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Hi, this is a 12min video how I am blasting through the styling of a book in Affinity Publisher. I want to show you how easy it is to even edit mulit-hundred pages long books. I never thought it would be such a "blast" until I did it - as you can see in the video. My suggestion if you come from Indesign or if you start with just plain text. Set up your text styles first. Use the first chapter for it until you are happy - unless you already have a ready-made layout. Assign keyboard shortcuts where necessary. Set up your master pages, too. Don't apply them yet. Use a "running page" master page as your first page, because if you auto-add new pages (Shift-Option-Cmd Click), it will take the current master page as a template. Apply your special master pages for new chapters etc only after your text is formatted properly and flowing beautifully. Otherwise it will mess up your page layout. Apply sections last, too. So if you are afraid of throwing a 300-odd page book at Affinity Publisher, fear no more! If you do your homework (see above) first, the final formatting is a piece of cake. Cheers, Helmar [Note: This is a not a polished video. It's just to share my joy of editing in AFP compared to InDesign. ] Screen_Recording_2020-03-17_at_11_58_43.mov

Current state: There is no logical link between text styles and master pages. If the page flow changes for whatever reasons, the entire structure of master pages gets messed up and needs to be redone. My suggestion: Link the a text style to a master page. Example: if this text style is chosen, apply the following master page to the page where the style resides. This would make setting up documents so much easier and more intuitive. Link master pages to each other. Example: if page 149 (right page) is Master A, make page 150 (left page) Master B. Then make page 151 (right page) Master C. Screen Recording 2020-03-15 at 15.22.56.mov Screen Recording 2020-03-15 at 15.22.56 720.mov Screen Recording 2020-03-15 at 15.22.56.mov Screen Recording 2020-03-15 at 15.22.56 720.mov

I reported this to Serif via email (I wanted to send a screen shot and chose email because I can't add screenshots here due to some forum bug). If anyone has the time to test this, it would be useful to know if anyone else can replicate it. The problem: trying to update an existing paragraph style fails because the "Update <name of style>" command is absent from the menu where it's expected. Procedure: from https://fonts.google.com download the font named Lobster (the one having only a single variant, not the similarly named font having four variants). This should display the font: https://fonts.google.com/?query=lobster (Not my favorite sort of typeface but it's called for in a class I'm taking.) After installing the font: In Affinity Publisher, use the Artistic Text tool to create a small amount of text and format it using the Lobster typeface. Go to the Text Styles panel, locate "Heading 1," and right-click it. If the bug occurs, the menu will not contain Update Heading 1 at all. In my test document I then added text in a new frame, this time using the Text Frame tool. I assigned Arial to the text — and again the Update Heading 1 menu item did not appear. I deleted that text frame, made another one, formatted the text inside it using Arial—and this time the Update Heading 1 menu item did appear. In what way were these two operations different? I have no idea. To keep testing...I added another text frame and used a typeface called Aleo (also downloaded from https://fonts.google.com). With that block of text selected, the Update Heading 1 menu item does appear as expected. This is baffling. Is the disappearing menu item caused by a font problem of some sort? Or is there something I'm doing wrong in assigning formatting to text?

I might be missing the obvious here. In A***e products, you can see pre-commited alterations to styles when you hover over a style in the panel; they appear at the bottom of the popup. Is there any way to see this in APub?

Publisher 1.8.0.535 hangs when applying text styles and editing text styles - Body Text, 2 indented styles and Header 3 style in use. 3 different types of Master pages defined. Working in Windows 10, i7 CPU, 16 GB RAM, preferred rendering via graphic card (NVIDIA GTX 750 Ti), approximately 30 pages document (so far) including pinned images. In Task Manager crash handler visible under Publisher entry.

