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Merge Documents in Publisher Beta 1.8.0.499 Not there yet


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I find that I have a new set of Master Pages created each time I merge a document with another, plus I am getting an extra pair of pages for some reason. They appear at the beginning of the Merged portion or at the 'seam' if you will.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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If you're inserting pages from document 2 into document 1, what would you expect to happen to content on the inserted pages that came from document 2 Master Pages if the Masters didn't come along, too?

-- Walt
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  • Staff

Master pages should be deduplicated if they are absolutely identical. Not sure about seeing extra pages - of course this shouldn't happen. As is so often the case, the documents used to demonstrate the failure would save us a lot of time.

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3 hours ago, AdamW said:

Master pages should be deduplicated if they are absolutely identical. Not sure about seeing extra pages - of course this shouldn't happen. As is so often the case, the documents used to demonstrate the failure would save us a lot of time.

" ...absolutely identical..." After testing some more I found that this is true.

I am currently trying to figure out why I am getting two blank pages inserted along with the other pages. I will provide the docs when I have something more illustrative.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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This is a test of as simple a thing as I can do, add two files together. I include the text files in case there is something in them which is messing things up.
I have two Publisher documents. The first is "Moby Chaps 001 4.afpub" and the second is "Moby Chaps 005 11.afpub". They were made using a document 'template' ("Moby half letter Template 02.afpub" as a locked file which prevents me from accidentally overwriting it) which has one Master Page applied to a single page, there is only one style a Paragraph Style called Bulk text which is based on a Group Style called Base.
Now I make a new document from the template and will 'Add Pages from File...' using the 'Replace' option for the blank page 1. 
What I expect is that page 1 from my saved document "Moby Chaps 001 4.afpub" will be page one in the new document. In the original document there are 38 pages, in the new document there are 38 pages. Page one is blank, it has not been replaced. Page 38 has overflow text in it because of page one being blank.
I will add a page and flow the text into that page (page 39) then I will add the second document using the 'after' option. So I expect a page 40 to appear with the first page of the second document. Page 40 is blank, page 41 is the start of the second document and again there is a missing final page in the import.
I include the files in a zipped file.

Publisher add document tests.zip

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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Using single pages everything works as I expect it to, too bad I do not want to use single page layouts.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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Interesting. It works with even less pages. I cropped the texts of

  • Moby Chaps 001 4.afpub
  • Moby Chaps 005 11.afpub

such that these texts would fill just two layout pages, and deleted all the layout pages that became empty after removing the text. Then I merged the latter document into the first one. Got a blank page and text overflow.

Merged.png.1072dd0f2f2f15df33d512522948e80f.png

A_B_C-Old-Bruce-1.afpub

A_B_C-Old-Bruce-2.afpub

A_B_C-Old-Bruce-Combined.afpub

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It seems there is a Master Page conflict on the spread that is supposed to hold contents of both source documents. Even naming the Master Pages and the frames on them differently doesn’t resolve the conflict. I don’t know whether that has some bearing on the Master Page duplication issue stated earlier by Old Bruce.

Conflict.png.73dcb960b66a65ebe89c71fc971b60f5.png

Test-1.afpub

Test-2.afpub

Test-Combined.afpub

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And of course, the problem only occurs when the text is (auto-)flowing through text frames defined on Master Pages. As soon as you manually add and concatenate text frames on Layout Pages, the problem is gone. Hope that helps to troubleshoot the issue. :)

OK.png.76529cf0ca0d56b88e33ed4e22f1fa9c.png

Test-Manual-Text-Frames-1.afpub

Test-Manual-Text-Frames-2.afpub

Test-Manual-Text-Frames-Combined.afpub

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Interesting discussion!

I am in the situation that I want to achieve the "Book feature" of InDesign. I want to create chapters of my book in separate AfPub documents. Let's assume that the chapters are approx ten pages of raw text and ten photos and callouts per chapter. Typically 15 chapters which translates into 300-400 pages in total for the book. The raw text is imported from a Word manuscript, and all picture mgmt and layout is done in AfPub. During the initial phase of typesetting the layout is very dynamic; photos and callouts are added/removed/restructured repeatedly. In the process I involve different people for feedback for different chapters.

I thus want to manage the chapters individually and only later in the process merge the different chapters. It is crucial to still be able to control consistency of the layout between the chapters.

So, I thought of creating a template file with layout and styles to become the starting point for each chapter. Then be able to merge the different chapter documents to a "master book document". It seems to me that "Old Bruce" and others in this thread might be in a similar situation, right?

That makes the behavior of masterpages and styles crucial. As expected "identical masterpages" seem to "de-duplicate". That's great. What about your experiences regarding Styles? Do they also de-duplicate when identical, as I would hope? And is there a way to determine when Styles are identical?

In my case also very generic tables are are part of the game. They are already authored in Word, but with different text styles than the bulk text.

 

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2 hours ago, BertilT said:

As expected "identical masterpages" seem to "de-duplicate".

Unfortunately, no. They won’t currently de-duplicate (see my example above), and using different names for master pages doesn’t resolve the blank-page-plus-overflow issue either. But I am sure these little wrinkles will be ironed out. :)

Deduplicate.png.03196c6057ce9cc3a100af78fb1f959e.png

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2 hours ago, BertilT said:

It seems to me that "Old Bruce" and others in this thread might be in a similar situation, right?

Exactly. But even better, I would love to have a book feature as available in, for instance, Indesign. :)

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57 minutes ago, A_B_C said:

Exactly. But even better, I would love to have a book feature as available in, for instance, Indesign. :)

Fantastic! I have been poking around to find posts that indicate someone is after this feature. I would have thought that there were hundreds of "non-professionals" struggling to typeset books and not being able to afford Indesign and thus looking for an alternative. That's my case. I have tried the old CC2 of Indesign, but the UI just makes me break down being used to the MS Office world. The UI of AfPub is much, much more intuitive to me and then of course the price that is just awesome.

Regarding the merge functionality of "de-duplicate" master pages I believe, as you do, that it soon will work to the spec of the developer posting above. Hassles on the way will certainly be solved. To me the decisive thing is that once the merge will be done, I would hope there is a next step that goes towards the book feature. 

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  • Staff

Still looking around this, but so far I've logged a couple of issues.

Quote

Page one is blank, it has not been replaced. Page 38 has overflow text in it because of page one being blank.

This seems to be the case, there's something else where the last spread of the document after merging is larger than the rest, indicating this is the page that was meant to be replaced, this is logged.

If I choose to merge the document and place it after the existing page (not replacing) it doesn't look correct too, which I've also logged.

Serif Europe Ltd. - www.serif.com

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3 hours ago, BertilT said:

So, I thought of creating a template file with layout and styles to become the starting point for each chapter. Then be able to merge the different chapter documents to a "master book document". It seems to me that "Old Bruce" and others in this thread might be in a similar situation, right?

That makes the behavior of masterpages and styles crucial. As expected "identical masterpages" seem to "de-duplicate". That's great. What about your experiences regarding Styles? Do they also de-duplicate when identical, as I would hope? And is there a way to determine when Styles are identical?

Styles from the 'Template' won't get duplicated when merging unless I make a change in one of the Chapter documents then it has a '1' appended to the name.

I have many more oddball problems I am trying to track down. 

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • Staff

We have made fixes/improvements to this area (Merging document and replacing current page doesn't replace current page) of the program in the latest Affinity Publisher beta. If you would like to try these changes the beta software is available in the forum posts listed below. Once Affinity Publisher has been through a full beta process the change will be released in a future free 1.8.0 update to all customers.

The 1.8.0 builds are in links at the top of these beta forum posts

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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