How to select and delete parts of a document?

[adrm]

I guess there's an obvious answer to this, but I'm used to Serif PagePlus' Edit Story-mode for such things.

How do I easily select parts of the text, for example chapter 3-9 out of 12 chapters to delete it?

(I tried placing the cursor at the start of the text and then moving to a later page to shift-click at some point there, but this doesn't work.)

[walt.farrell]

24 minutes ago, adreamer said:

How do I easily select parts of the text, for example chapter 3-9 out of 12 chapters to delete it?

(I tried placing the cursor at the start of the text and then moving to a later page to shift-click at some point there, but this doesn't work.)

You should be able to place the cursor at the start of the text to be deleted, then hold Shift and the down arrow button. That will scroll downward through the text, moving from page to page as needed. Release the down arrow key when you reach the end, make any necessary adjustments to make sure you have the exact end selected, and press Delete.

[adrm]

Thanks, Walt.

That method becomes somewhat tedious if you have to scroll through several hundred pages, though.

Perhaps there are more ways to do this?

[walt.farrell]

You're welcome.

I'm not sure there's anything better. Though, of course, you can stop whenever you want, hit delete, then resume, repeating until you get to the desired stopping point.

[walt.farrell]

Here's another approach that is simpler.

1. Pick some unique character string that does not appear in the document. I'll use %@% for this.
2. Insert the string at the point you want to start deleting.
3. Insert it again at the point you want to stop deleting.
4. Use the menu item Text > Find (or open the Find and Replace studio panel).
5. Click the cog for the Find part of the panel and make sure that Regular Expression is selected. If in the beta, you may need to also select the Regular Expression Option "Dot matches paragraph break".
6. As a Find expression, use the following, substituting your unique character string, with no spaces:

   %@%.*%@%

7. Leave the Replace expression empty.
8. Click Find. Then Replace All.

[adrm]

Thanks again.

Still hoping they will implement something similar to PagePlus' Edit Story in the future, though.

[walt.farrell]

You're welcome.

[h_d]

Affinity Publisher has no concept of 'chapters'. The nearest concept is Sections, which can be accessed from the Section Manager in the Pages panel.

I'll stick my neck out here and say that if I were creating a full-sized book, I would break up the text into chapter-sized chunks in my writing program (word processor, Scrivener, whatever),before importing them separately into Publisher, possibly matching the chapters to the sections.

That would give me chapter breaks based on page numbers, and if for any reason I wanted to delete a chapter of more from the Publisher document, I could select and delete the relevant pages en bloc from the Pages panel.

The thought of managing a full-sized book as one continuous text flow gives me the absolute whim-whams.

[carl123]

11 hours ago, adreamer said:

(I tried placing the cursor at the start of the text and then moving to a later page to shift-click at some point there, but this doesn't work.)

I don't understand... If your text is simply linked text frames then it should (and does for me) work as above

What am I missing here?

[adrm]

1 hour ago, carl123 said:

I don't understand... If your text is simply linked text frames then it should (and does for me) work as above

What am I missing here?

I tried with a smaller text now, and you're absolutely correct.

I can only speculate that the (very) long text I tested with earlier made APu so sluggish, it appeared not to work.

Thanks.

[adrm]

7 hours ago, h_d said:

Affinity Publisher has no concept of 'chapters'. The nearest concept is Sections, which can be accessed from the Section Manager in the Pages panel.

I'll stick my neck out here and say that if I were creating a full-sized book, I would break up the text into chapter-sized chunks in my writing program (word processor, Scrivener, whatever),before importing them separately into Publisher, possibly matching the chapters to the sections.

That would give me chapter breaks based on page numbers, and if for any reason I wanted to delete a chapter of more from the Publisher document, I could select and delete the relevant pages en bloc from the Pages panel.

The thought of managing a full-sized book as one continuous text flow gives me the absolute whim-whams.

I've only used Sections to separate front / back matter from the main text, so far.

I shall have to look into other uses for that functionality.