I know I shouldn't really do this, but after experimenting with the pub18-502 beta and its amazing idml import, I decided to jump into the cold water and use the beta for a small but urgent project (today) in real-life. This way you actually see all shortcomings because you highly depend on it to function correctly. So my Problem is with placed .afdesign files. I have 8 afdesign-Icons linked in my one-page document. Also, there are some text-styles imported via idml which also have weird anomalies*. At some point I opened the triangle in the layers panel and it immediately showed the beach ball followed by the crash report. Then, after recovery and redoing the lost part of the work, I imported another, highly complex .afdesign file into publisher and after maybe ten clicks same crash again. So I want to report this here and in the meantime I will refrain from importing this AFDesign file again and instead convert it to pdf or so... *text style anomalies: when changing one of two hierarchical textstyles, the other one changes the font-weight. The problem is a combination of the font Helvetica Neue LT which has many font weights combined with publishers style preferences, which differentiate between FONT WEIGHT and FONT TRAITS. My Helveticas weights are listed as Traits. And secondly, the default style is not Roman or Book but "Condensed Light"... which is also bad...

Please, add "Baseline Grid" in "Leading" together with "Exactly", "Multiple", "At Least"... This way body text will be linked with baseline grid and will follow its changes smoothly without jumpings. In this case "Align to Baseline Grid" will be no more needed.

Text Style changing Problem (macOS Mojave 10.14.6, Affinity Publisher 1.7.1) Hi guys, I have a very bad problem concerning text styles in Publisher: Each time when I want to create a new text style or changing and saving an existing text style itself, Affinity Publisher crashes completely. I had this problem already during the Beta phase and thought the final version would solve the problem, but unfortunately not. I deinstalled and reinstalled Publisher several times, but the error remains. I have NO problems with other programs at all, only Affinity Publisher crushes when working on the text styles... I have installed several third party fonts... but I never had problems with that fact before in macOS. I have no more idea what to change or what to do. Does anybody can help me or has an idea? Best regards, Mac

Hitting the text styles tab causes the program to crash. Every. Time. It is making Publisher almost unusable. Please fix soon. I have Publisher 1.7.1 running mac osx high sierra 10.13.6.

Hey guys, Loving the Publisher Platform. I've been using the program all week and along the way I've come across a few buggy issues. I didn't take any screen shots but Ive tried to describe them the best I can. See below: 1. When using tables, for whatever reason if I delete a row/column it makes whatever the last remaining row/column cell on the table really large to the point it goes off the screen. I have to delete the table and restart it. 2. The guides manager menu item, sometimes doesn't show up. On some instances it takes me 3 or 4 attempts to get the Guide Manager window to even prompt. 3. There was a major issue when I was typing into a text frame, I would type a normal paragraph and if I hit the keyboard 'Delete' button it would delete a character, but as soon as I started typing again, after that delete it would only show random square glyphs instead of spaces or letter as I typed. Even when I used the keyboard arrows keys (left & right arrow keys) to try and move across, it would type glyphs as if I was typing letters or number. I couldn't get it to stop, so I had to delete the text frame and restart the program. 4. The final bug I noticed was the text style buttons didn't work, I tried to 'Superscript' an ordinal (make the TH or ND on a date smaller....4th, 2nd) it only worked once for me. Initially I thought it might be a font issue but it happened on all the fonts I tried it on.

Reusing styled text frames My proposal: Let paste any text to existing structure of frames with styled text and retain its properties (fonts, size, colour etc. - simply styles). Divider for next style would be 'End of Paragraph'. My reason: In newspaper type of work you deal with multiple articles utilizing identical structure. Everyone of them has same style of title, subtitle, perex and then paragraphs of text. Drawing text frames and styling texts for these again and again on every page and in every new issue is painful. Best way to implement: Drag 'n' drop text file (word, rtf, plain text file, etc.) to existing styled TextFrame/TextFrames. It'd be fastest way probably. How it's done in Indesign: With use of 'Object Styles' you can format whole article with one click. Of course, function 'Span columns' is integral with this task in Indesign, so you're good with just one text frame for article. My proposal is not fully equivalent but would be great help for time being.

