Kate H

Hi thomaso Thanks for the perfect workaround! I really do not understand blend modes yet, but, hey, it works so I don't have to understand why.

Editing detached worked, obviously, to remove the object from the master layer and I think we (the design is someone else's) have a strategy for keeping the shape text in the right places. Many thanks again for your help and interest.

Thanks for your further reply, I've never had to edit detached before, but I think I understand from your manual how it works and will try it. Here is what I mean with the pinning -- in the first image the shape is not pinned, and could be moved down the layer stack so it doesn't obscure the text that is wrapped inside it. In the image below, I have placed a "float with text" pin and although now the shape is still apparently below the text layer in the stack, it obscures the text and cannot be shifted down as needed. Removing the pin allows the shape to shifted back again. In fact, placing a pin greys out the controls at the top of the screen that allow one to shift items back or forwards (without using the layers panel). Maybe this is always an effect of pinning a shape that I have never noticed before? I also avoid using Book documents for any except huge books that make Affinity too laggy, which I don't experience often as my computer is able to cope with most size documents. Keeping all text in one Story and using the Flow controls in the text style is also my preferred way of placing chapter starts. In this case, I wanted to keep the shapes together with the chapter titles so that if chapter one (for instance) got longer or shorter, the shapes on each subsequent chapter opening (there are 12 chapters) would not be stranded apart from the relevant text but would mover along with it. The shape on each chapter is different, so rather than make 12 different masters, I thought to place the shapes on the document pages instead. Maybe 12 masters would be simpler after all?

Thanks for the explanation Mike, that does indeed seem like a bug, here's hoping it is fixed soon. By "use undo" do you mean cntrl Z to back out of the problem? In my case, I'd gone too far with other things before I realised i had caused this issue, I guess I'll have to be more careful in future. The most recent version of the problem was when I used the shape tool, converted the shape into a frame, and used text wrapping to force text inside the shape, for artistic effect. The shape is where I want it on the page so I guess I could just leave it. BTW, another issue with the same shape into picture frame: I would like to pin the shape (which has a light-coloured fill) to float with text, but when I do that, it moves up the layer stack and can no longer display the text inside the frame as I want. Is there something else I could try to keep the shape with the text (in this case, the chapter title)? Without anchoring the shapes, I'm going to have to be super precise in order of operations so that the shapes with text inside remain where I want them (on the opening page of each chapter). I have thought to use a Book document so that spacing alterations to each chapter do not cause later pages to shift in unpredictable ways -- is this my best option? I have downloaded your manual and plan to spend hours with it refining my ability to use Affinity in awesome ways. Many thanks!

I have encountered this issue several times and have not been able to understand what I did to cause it, or how to reverse it. Sometimes, a frame I draw on a document page suddenly becomes non-editable, as if it is on a master page (with x's instead of handles, for example). Looking in the layers panel, I see that it has become associated with the master page in a way I did not intend, and I can no longer move or delete it from the document page. It seems something I am doing has caused it to get "locked". In the attached pages, both the small empty picture frames in the margins are non-editable. In Layers, I see they are "children" of the master pages, but lack a green bar. I have no idea what I did to cause this behaviour. When I right click on these frames in the Layers panel, I do not get the option to "release".

Hi Mike, thanks for your response. I didn't share a screenshot because the writing in question is extremely personal. However, on pages following the ones where the chapter title style is used, from where the running header field is sourcing the text, the running header frames are simply empty. And in one or two bizarre instances, the placeholder <running header> is visible when in preview mode, in black and white, which I have never seen with any field placeholder text before. These affects occur after I apply the relevant master pages. I say I think I broke it, because it seemed fine, until i inserted a TOC inside the main document, rather than in frames not part of the main run -- could that have affected things? I had by then applied the relevant blank and "no header" master pages to document pages that needed them-- the story opening pages and the first page of text in each story: the configuration is a "blank" (no header or footer/page number) page containing title of story (using text style that the running header must pick up), then blank, then first page of text with footer but no header. Book title in left hand header, running story title on right hand pages. But of course, after i inserted the TOC, everything shifted, and then the running headers "broke" when I tried to reapply the masters to the new pages. A bad workflow, I'm well aware! I will of course be able to try again with a clean document, I was just wondering if this was an early use bug. I really want running headers to work well, they were the one thing I truly l missed after making the switch from InDesign.

Running headers "breaking" I seem to have broken running headers. I selected my chapter title text style as the source text. Initially all worked well. However, the chapter titles themselves were separate from the text on pages assigned a blank master page (ie, without either headers or footers for page numbers, simply with a text frame) and the opening of the chapter had a footer field but not header. The running headers failed after these two masters were applied to the pages that needed them. In a previous document where the chapter title style was not on a separate page, but only on a master page with no header field, the running headers performed as expected, so I think I pushed it too far?

ETA I'm afraid i posted this in entirely the wrong place! I'm having a problem with drop caps in Affinity Pub 2: The drop cap (using the paragraph style and a character style) does not align properly with the top of the text in the first line of the paragraph. It sits on the correct baseline, but the top of the character is below the body text ascenders. I am aware that in many fonts, the top of the uppercase letters is actually lower than some lower case ascenders, but it seems more pronounced in Affinity than in InDesign. I tried scaling the drop cap character style, but this did not seem to have any effect. I could make it work by applying the scaling directly to an individual character, but as part of the drop cap character style, it did not seem to work. I did a comparison with InDesign to demonstrate what I mean: I have not tweaked the positioning or other aspects of the styles in either program, it has never been necessary in ID. The ID sample is first, the second paragraph is especially bad in Affinity, where the bar of the T is on a level with the baseline, the drop cap is in a font called Cicero

Oh, I see, I didn't notice the setting to have the space before "only at column top". Elegant! Thank you.

I am new to Affinity Publisher, so this may simply be something I have not grasped yet. I have imported text into a document and subsequently decided to lower the top margin on the main Master A. However, the text frames on the pages do not snap to the new margin. I deleted my text and the pages and pasted it into the document again, autoflowing to Master A pages. This solved the issue, but is there a way to do it without deleting? I have a similar issue with the Master I have set up for the openings of chapters. I set a deeper top margin to drop the title down the page, but have to manually align the text frame with the margin guide. Is there a different way (without adding extra paragraph marks) to create space above the first paragraph on a page? In InDesign i used a paragraph rule with an offset, but I can't see how to add an offset distance under a rule above a paragraph in Affinity. Many thanks