PeeGeeBee

Apologies, returning to this topic after two months as I'm back where I started. (With the previous project, I gave up and started over!) Now I've got the same issue in a new document. One text panel is not allowing me to change the leading, despite using a text style. If I make changes to the leading in the Character tab, either nothing happens, or, if I add a very significant change, the leading jumps dramatically, but I have no control of the intervening values. Is there another setting apart from the leading (Exactly, etc) in the Text Style tab? Or is there some way to remove any additional leading which may be in there, from wherever? Something is definitely overriding my Style setting but if it is the Character tab settings, only some changes seem to affect the text, minor changes (difference of .5 for instance) are ignored. Many thanks

Thanks, Walt. The truth is I'm not sure which. I add a frame then chose Place from the File menu: as they didn't update after I edit them externally, I guess that must embed them rather than link them. But I don't wish to waste your time. I find myself asking a lot of questions about Publisher where other applications seem much more intuitive to me -- maybe we're just not compatible in the long term! And yes, I know, I should be reading the manual etc, but, to be honest, most of what I'm trying to do is so basic that it shouldn't even require that effort. As I say, though, put that down to me maybe and not the app.

Thanks, all. I appreciate the note(s) of caution. I've therefore decided to edit the images externally and then replace them in the document, one by one. It's hardly the most efficient way of doing it, but better than learning from a bad mistake! Thanks again

Re Document > Resource Manager referred to above. Is this feature now somewhere else in the Affinity Publisher Menus?

Hi, a basic question, I trust. I have a number of photos included in my text (Publisher) document. How do I edit them in Affinity Photo (I want to make them monochrome). When I switch to the Photos persona, what's the secret to actually editing the photo (there's nothing obvious like 'Open in…' in the contextual menu, on Mac). Many thanks

Happening to me too, regularly. Sometimes, like today, no adjustments at all available in the Photo persona. Very frustrating.

Sorry to come back to this general question again. I'm attempting to revise a simple Affinity Publisher project from a few months back and encounter an annoying problem I just cannot figure out. When I add new text to a document, using either the Place feature or typing directly into it, I'm getting a huge discrepancy in the amount of leading showing, even when I use the same text style I've used for the earlier part of the text, which is being displayed as I wish. I've selected some of the original text, and updated the textstyle then applied it to the new text, but still the extra leading is being added. I've checked the character panel and can't see anything there that might be affecting it. I've gone through multiple tutorials and can't see where the solution lies, or what the issue is. Any ideas where I should be looking. I'd have thought selecting No Style, to remove all styling, then applying my chosen style would do the trick, but there's clearly other forces at work! Thanks

Thanks, @Old Bruce. My printer (sorry for the 'printed' typo) requires separate PDF files for cover and body text (as does Lightning Source with whom I've printed over 200 books over the past decade or so), so the output format is a given -- it's just a question of what's the best way to produce the cover PDF. I think my mistake has been in trying to edit the Document Setup Dimensions instead of the Spread Dimensions. Thanks, @R C-R, yes I think you're right about that. I don't need a Master Page (when there is nothing else to have conform to it except the single cover spread I'm working on.

Thanks, all, for the contributions. If I'm understanding correctly, instead of trying to change the spread width (back, front and spine widths all added together) in the Document Setup Dimensions dialogue, I should be choosing the Spread Properties, as in thomas's post above, and editing the Dimensions dialogue there. Is that right? Is that the 'proper' way to achieve an easily resizeable cover file that can be adapted, project by project? I may have caused some confusion when using the word Template because my question would as easily apply to a simple file, stored and Saved As, as new projects occurred. And yes, just to confirm, I am working on only the cover spread, as a separate file to the main (interior) body of the book, sending the printed two separate PDFs, one for the cover spread, the other for the body text etc. Many thanks again for the contributions. I learned much of what little I know through reading printed manuals on InDesign. I've struggled with the documentation for Publisher; maybe it would be easier to have started from scratch rather than trying to find equivalent actions and solutions.

Having struggled with this for a while, I've settled on PDFelement 6 Pro -- for Mac -- (not free but far more reliable and less involved than any of the free or cheap alternatives I tried). Still seems like a major oversight that a potential InDesign-killer like Publisher doesn't have a way to export either ePub or even a simple .doc/.rtf file. I would have thought this was a basic in today's multi-format publishing world.

@thomaso Thanks for your reply. I find Document Setup at the bottom of the File menu. In V2, at least. My printed books are generally 140mm wide x 216 mm high (5.5 x 8.5 inches, or thereabouts for Imperial users). So I have a blank cover template (i.e. back and front cover, side by side) that is 216 high x (140 + 140mm) wide = 280mm. This way I can have all the essentials like logos, barcode blanks, etc, in place when I begin. For each new book project, I only need to add the appropriate spine width to the overall spread by going to Document Setup and changing my default 280 (remember 140mm front + 140mm back) to 290 (i.e. including now the 10mm spine). I then output a single cover file spready. (The interior pages I set up entirely separately as they are monochrome and, of course, all precisely the same size, like the interior pages of most printed books.) In InDesign, it is possible to build a template with three 'pages', ie. a back, a front and a spine and, for each new project, to manually change the width of the spine to the necessary dimensions. (InDesign treats the spine like one of three pages that contribute to the overall cover spread, which is logical and pretty straightforward.) However, this seems not to be possible in Publisher, so I try to effect something similar using the Document Setup menu, adding up the width of the back, the front and the estimated spine size and producing a single cover PDF for the printer to work with. Is there another/better way to do this? As I say, the process works for me but, oddly, the changes I make in the Document Setup (see attached for a file with a spine of 7.8 mm) are not always remembered.

