LondonSquirrel

Perhaps if TOCs were easier in APub this confusion would not come about. It's madness to show bits of settings in the Text Styles, but not the bits that actually matter. I almost threw APub into the Bin over this this evening. About two hours to create a TOC. There are just too many problems, what with fonts and sizes changing by themselves, the horrors of the [No Style] style. APub's handling of TOCs is about an unintuitive as it is possible to be. Why does the Text Style panel give me the option to delete something which it does not show? In the end I didn't use APub's TOC. The document is finished. I wrote the page numbers by hand and typed them up the entries into a normal text box, then created hyperlinks by hand. I will still use APub, but if it involves a TOC I will probably refuse to do it.

If I put the cursor in what would be a TOC 1 Chapter Title entry, and I look in the Text Styles panel there is no such type as 'TOC 1: Chapter Title'. Yet, if I click the delete icon, it is apparently there. Am I blind? Is TOC 1: Chapter Title available as a paragraph or character style? If it is there, I cannot see it. If it is not there, why am I offered an option to delete it?

And the new TOC has lost the colours which were configured too. I didn't imagine it, I have PDF exports throughout the day. Create a new TOC, and the paragraph style has lost the colours.

I deleted the TOC, and added it again. Now it's got a missing entry, the very first thing which should actually be in the TOC. The TOC now has a different font for all the entries, Cormorant Garamond, which I'm using throughout for the main text. I highlight a TOC 1 heading, and set the font to Chunk Five. The text for the TOC 1 heading changes to Chunk Five, but the page number is still Cormorant Garamond. The text for the TOC entries is style type [No Style] for the Character Style, but the page number is of style TOC 1 heading number. Why is this so difficult and intricate to get a working TOC? TOC 1 number is based on our old enemy [No Style]. It seems it would be easier to create my own 'base' styles and build everything, every paragraph and character style, off those so I know what the base actually is.

The [No Style] thing is the root of many evils. I swear I have not touched the Table of Contents, except to do Update Table of Contents. I go back and the fonts and font sizes are screwed up. I just don't know where APub is getting this from. I set the font and font size again, and click the Update Paragraph Style button. Something is still broken. Now the text and the page number are in different fonts and styles. WHY is doing this in APub so difficult? I have literally spent an hour trying to STOP Apub changing the fonts for the TOC. It is so frustrating to think I've fixed something, then go back and find it has broken itself (because I certainly didn't set the text and page numbers in different fonts and sizes). I am sure that I ran into a problem with TOCs before some time back, but haven't needed it for quite a while. I am slowly growing suspicious of the [No Style] thing. It obviously 'thinks' it has whatever settings, but Edit/Defaults is unclear. Does this set ALL defaults, or just those that are highlighted? Does Edit/Defaults/Factory Reset reset EVERY default? If so, that doesn't work either, because I tried it. I don't use Arial anywhere in this document. Update Table of Contents, now I have Arial.

Exactly my point! If the estimate took 5 or 10 seconds, fine. But with this document it is just as quick) to export it anyway, give or take a couple of seconds.

Right! If I turn off 'Show Samples' the labels appear in plain. If I turn on 'Show Samples' again, the labels appear again how I would like to see them. So it does appear that APub got connfused. The [No Style] text style is frankly a bit of a pain, because I have no idea what attributes it has. I will contrast this with LibreOffice which has a similar thing, the Default Paragraph Style, on which other text styles are by default based. This can be modified as per any other text style:

I'm not sure what is going on here. Any ideas?

It's more than a bit frustrating. I add a hyperlink to a part of the document. APub thinks it is there, otherwise why offer it to me as a choice? Preflight flags this as invalid. I just don't understand it. I am now convinced it is not me. I deleted the original text 'Shopping', and added it anew. I deleted the hyperlink, even deleting the text 'Shopping' and the spaces around it, and added it anew. Then added the hyperlink again. Sure enough, Preflight shows it as invalid again. Somewhere, somehow APub has an invalid 'view' of this document. If this anchor is offered to me, then it should not be an error. I have seen more than a couple of errors with hyperlinks in APub documents. There seems to be no resolution to this. I can't remember what I did before to fix this. It is time consuming and frustrating, going over things like this, things which I sure that I am not doing wrongly. I think this should be considered a bug, as APub should not offer invalid anchors.

