MickRose

Hi @Willi If you want to use a rectangle as a cutting line, don't give it an outline. The shape of the rentangle itself will act as the cutting line.

Hi @RolWg People don't normally send INDD files to others. As a workaround it might be worth trying the free version of Viva Designer. It can open indd files. Then export as IDML or make a PDF and open in AfPublisher. Obviously you might have missing fonts and images and you certainly won't have text styles etc.

When opening PDFs I frequently get this kind of message. Am I missing something here or could this be improved? It would be good if the software could remember chosen replacement styles and build up a library of replacements for future use.

This is what the layer panel should look like. The rectangle needs to have a fill of some kind (any).

Hi Callum - thanks for the explanation. I've always found the naming of objects as Layers a bit confusing, particularly when an object can either be contained within a Layer or be the actual layer itself.

If nothing is selected then: Layer, Show All works okay. But if a single object is selected first, then Layer, Show All simple deselects that object and it doesn't show any hidden layers.

Pinning (float) is worth playing around with as a workaround for Span Columns.

If this is just white text on a black background or similar I'd have thought a paragraph style could be set up to do that.

I'm don't know a way to do this apart from hiding the layer with the text box on. But why not just make a text frame outside the page area to put your page specific notes in?

What would be really nice would be a kind of Super Preview in which text frames and other objects wouldn't show their frame even if clicked. They would show as selected in the layers panel but not on the main design area.

For symmetrical objects something worth trying is to duplicate an object and flip one of the objects horizontally or vertically as appropriate. Then select both objects and play around with the dashes. This rectangle/coupon box is an example. Dashes.afpub

Yes, Windows can have multiple columns of panels.

It seems to be because it is Artistic Text rather than Frame Text. I can sort of see why this happens.

Hi @abra100pro it looks like there is some transparency in your document, and I wonder if that is causing the problem with rasterization. Have you tried different PDF settings? Perhaps you could upload a file containing some of your document (where the problem persists) so people can have a look and try to find out why the rasterization is happening.

On a similar theme, is it possible to use find & replace on just one frame or will it always use the whole document?

Thanks @MikeTO. Thanks - that works. I noticed that the non-breaking space can be accessed in the drop down menu in the find/replace menu.

Sometimes when I import PDFs I get this special character as a space character. Does it have a name and is there a way to change these characters to normal spaces?

Looking at the website from your link - and having got over the initial shock - I'd query whether Affinity Publisher was suitable for this. If you intend to still use tables a lot then you probably need the tables to be able to flow from one page to another. I'm pretty sure Affinity Publisher can't do that.

No, but hopefully you should have far fewer text frames to deal with. The text flow from frame to frame will always have to be done manually. I'm not aware of any software that can open a PDF and automatically link text frames across pages. Perhaps others might know.

Can you not open the PDF as a new document and click this

I'd guess at the moment you have a multipage document with each page containing text frames isolated from each other. So have you tried just linking the text frames where appropriate and then removing the empty ones? I'm sure that would have to be done manually but it wouldn't take that long I'd have thought.

Why don't you remove all but one of the pages and create dummy text on the remaining page, then upload the file for people to look at.

You also get this with just a standard text frame of zero width. I seem to remember this issue was raised a few years ago.

I used to have a Versacamm and I remember one particular problem with Versaworks. If the PDF contained any transparency the CutContour layer couldn't be read by Versaworks. I mention this if only to eliminate that issue.

I find the transparency grid when exporting PDFs quite annoying, partcularly if I'm trying to check some fine detail. It's a shame there isn't an option to show it as white (or something else). An option to hide the preview would be good.