Hi. It's possible I'm missing something obvious here, please bear with me. When I want to produce the cover file (back, spine, and front cover in one PDF spread), I add the width of the front and back (say 140 mm + 140 mm), then add to this the specific spine width (say 10mm). The result is 290mm and I go to Document Setup and change the existing 280mm width (my default) to 290mm, and all is well. The printer has successfully produced a number of bound books for me and they look good and as expected. But here's my question: when I return to some of these Publisher projects, including those from which I've successfully exported the cover PDF, inside the Document setup, the width has reverted to 280 (i.e. does not include the spine measurement) though on the file itself I can clearly see the spine is included, and if I measure using the overhead ruler the width is indeed 290mm and not 280mm. Is this a glitch/bug, or is there something I'm missing? Many thanks, as ever, for the support for a newbie.

Ah, fantastic! 'Edit Detached' is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise!

@R C-RThanks for your kind reply. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to change anything for me. Maybe I haven;t explained the issue properly. I have a Master Page, with a text box (the full size of the page margins, and text is flowing through the series of pages based on same. On just one of these I would like to 'break' the text box margin, but I can't find a way to select and change the width of the text box margin. I hope that's clearer. I did try as you suggested, first reducing and then increasing the outer margin number, but neither seemed to make a difference to the text box margin on the page in question. Is there a way to 'select' that, one a page-at-a-time basis, and manipulate? Many thanks again.

Is there a way to override the margins on a single page? In InDesign, I could, if necessary, just select and move any of a given page's margins, to override the document margin. Can I do this in Publisher? Many thanks

One connected question: does the Paragraph panel 'override' the settings in the Text Styles panels? Is that what I'm getting wrong?

Many thanks for your response. I'm still struggling with even the basics of text styles! I've checked and it would appear I have no 'levels' selected; the paragraph style is based on No Style, which I take is a blank slate. But still I can't delete/backspace, and neither can I add a tab before a new paragraph. Though I haven't set it, I'm also getting additional spaces between paragraphs, and don't know what is causing that either. When I try to add a tab (to paras 2,3 and 4, for instance) I merely 'increase paragraph level'. Really I just need a kind of 'Reset' button that gives me a new paragraph style with NOTHING preset. I've got an extremely simple prose (novel-style) layout, and need only three or four styles for the entire document (and indeed all the documents I work with) but the complexity of setting those up for easy re-use in Publisher is more than I ever imagined. I've laid out many very complex magazines and hundreds of books in the past (with Quark and then with InDesign) but now the simplest paragraph and character styles look like they're about to defeat me. Argh! Any help is greatly appreciated.

Hi all. When I hit the backspace/delete key in one particular project (on a Mac), though in all other projects this allows me to delete a line/paragraph return, it now shows in the history as 'Decrease paragraph level' and it does not delete that paragraph return. Any ideas how to fix this, or where I should be looking. Thanks

OK, will do (I just feel a bit guilty going through things that the tutorials almost certainly cover) -- guess I'm not the ideal candidate for the end-of-term paper! I'll try to gather and strip down my essential questions and will be back! Thanks again

Thanks so much. Great help. Do you, by any chance, offer one-to-one online tutorials? Publisher seems ideal for me but I'm having a lot of problems just doing basic text-import etc things for simple textbooks. I'd love to have someone answer a range of questions over an hour or so, paid, obviously – endless hours of video tutorial just put me to sleep, haha

I spend a lot of my time reshaping long texts and have to insert many Page Breaks in the course of that. With Publisher this involves quite a bit of menu scrolling. Is there a way to give this feature an easily remember shortcut (Command+Return, or whatever. It would be a huge timesaver. Many thanks

Can I organise (re-order) text styles so that the ones I actually use in a document are grouped together? Also, and this may be a different question altogether, the shortcuts for applying text styles are very handy, but is there a way (an additional key command, perhaps?) that applies the text style but DOES NOT change the local formatting? Many thanks. Very new to Publisher and, despite the learning curve, very impressed so far!

I'm still new to Publisher (on a Mac) and looking for a way to apply Paragraph Style while simultaneously preserving character formatting, using shortcuts. I've managed to get the shortcut working perfectly, but there seems to be no option to have it preserve the existing character style. Anyone know how to do this? Many thanks

Many thanks for your thorough advice on this.

As a new user, I'm still finding, or not finding things about Affinity that I expected. I confess I'm a bit disappointed that there's no option to export to epub. That said, perhaps it's a different target audience? My old version of InDesign CC had the option, but mostly I preferred to export an rtf document which was often easier to work on with a variety of apps, including Amazon's Kindle Create (is that what it's called now?) So, is there a way to export an rtf or doc/docx file from Affinity, or how do folks bridge the gap from print to epub, mobi etc? Many thanks!