I design the Sunday bulletins for the church I work for using InDesign. The format I use for the various Bible readings in the service uses the split column feature in InDesign, which I know, along with the span columns feature, hasn’t yet been implemented by Affinity. Maybe someday! 😉
I’ve been experimenting with trying to import IDMLs of my bulletins to use in Affinity Publisher, to see if I can get used to an Affinity Publisher workflow (I know it will be more work in creating more text boxes, and the H&J won’t be as elegant as InDesign’s Paragraph Composer, but again, Affinity may have support for those things in the future. I do like the idea of being able to edit on an iPad with Affinity Publisher, though!
Here's the problem: if I import an IDML file that has split columns defined in it, Affinity Publisher will ignore the split columns (and also indents in that paragraph style). Oh, well, I can work around that, I figure. Let’s just move the text frames around and reflow the text into new text frames where i can tell those frames to be 2 columns, and then back to 1 column frames, and then reflow to a 2-column frame, etc.
But what actually happens if I try to move the text frame and then flow that text block into a new frame is that the size of the type in the new frame is drastically reduced—to what a mentor of mine in the old days called “mouse type”! What was 12-point type is now 1.4 points! And changing the style doesn't have any effect, because it's the same paragraph style as in the other parts of the document.
The size reduction is only in the new text frame I've created—once the text flows on to the existing text frames in the document, it's at the normal size.
If I'm trying to replicate my original layout, how can I do that if making new text frames/boxes is going to result in these sorts of type-size errors? Hopefully this is a bug that can be fixed in future releases until such time as they enable split/span columns.