planetbuck

Well I think I solved this on my own. Crashes were happening when I imported text and then scrolled through pages, looking for the right page to put it on. Possibly something to do with if you're holding a whole bunch of text and you roll over a text block, Publisher tries to show you what the text would look like if placed in the block, with the block's specs ... ??? Anyway when I avoided doing any rollovers while holding text, the problem went away. Now I'm happily working on the project.

I just upgraded to Publisher 1.8. When I open an existing file and start to import text, the program either hangs up or crashes ... sometimes right away, sometimes after a handful of imports. Help! I'm on a very tight timeframe. Could I somehow go back to version 1.7, which didn't have this problem?

Related question, or maybe the same question: When I'm ready to send a document to press, I export to pdf, then I've usually used Acrobat Pro, advanced features, to look at the pdf and see what inks are printing where ... so I can check for wrong overprints, color builds instead of solid blacks, unwanted spot colors, etc. Now that I'm on Mac Catalina and using Affinity, is there any way of doing this within Affinity, without purchasing Acrobat Pro?

Maybe you text experts can help with this question. When I import text into Publisher, say from a Word doc or a txt file, all the apostrophes turn into straight-up-and-down tick marks. Likewise quotations marks go straight-up-and-down. Doesn't seem to matter what font I use. Not sure if this is an Affinity thing or a Catalina thing, but when I was working in an older Mac OS and with Adobe InDesign this never happened. And yes, in Publisher preferences I have checked "Change straight quotes to typographic quotes." Help please?

Wow, that totally works and I finally understand your description. I'm in business, thanks Old Bruce!

Also I'm understanding that the character styles only apply to the text selected, not to the end of the paragraph. It seems I will just have to format the character styles bit by bit. So maybe I've got all my answers. Feel free to comment with any insights. Thanks again.

The last problem I noted, the odd characters showing up, is only when I import a plain text document. When I import a Word document, no more odd characters. So, that problem solved.

Thanks again Old Bruce, you are saving my bacon. Indeed I'm not familiar with "grep or regular expressions" and when I enter the fields as you described, the find function does not find anything, so not sure what I'm doing wrong. But realized I can just do everything I need in one operation by entering <pstyle:bodytext> in the Find field, and for the Replace field use the "zero width space" as well as choose the "bodytext" paragraph style. I've never seen a "zero width space" character before; I see there's an invisible character there in the text, but it doesn't seem to cause any problems so I think it's fine to have it there. I'm still having two other issues when importing text. There are some tags for character styles as well as the paragraph styles we've been discussing. When I do a similar find and replace for character styles, it seems to do the whole paragraph (text between hard returns) in that character style, not just the text following the tag. In other words the find and replace seems to be treating a character style as a paragraph style. Also I'm getting some odd characters in the text. "Õ" is replacing the apostrophes, and "Ê" is showing up kind of randomly where there should just be space bar spaces in the text. Any idea what's going on? Thanks again and happy new year.

Thanks Old Bruce, the style search and replace works great! Given that, a possible workaround for importing text with style tags already embedded: Once text is imported, search for the tag text (e.g. <pstyle:bodytext>) and replace with the style set up in Publisher. Then all the paragraphs with the tag will be formatted into the paragraph style. Next, search again for the tag text and replace it with a "zero width space" to essentially delete all of those tags. Unless there's a way to just find and delete the tag text outright? Anyone have any other ideas?

In Adobe InDesign, if you import text with embedded style tags (e.g. "<pstyle:bodytext>"), the program will format that paragraph with the specified paragraph style, and remove the style tag in the text. So an editor can set up all the text formatting with style tags, and when the text is imported it's automatically perfectly formatted. Can Publisher do this? If so, how? If not, is this something that could be added to future versions? Also, in Adobe InDesign, you can copy formatted text from one document into another, and if the second document has the same style names but different specs (e.g. "bodytext" is defined as 12 point instead of 10 point), the text will adopt the new style specs. But when I try this in Publisher, the text retains the old specs, and it's original style is added as, e.g. "bodytext1". Is there any way to override this so that the text adopts the new style specs in the second document?