Publisher - Sections for newbies

[C.L.]

I'm just starting to learn Publisher so I feel silly asking this...(ex-InDesign user, very out of practise). I started by watching Affinity's tutorials for Publisher Desktop e.g. "Linked Text Frames" video and "Sections" as well, which helped get me started, setting up a book of over 200 pages. Once I decided on my book dimensions I set up a Master Page. Next I populated the text (as described 9 minutes in to Affinity's "Linked Text Frames" tutorial video) - and it worked wonderfully. I formatted and laid out the first 6 chapters, adding pictures as I went. As the chapters took shape contents-wise, I wanted to create some sections delineating those chapters, which all went smoothly. So far so good!

But text still flows from one section to the next! I want my chapters to be not constantly pushing content around in the next chapter if I happen to add a picture in the previous chapter, if you catch my drift. I tried severing the last text frame of a chapter but then all the text disappears for the rest of the book. I know I am making a big rookie mistake! I checked all the forums I could, and Affinity Help, and back over the Tutorial videos, and nothing tells me what I am doing wrong. Simply put: how do I keep chapter content separate and not flowing in to the next section/chapter? Sorry if this is ridiculously basic but it isn't obvious to me.

[h_d]

Hi @C.L. and welcome! This has been asked before (eg here) and the simple answer is that there's no easy way. You may be able to get round it by inserting page breaks or column breaks into the flow:

 

or by cutting and pasting the overmatter into a new flow at the end of each chapter/section.

But if it were me, I would organise my original text outside AFPub into separate files for each section or chapter, and then pull each of them as a series of new flows.

[GarryP]

13 minutes ago, h_d said:

cutting and pasting the overmatter into a new flow at the end of each chapter/section

That’s the way I’ve been doing it.
A laborious task if you have a lot of text – and potentially fraught with danger if you’re not careful to make sure you don’t omit some text by mistake – but, as h_d said above, better text management before you get to Publisher is probably a better solution.

[Rossjackson01]

Does this not do what you want? It covers the making of chapters into sections

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/tutorials/publisher/desktop/video/337265458

Regards

Ross

[C.L.]

Thanks, yes I did watch that one. However I am persevering slowly. Thank you.

regards,

CL