One of the things I need to do regularly is produce a list of abbreviations. I'm setting up a text style using initial words settings (love this - it is so useful for knitting patterns). However, one thing I really want to do is preserve the first character on each line as lower case unless I specifically type it in as a capital, as I want the abbreviations to appear in the same form they are used in the text. Some are all lower case, others all capitals (eg k2tog, pm, skp, WS). It's always a pain to have to go in and replace capitals with lower case, as these can reset when typing or editing, and are very easy to overlook. Any suggestions gratefully received. This is what I want to achieve: k2tog knit 2 sts together WS wrong side Occasionally, the text also continues onto a second or third line. If at all possible I'd like the start of this text to automatically be in line with the text starting after the tab stops in the first line of the entry. However, I can understand if this is not possible with the tabs being between text, as I can deal with this manually if needed. I'ven now worked out how to do this last task using the text frame ruler.

In the Text Styles dialogue box, the "Current Formatting" window at the top of the box appears to be smaller that any other text box I've seen in Publisher. Preview text is actually cropped off as shown in the screenshot below. Just curious, is this by design, or should this window be the same size as all other text boxes?

One thing that annoys me with text styles is, whenever I start a document I already have some text styles included in the document. However useful this might be in some cases, I never use them, preferring to start from scratch. It would be nice to have the option to start without predefined styles, either as a global option in preferences, or as a document option.

I would LOVE to have quick key commands for justifying text as well as applying text styles. Commands such as command-shift-c (Mac) for centering text blocks and selected text would be a great time saver!

I often work on multi-page documents that require text blocks to reverse from black to white depending on the image underneath the text on that particular page. I may also employ subheads that use Paragraph Rules (a line beneath the subhead and the subsequent body copy). In InDesign, I would set up a Paragraph Style defining the text as Black, and make sure the Paragraph Rule is set to "Text Color". Then on the pages where I need to override that with White, I simply use a Character Style. When the text turns white due to the character style, the paragraph rule updates to white accordingly. In APub, I see that instead of Paragraph Rules we use Decorations. However there is no way I can see to set the Decoration to inherit the Text Color. This is forcing me to create two sets of Paragraph Styles just to control that single line. Is there a way to make a check box that tells APub to color the decoration according to the text color?

Affinity Publisher 1.7.0.174 on a German Windows 7 (64 bit) behaves as follows: In the Text Styles panel, the functions Duplicate "..." and Create Style based on "..." do nearly the same. While duplication does what I myself expect it should do, basing a new style on an existing one does not: When creating a new style based on, e.g., the style Base, I would expect the newly created style to be defined as Base + [nothing] by default, meaning it is the same as Base and does not change anything. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Instead, the newly created style is automatically set to Base + [hundreds of settings that are copies from Base]. This means that when changing Base at a later time, nothing is delegated to the dependent style, because all settings of the dependent style were overwritten with copies at creation. After creating a style based on some other style, this now makes it necessary to manually set hundreds of settings to [no change], which is extremely tedious. This might be by design and not a bug, but I myself find it extremely impractical and like the way PagePlus (and all other programs) works much better. When trying to overwrite all settings of the newly created style to [no change], this does not always work, because the setting [no change] is ignored and replaced by some hardcoded value. This is the case with - Font: The font size can apparently not be set to [no change], it always contains a valid size in points. - Position & Transform: Kerning, Tracking, Baseline, Leading override (all are set to zero when trying to set them to [no change]) - Initial words: There doesn't seem to be a don't change setting for the end characters - Decorations: These can only be enabled or not - a don't change setting of the check box and all other settings is apparently not possible. Even some settings that can properly be set to [no change] in the dialog show up in the textual style settings as if they were well-defined: In the attached screenshot, the descriptions shows hyphenation language: Auto (even though it was set to [no change]), List: None (even though it was set to [no change]), etc. It is therefore not possible to set up a decent hierarchical set of text styles - what a pity. Similar inconsistent behaviour can be seen in other Affinity programs... Andreas Weidner

I am using Beta 174 in Windows 8.1. I have been working with Text Styles on a test document in APUB. I noticed there were over 100 text styles like: Box, Box1, Box2...Box21, with same for other styles. I spent some time deleting most of these styles, keeping only one or two of each as well as the new ones I created. After closing APUB and opening it again, all the dozens of deleted Text Styles reappeared magically, along with new ones where I edited a Text Style (reported previously). Deleted Text Styles should remain deleted.

