Kent Steinbrenner

Really? That’s great—I shall have to try that. I’m still learning things about Affinity Publisher!

Yeah, the long list of color swatches is what happens when one's workflow is, “Open up last week’s bulletin and do a ‘Save As.’” 😉 I probably should do a pruning of that list every now and then, but I do re-use a number of the swatches on a regular basis for our announcements pages, which often have articles or ads with type on a colored background. Probably not “best practices” to have such a long list, but hey, I’m the only one who has to deal with it! As for character styles, besides making it easier to globally change a style when needed (which has happened), the main reason for using them is to make it easier to format the people's responses, which are in Chronica Pro Bold (a sans-serif typeface), as opposed to the rest of the body copy, which is in Sabon LT Std, as you can see from the screenshot. Who wants to manually change the typeface on every line like this, scrolling through the font menu? I would love it if a layout program could define a paragraph style as “Set the first word [or words] in a line in one font and size, and then after a tab stop, set the rest of the line in a different font and size.” That would make formatting even easier! —Kent

Thanks, Hangman—I’m glad that I’m not the only one who‘s noticed this. Hopefully the developers will figure out a solution. It’s certainly mystified me why it behaves that way! —Kent

Yes, of course—here is an IDML file containing 3 pages (along with a ZIP file containing the original packaged .IDML/.INDD file with links, etc., just in case you need those for testing purposes). —Kent2023-04-30 Easter 4A test file Folder.zip2023-04-30 Easter 4A test file.idml

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.