Greetings. My main point was about the estimated time taking as long as the export itself. However, as you asked... The file actually has 110 or so images, most of them small, but 14 of them are large. The 'large' files are about 8MB in size, 4608x3456 pixels in RGB format. The file is exported from InDesign as IDML, and that is what I brought into APub. It's not too messy, but as we all know the import is not 100% 'good'. I can live with that. If I want to I can fix it, or make a new APub file and copy and paste - but that would be time consuming. I did encounter a few problems with the import. The [No Style] Text Style was one of them. The fix was quick, but only after I scratched my head for half an hour or so, and then resorted to searching for the answer. Affinity's Font Manager could use a bit of improvement. I had Arial somewhere in a text frame and could not see it. I tried substituting it for a very obviously different font (Broadway) and still could not see it. It could be a non-space space or something weird, which is just invisible if you look at it and won't highlight with Font Manager's usual highlighting. In the end I gave up and copied that frame to a plain text editor, and pasted it back, and applied the styles from scratch. The TOC styles were a bit messed up. No problem, I created a new TOC from scratch. I was quite surprised by the RTL aspect. With about 130 words, mostly in very short sentences, it was possible to construct these using the glyphs panel. For longer texts it would be too much trouble. But Affinity can do RTL this way. I will have to get a sample from InDesign as I only have the whole file.

The problem I encountered, and spent about half an hour trying to figure out, was from an IDML import file. I didn't set the [No Style] attributes, and couldn't figure out how to set them. The context menu on the Text Styles panel for [No Style] could have a 'Synchronise from Selection' option added.

I'm working on 76 page APub document for export to PDF. It takes longer to estimate the export size as it does to export it, so there is not much point in me waiting to get an estimate. Actual figures measured with a stop watch: Time to estimate size: 1 minute 30 seconds. Time to export: 1 minute 28 seconds. The file size is 'too big', which is a known issue with a lot of PDF exports from APub. I've tried for over an hour to get the size down and failed. An IDML file was provided to me, and a sample PDF from InDesign. That is 18MB and looks pretty good to me. A 'good' export from APub, no matter how I play around with the settings, is about 130MB. I have tried about a dozen different things - colour formats, downsampling images. The only way I can get a quick export and small file size is if I use the (digital - small size) preset, but then the images are ugly. The file size is 'too small' at about 5.5MB, so it is clear there that a lot of image data is being discarded. For those interested, this document has about 130 or so words of RTL text. This comes in broken, as expected. But 'typing' 130 words using the glyph browser is actually possible. It is time consuming, but not beyond my tolerance. The result is actually very usable. The RTL text is searchable in a PDF, the quality is very acceptable. I could not find a glyph for لّ (ل +‌ّ [shadda]) as seen in علّامه. Perhaps it is there, but I haven't found it so far.

This is definitely preferable if you are dealing with a series of screenshots. The truncation from the right is annoying. Screenshot 2022-06-24 at 19.12.48.png Screenshot 2022-06-24 at 19.26.59.png Screenshot 2022-06-24 at 19.52.34.png Screenshot 2022-06-24 at 20.22.21.png Screenshot 2022-06-24 at 20.22.29.png Screenshot 2022-06-24 at 20.22.33.png Screenshot 2022-06-24 at 20.22.38.png Screenshot 2022-06-24 at 20.22.44.png

Linux doesn't offer anything amazingly better than Windows or MacOS. We can look at history and see very clearly that those companies who were bought into the hype/were talked into making a version of their software for Linux were nearly all burned - Wordperfect, Borland, Corel to name just three. Linux is ONLY a contender because those games were released for Windows, not because they were released for Linux. If you want Linux games look no further than Tux Racer and Gnobots.

I've had no luck opening these files. If you are using a Mac your external hard drive may well have Time Machine enabled, and thus you might have a recent back up.