I'm working with Beta 162. In a previous beta, I created a Text Style "Body 2" which is setup to configure default text for body of my novels. It took a while to figure them out, but I think I finally got it. The problem comes when I edit an existing Text Style. For example, each time I tweaked "Body 2", a new Text Style appeared: Body 3, Body 4, Body 5, etc. This also happened when I renamed "Body 2" to "Body Novel." At one point, I created a new Text Style "Basic Novel" to use as the basis for "Body Novel." Each time I tweaked "Basic Novel," a new Text Style appeared: Basic 1, Basic 2, Basic 3, etc. It seems to me that a new Text Style should not be created when editing and saving changes to an existing style. I end up having to clean up many spuriously created text styles for nothing.

Yesterday I decided to take a dive into AP by updating my company profile in it. While i was able to finish the job but the App has some serious bugs (as expected I guess). The moment I create flowing text, text on the second frame becomes tiny while maintaining it's leading. I tried to manually edit the tiny text on frame two but I doesn't respond. Applying the same text styles to both did not work either! At this point I tried to use page Colums because I wanted side by side text frames but it I could not manage to have spacing between the colums even using the textual ruler. I finally simply divided the text and created two frames manually like you have to do in AD. I remember that is one of the things I did not like in AD last year. Another thing I noticed is that text frames don't always respond to text styles applied to them especially font and font colour. There just seemed to be something being applied to paragraphs that I had not created. All in all though, this is a lovely app I can't to have the final release to add it to my arsenal

In a long text document I have a number of different image types I wish to caption. I want to be able to automatically number these — for example: Figure 1. Lorem ipsum. Figure 2. Alice went down. Chart 1. Latin alphabet. Chart 2. Characters in Alice. Map 1. Holy Roman Empire. Map 2. The rabbit hole. Question 1.) I am trying to create named text styles for these: Font, size, style, automatic numbers (presumably based on whether I name my style Figure Title, Chart Title, Map Title), etc. How do I get the word "Figure" or "Chart" or "Map" to appear before the automatic number? It seems no matter what I do, the sequence is: 1. Figure. ; 1. Chart. ; etc.. I do not see where or how to add an automatic field with the necessary label before an auto number, then to be followed by individual identifying text in each caption title, terminated by a period. I would usually be adding longer explanatory text after the period, but in a different style such as Caption Body. That is, my actual caption (title + body) might be: Map 2. The rabbit hole. Map and cross-section showing the various locations Alice entered, including citations for actual chapters in Carroll's book. Question 2.) If I am able to create these styles, then what is the procedure to create a "List of Figures", "List of Charts", "List of Maps" — with page numbers — (in addition to my TOC created by Heading styles) at the beginning of my long document? I would presume this might be in the TOC creation panel, based on searching for the 3 text styles I created when adding the image titles. The longer explanatory text, being in a different style (Caption Body), should not appear in these lists of image titles. I have not found this addressed in the manual. I think my answer is already in there, but I do not see where/how. I need help with some sort of step-by-step process; I am clearly missing something. Thanks for this very interesting program.

Sorry, but this whole Text style thing is somehow stil difficult to me.. Following problem. I had to copy some chinese text and english text from an indesign document to my publisher document to see if i could reproduce it and make styles of it.. First i had to install "SimHei" as a font, which was missing in indesign . Well that seemed to work.. I made textframes in publisher, copied the text from Indesign to publisher and made a new paragraph style from it.. than i try to make my headlines bold.. which worked fine so far, but when i tried to resave my headline style, the Chinese text is killed and i only get some squares.. hmmm.. So what do i missunderstand here.. is this a limitation of SimHei, or do i make something else wrong ? Ill put the screenshots..

When using multiple decorations for a style you can not access the second decoration from the pull down menu. It is fine when first creating the second decoration but once you save and get out of the style editor and then go back to edit it later you can not access the other decorations.

I have not found (yet) any request (except for one) for other ways how to apply text styles. I Personally use very often Dropper tool or Quick Apply function (InDesign). Of course, that I also use own keyboard shortcuts, but mentioned alternatives are often really useful, super fast and easy. It would be Great to have them...

On the PC version, there is no text-style preview as in the Mac version.