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.

I've just been having some unexpected behaviour from Symbols unlinking. I've spent much of this evening experimenting with different Symbol content trying to work out which attributes are linked and automatically update when a Symbol instance is changed. But due to unsolicited unlinking, I couldn't draw any definite conclusions, and instances that originally updated, stopped updating, and I have no idea when during the last 3 hours that happened. I might try to find what triggered the unlinking, but my priority is to finish a design project for a client, not look for the causes of erratic software behaviour. If I can offer any better information I will, but I learnt nothing more than that the Symbol feature is unreliable, and reduces to behave like an Asset if some unknown trigger(s) is tripped. I was experimenting with bitmap fills with different scaling settings inside symbols. Perhaps they were a trigger for unlinking. Two memorable things that happened were 1) I dragged a Symbol i2 onto a layer where another instance of the same Symbol i1 was. The new instance would not update the preexisting instance with a colour change. I tried again. The new instances i2, i3, had ended up inside the Symbol layer of the pre-existing Symbol i1, even though I am pretty sure I had selected the vector Layer where I wanted all the instance to be but separate. So there were two instances i2, i3, of a Symbol inside i1 of same Symbol. I moved them out to be at the same layer level as the Symbol they had been inside, so that all three instances were immediately inside the vector Layer. They still wouldn't update. 2) at some point when I right clicked on the Symbol group layer, a tooltip info box appeared stating something like "symbol instance unlinked attributes: colour, stroke, ..... " and about 10 other words. But the tooltip box disappeared before I had time to read it properly, and I couldn't get it to reappear. The key words "unlinked attributes" at least helped me find this thread in the forum. I'm too tired to persue this now. Need some ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

thank you Mike for relating your experience and giving me the confidence to move ahead with structuring my book further. I wrote most of the text in MSword, and later continued in google docs all in a single file. Your tip on starting the story division cutting and pasting from the end and working forward makes good sense. Thanks. I really look forward to the Book function getting debugged. I really want a shared style sheet for the two parts of my book. Currently Part 1 is one file consisting of Chapters 1 - 5, 260 pp.. Part 2 another file consisting of chapters 6-9, 270 pp.

I might have use for this feature, I think, though I'm not sure. This is my problem. I have my whole book text as one story (frame chain). I would like to split it into one story per chapter. The reason for wanting this is that I want my list of literature references to come at the end of each chapter, NOT at the end of the book. If each chapter were a story I could use "Text>Notes>InsertEndNotes" in each story. Earlier I was dabbling with the BOOK function until I discovered that it is still riddled with nasty destructive bugs, so that's not an option. I'm trying to work out the easiest way to get the literature refs at the end of each Chapter. So far all I can think of is cuting text, unlinking a frame flow, and pasting into the first frame of the unlinked flow. Perhaps the idea of putting each chapter in a story is not so good. What happens if I then write some more content in one of the chapters? Perhaps it's better to keep one story for all chapters and use sections. I'm really not sure. Any advice would be welcome, so I don't change things in a way that will only create more problems. Are there any functional relationships or constraints between stories and sections in AffPub2, or are they completely independent? How do publishers usually think about them? Perhaps I should just have patience till the Book function is debugged. I'm grateful for any advice and insights. Thanks.

I lost many hours of creative work due to the corruption of one of my files that I tried to include as a portion of a Book. I wish I had been warned or thought to make a backup before attempting this new feature in 2.0. The intended functionalities of Book are exactly what I need and very well conceived indeed, just riddled with problems at the moment. The shared template for text styles in particular is a marvelously useful function of Book. I hope this will be remedied in an update.

the common template is what I was hoping for by using the book functionality. I want to have one of the chapters be the master, and then any updates to the template automatically update for the other chapters. That was how the documentation indicated the book function would work. But instead it created lots of problems and corrupted one of my files really badly.

Thank you, fde1010. It is good to know that this has been thought through with geater insight than I have into the issue. It is helpful for me to read your explanation, is both lessens my consternation and increases my understanding of the whys and wherefores. I enjoy the Affinity apps more and more as my knowledge of them increases.

Thank you, fed101.

In your file, I see lots of alternative colour schemes layered on top of each other. Lots of choices. I think I would get rather confused with so many objects that are not being displayed. But I see the principle of grouping two coloured boxes and a transparent text as simpler, yes. My "odd" way of doing it was due to an attempt to get the connecting lines to following the text. The attempt failed, but left me with text with a background colour. Then I added the second colour bar as a shape and found that scaling text and shape together didn't work properly.

Very clever, loukash. Thank you.

Thank you Mike. I'll get my head round this with your helpful explanation. I do prefer the hierarchical structure in the panel because it helps remind me of the style structure I've built up. If I need text styles in alphabetical order, they are easily found sorted that way in the two drop down lists in the Frame Text tool's context tool bar. This is great that there are two ways to access text styles for application to a text.