Lothyende

Great suggestions. Especially BR22's! It would be perfect if Document Setup could optionally apply to a Book instead of just one Chapter. After all, in most cases, one would want all chapters to have the same margins, bleed, format, colour model and whatnot. Of course, as MikeTO mentions, ideally you'd have templates and styles 100% done before starting to lay out chapters. But I guess it even happens to experienced users that something in the layout needs to be changed afterwards. Right now, that comes down to a discouragingly tedious errant of having to change document settings and syncing Master pages across all chapters in a book; and then, for every chapter individually, manually re-assigning the newly copied master pages to all pages in the chapter - while making sure you don't pick the wrong one because the copied master pages' names are identical to the old ones. I also found that when re-assigning a master page to a page containing an image, the image's scale and location relative to the image frame are reset to default. I can see the rationale for all these behaviours, but it sure would make things a lot easier if we could optionally have Book-level Document Setup, Guides, and Master pages. Oh, and book-level search & replace would be brilliant !

I second that! I'm working on the first of a series of 4 books of ~500 pages each. Each book has about 18 chapters + front/back matter. Chapters have three or four master pages: a title page, text-only spreads, and masters for left- or right-facing full-page illustrations. Because it's quite a hefty book I wasn't sure what inner margins/gutter would work best. After the first test print, I wanted to move the text frames 2 mm inward and downward, and that's when I discovered that I could not change the masters of all chapters in a book at once. It is possible to copy all master pages from a 'style source' chapter to other chapters, but that only adds new master pages to the source chapters instead of overwriting them, as I had hoped. It would save a lot of tedious reassigning of master pages if there was an option to either overwrite or add master pages in target chapters. The above suggestion for an option to use the source chapter's master pages is even better though!

Just tried that: only one chapter open, "check spelling while typing" unchecked. This also removes the red squiggly spelling errors in the text display, unless I activate Text -> Spelling -> Check Spelling in the menu. It then jumps to the next spelling error and highlights only that. Instead, I tried Text -> Spelling -> Spelling Options which offers a choice of how to handle it and then moves to the next one. I just applied "Learn" to one of the character names, saved and closed the chapter and opened the next chapter. And indeed, now that name no longer appears as a spelling mistake. I'll experiment a bit more with what exactly the "check spelling while typing" option does. But this definitely resolves the issue. Thanks again!

Thank you for your help @walt.farrell ! Too bad about the Find & Replace function but it's good to know and take into account. I'll then go through the spelling in some other way before I import them to Publisher for the next volumes Re. the spelling mistakes: I have usually indeed several chapters open. I haven't considered the "spelling as you type" option at all ... that may indeed be the reason for it. I'll try it with only one chapter open and see what happens if I turn that option off.

I'm working on a large Publisher project of a series of four books of ~18 chapters each. One feature that would be extremely helpful to have that I hope I overlooked but fear doesn't exist: the ability to search and replace words across all chapters in a book. For instance, to replace the word "chainsmith" with "chain-smith". Does anyone know if this is possible within Publisher? I found that I can do a multiple files text/replace search with BBedit on the .docx files that contain the source text but that would also require me to re-import them. Unfortunately, the .afpub files are in a binary format, making external editing impossible. I also noticed that the spelling checker behaviour is not always consistent. For instance, if I mark a word listed as a spelling mistake with "learn spelling" it gets added to ~/Library/Spelling/en_GB. That's extremely helpful because quite a lot of dialect is spoken in the story. But it happens quite frequently that when going through the preflight list of spelling mistakes, words marked with "learn spelling" in previous chapters (and are, as I can see, listed in the en_GB file) are still being marked as spelling mistakes - and the odd thing is that the context menu then does not offer "learn spelling" (correctly so) but "unlearn spelling" (which is strange). When I select that, the mistake disappears. This does not remove the word from the ~/Library/Spelling/en_GB file. But why then does Publisher mark it as a spelling mistake in the first place? It's as if does not take the learned spelling list into account for new chapters. Is there a way to configure Publisher so that it no longer marks learned spelling? Thanks!

I’m happy it helped you, but why not just use “merge visible” instead and buy a new bicycle from the money saved by cancelling your Adobe subscription? As far as I know only the “merge down” function behaves in this particular manner. I can’t say I understand the rationale either - or, more accurately: I do understand why a rasterised image will blur when rotated, scaled or merged with a non-aligned other layer; but it’s beyond me why “merge visible” blurs the image so much less than “merge down” on the exact same layers. It seems obvious from all the comments that this behaviour is contrary to what people expect - (disclaimer) I’m not denying the validity of all that about pixel alignment even though I don’t get it - I would just make the least ”distorting” operation the more obvious choice, to spare users who are not into the nitty-gritty of blending and sub-pixel alignment some vexation and lost work. In other words, I’d make “Merge Down” behave as “Merge Visible” does now, and maybe introduce a new merge mode called “Merge Aligned” that works like “Merge Down” does.

Hi Meb, thanks for the reply! I’ll have a look but I’m not sure I kept the file; it was just a quick-and-dirty fix for an object in an animation. I thought this was already discussed so thoroughly that I didn’t consider that. FWIW: it was an imported image, with the original layer duplicated and rotated; and another layer added and painted upon. The “pixel alignment” and “move by whole pixels” were both on. I’ll try and find it or reproduce it otherwise.

Sadly, it didn't. left: three layers "merged down"; right: the exact same three layers "merged visible". I read both related threads but can't make heads or tails of why the left image turns out blurry while the right one does not. Ah well, as long as I remember to never use "merge down" I'm fine. AF is good tool despite some quirks, but what software doesn't have those? It's affordable and no subscriptions. I'm glad it's there, especially now Gimp and Inkscape have become unusably slow on Mac OS.

Dear all, happy holidays! I wanted to confirm that the Median Brush tool still does not work on AF 1.8.6 (Mac Os 11.1). Other than described above, disabling Metal Compute acceleration does not fix this. The only effect that I noticed is that it causes the "brush effect preview" to stop working as well.I made two screen video's to show what I mean, one with Metal enabled, the second one with Metal disabled. If you watch what happens with the bright spot that I try to retouch you'll see the difference most clearly. The Blur Brush tool does work as mentioned, only with metal disabled. Other tools such as the healing brush, do work fine with metal enabled. Screen video with Metal acceleration disabled: