). Place the document in a Publisher project. First bug: see that the styles imported from the .docx file don't look OK: Heading 1 paragraphs have a bullet. Second bug: notice however that some of the hierarchy between styles is wrong. Heading 1 and 2 inherit from Heading 3, which isn't the case in LibreOffice (they're all siblings, inheriting from a base Heading style) Modify the Heading 1 style in Publisher, making it red or centered or whatever. Go back to LibreOffice. Add a new paragraph. Save to .docx again. Switch to Publisher again, and re-import that .docx. Third bug: notice that the style changes in Publisher are lost (Heading 1 isn't red/centered/etc. anymore). Fourth bug: now Heading 3 is by itself (no parent), and Heading 1 and 2 now inherit from Heading 4 for some obscure reason. These steps were specifically done with Publisher 1.7.3, and LibreOffice 6.3.3.2. The bugs happen pretty much the same under macOS and Windows. Thanks for any help.

Thanks. Yes it was understandable. But it didn't work for me. It seems that for some styles, Publisher indeed creates a numbered duplicate (in which case your work around works), but for some other styles like "Heading 1", "Heading 2", etc... it will actually overwrite that style, in which case the Publisher style is lost as far as I can tell. I don't own Microsoft Word so I can't totally test if this is a problem with LibreOffice's .docx export, but I was able to reproduce this problem by using Microsoft's Word online app and downloading the .docx from there (I assume this would be the same .docx file as if I had used the desktop Word app).

At this point I would be super happy if Publisher could even do that when importing Word documents (apparently it's not implemented yet). Throw in support for other text editors like the OpenOffice/LibreOffice format, and that would solve my problems. There's no need for an Adobe InCopy alternative until way down the line IMHO.

Bumping this thread -- is there a way to import a .docx file without it overwriting all the styles setup in Publisher? I'm using LibreOffice and not MS Word to create .docx files.... copy/pasting doesn't make styles work from LibreOffice (it seems to "flatten" all styles like RTF). It feels silly to have to rely on owning, using, and opening Word to update the text in a layout. Surely there's a way to make it work when importing a file? Is there another format that works better? Thanks

Funnily enough, I just started to use Affinity Publisher for TTRPG stuff too. It is indeed extremely promising, and I'm happy with most of what I've seen so far, but I strongly agree with the @Dee's first 2 points: I'm not sure if "we need the styles to map consistently" meant that it does it inconsistently right now? I can't make any styles map on import ever. It's a big waste of time when I re-import a text file. That's my #1 feature request by far for Publisher. Supporting Markdown would be a nice bonus indeed. Most Markdown editors support a quick RTF/DOCX export, though, so it's not a huge deal for now. My #2 feature request is being able to link to a text file, as opposed to importing it. I imagine Publisher would mark "outdated" text frames with some icon, and you can one-click-reimport the text without having to navigate for the 100th time to the correct file on disk. Assuming the text style remapping works, this means that the layout person only needs to fix, well, layout issues when the text changes.