GuyMiklos

Thank you Walt for your document with demonstrations of multilevelled and mixed list types. It was very helpful to open this and look at the settings and play around with them.

There are three ways I have found to do this, the first in A.Designer, and two ways in A.Pub. from which the results can be copied and pasted into A.Designer or Photo. Method 1 is to do as you were doing. Create a Text Frame and Rectangle. Colour the rectangle. Group the two of them and add the group to your Assets panel. Grouped objects resize together using the extended handle on the bottom right corner. Method 2 is show the window/panel/studio for Text Frame in which you define the frame and fill colour. The frame still needs to be adjusted in size if the text overflows. Method 3 is to show the window/panel/studio for Text Style and define a style for say "My Boxed Text" and edit the style's Decoration panel (bottom in the list of edit options). The box thus defined will grow to surround text that overflows from its text frame. Hope this helps anyone with the same query.

After much frustration and wasting well over an hour with out success, I finally stumbled upon a way that worked on a MacBook. I hope this helps somebody out there. I organised the table in GoogleSheets. Then copied and pasted the table content into TextEdit. From TextEdit I copied and pasted into a text frame in Affinity Publisher. Then I made an empty table in AP. Then I copied and pasted the data from the text frame into the table. One day AP will support this. Until then - happy workaround-round-round-round-round-rounds.

Thank you Walt. I searched multiple times through the interface on different occasions. I'd never have found this extremely useful selection of parameters accessed through the little cog symbol, if I hadn't found your post here. This will be a huge help in tidying up the formatting of several hundred pages. Thank you.

I use Affinity Designer for populating maps with infrastructural- and botanical objects. Any object that is repeated more than a few times I'll define as a symbol. This allows me to change the appearance of all instances of an object type at once. A marvelous feature. Another marvelous feature would be if it were possible to count how many instances there are of any given symbol. This would be really useful when ordering items from building suppliers or nurseries, or for planning plant propagation. Counting while searching a large map is really slow and frought with inaccuracy.

Thank you Walt. I'll update A.Publisher. It is still version 2.1

Thanks for this suggestion. I found in the help section: "To edit content in a different app: With content selected, from the File menu, select ... Edit in Publisher." The "edit in publisher" option in the file menu is greyed out, whether I select text of not. How would I select all the art text and all the frame text, and all the line text?

I would also very much like this, please. I draw commented maps that contain thousands of symbols with several hundred comments. Keeping terminology consistent across comments is very difficult without a text search&replace function.

Thanks Aleksander, for summarising the main issues. I think the book feature is well conceived, but has failed to fulfil it's purpose due to poor implementation that doesn't correspond with user needs, expectations, or intuition. What's more, unsuspecting users will be subject to a huge amount of extra work try to sort out the mess this function creates, as mess that cannot simply be undone. I hope the development team will rethink keeping in mind users' needs, expectations, and intuition, before "fixing".

Thank you PixelPest. Your ingeniously simple solution worked for my mirrored text. Very clever. I would never have thought of doing that.

I think there is more than one issue going on with this. One of the issues is more simply isolated, as the following. Create a symbol. Create an asset that groups multiple objects, one of which is the symbol just created. Drag the asset onto the artboard. A duplicate icon of the symbol is reproduced in the Symbols Panel. The consequences of this are twofold. 1) the Symbols Panel becomes cluttered with duplicated Symbols for each new compound asset that contains a symbol. 2) when the original symbol is updated, it doesn't affect any of the assets that included the symbol. I would expect no duplicates in the Symbols Panel, and that symbol instances in compound assets remain linked to the original and update when the original is updated. This would be a powerful way to create hybrid components in a drawing (I draw maps with many repeated, and mixed elements) that permits automatically updating symbol components of a group - such as a shape or colour, but that leave the text (with defined text styles) in a compound asset fully editable. This decoupling behaviour of assets decoupling from symbols is analogous to TextStyles becoming decoupled as soon as they are used in an asset, which I'm glad to say, doesn't happen. My current use-case is defining templates for trees. The template is a group of a coloured circle symbol, a branching symbol for deciduous trees, a pink circle symbol for nitrogen fixing trees, and botanical name of the tree preformatted using TextStyle definitions. Is the there an intentional reason (such as a use-case) that requires assets to unlink from symbols. To my mind, this behaviour violates the frame rule (no-changes to the universe-of-discourse unless specified). Could you suggest a temporary work around.

Thank you Walt. A good suggestion. Reopening the file did not produce the message again. But I did find some unlinked files in the Resource Manager, so perhaps the message was about them. I'll never know now.

Thanks Mike, but I don't think it was this. I don't remember seeing a blue icon or a 'close' button.

Affinity Designer crashed. Upon restarting I chose the recovery file, and when it opened there was a pop-up information box that said something about a "linked file" but it was displayed for only a fraction of a second, so I don't now what it said. I would expect the information to remain displayed until dismissed by the user. Is there a way to access this information somewhere else. How do I know what to do when I didn't have time to read the information? This happens after most crashes, perhaps all of them; I might not have seen the fleeting info box.

O C-R wrote: "If you hover the pointer over the Sync button in the Symbols panel, you should get a tooltip explaining that editing properties while not synchronized will detach those properties from that instance of the symbol. Once detached in that instance, those properties cannot be relinked to the same properties of the 'master' symbol. The builtin & online help does not explain this at all clearly. The only clues we get are the Sync tooltip & ones that appear when hovering over the names of symbol instances in the Layers panel that list unlinked attributes of that instance. (Annoyingly, hovering over the thumbnail doesn't show the tooltip; the pointer has to be over the symbol name.)" Thank you O C-R I realise now that my problems above were probably caused by my inadvertently pressing the Synch: symbol when I was intending only to access the burger menu a couple of milimeters away, and not noticing the change, because it IS barely noticable. How about writing "on" and "off" instead of barely perceptibly changing the background of the Synch: icon from light grey to slightly less light grey. It would be good if the orange colour used in the previous version of AffD. were restored to signal linking/unlinking. Synching can be very confusing when it isn't clearly signalled. There is insufficient support from the interface. Again sleek and trendy grey minimalism in symbol size, contrasts and colourlessness have made the interface less clear. I'll revisit this tomorrow.