Publisher 1.8.2 (Windows): Apply [style name] and clear 'hard' formatting?

[MikeA]

The "Apply [stylename] and..." options in the Text Styles panel include one that clears text formatted via character style. There doesn't seem to be an option that clears text formatted by hand—"hard" formatting, without use of a named character style. I've tried all of the options to see what they would do and none clears that kind of local formatting.

Does Publisher have any other command (after the fashion of MS-Word's and other programs' Control+Spacebar) that returns highlighted text to the current paragraph style's default underlying characteristics?

 

[GarryP]

Does this video help? The Reset Formatting button isn’t easy to spot stuck out there on the right.

[MikeA]

@GarryP

It does help — thanks. Now that I look at the menus, Reset Formatting (you're right, it's hard to spot) seems identical to Text > Reapply Text Styles—as opposed to Text > Reapply Base Styles, which seems to clear every bit of formatting including (named) character styles.

I see that Reset Formatting applies to an entire paragraph and not highlighted text. So the program seems to be missing a "clear text formatting" command applying only to selected text. That's unfortunate. Time for another feature request.

This side-trip into text formatting seems to be pushing me toward buying MS-Word, which I hate. I have been using a Word "clone" program (TextMaker) I strongly prefer because it has an alternative to the ghastly "ribbon" interface. But the "clone" program can't create a character style based only on the underlying paragraph's attributes—and Word does permit that...or it once did. I can't tell if Affinity Publisher does. Its relationships among base styles and paragraph/character styles are still pretty murky to me—not to mention which of TextMaker's formatting attributes Publisher honors and which it discards or changes following text import.

Thanks again.

[GarryP]

You’re welcome.
Publisher has so many ways of doing similar things with Text Styles that I don’t fully understand how to properly control it yet.
I’m fairly sure that I’m not using optimal workflows yet but learning the best ways of doing things in different circumstances takes time.

[MikeA]

The text + character + base styles interactions might be complex because end-users asked for the complexity. My impression, having worked with other publishing systems in the past, is that they are unnecessarily complex. For example, I wasn't prepared for finding that a previously defined paragraph style seems to be completely removed and stripped down to bedrock, so to speak, if its underlying character style is changed to "no style"—as if the previously defined paragraph style had no meaning after all. My reaction was: "What the hell just happened..." How to make sense out of it all? I got a bit of a chill thinking that in making a long document, a few bad decisions at the outset, style-wise, could result in a later cascade of errors requiring hours to fix.

The "No change" selections in the style-editing dialog were also eye-openers and I'm trying to grasp what they mean. In one case it looks to me as if selecting "No change" in defining a character style is the equivalent of "base this style, first of all, on the underlying paragraph format"—as can be done in MS-Word. Or in CSS, in which you can have a local formatting attribute that isn't wedded to any specific HTML element.

There might be ways to simplify the paragraph+character+base style setups and make simple predictable routines. I don't know what the simplifications might be, yet. (The un-MS-Word-like behavior of styles in my Word "clone" word-processing program complicate this all the more, but that's another story.)

I read through a "What are group styles?" thread here and knew little more at the end than I'd known at the start. People were trying to get across that "group style" doesn't mean "based on," but just what it means, I dunno yet.

[MikeA]

I can think of any number of situations when I do NOT want all styles to derive from "Normal" (MS-Word's terrible habit) or "Body". From where I sit it isn't logical at all to do that with, say, subheadings. At least in Word you can specify "based on NOTHING" if need be. I don't see a "based on NO style" option in the Publisher style editing dialog. It might be there, but I'm not finding it yet.

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[MikeA]

@Lagarto

It does seem like a mess.
That you know of, is there a way to originate a style of either sort in Publisher that is truly based on "no style" (neither paragraph nor character style)?

I agree about find/replace. The way I've worked around this problem, in tests, is to place two or three "found" text items near one another so that I can see what happens later when I click "Replace All". This of course requires time to set up and test. The program needs both "Replace once" and "Replace and Find Next."

As much as I hate this idea, I am wondering if local formatting within body text should simply be done with "hard" formatting—not out of sloppiness but for, well, survival's sake. (It's ghastly, I know.) Then when need be, "hard" formatting can be easily removed and replaced. If it is fixed with a character style, a replacement done incorrectly might not replace the local formatting at all. (example below)

Publisher doesn't support import of HTML files, so creating character and paragraph styles "on the fly" while importing HTML is out of the question. I was disappointed on finding this; for some reason I had expected it. What a simple matter it could be with simple CSS definitions for both kinds of styles.

«
Another way to resolve the problem is creating character styles for local formatting (like italics, bold and bold italic). This way it is not lost simply because another paragraph style is applied to text.
»

I have found that when I did not set up the character styles correctly, applying a new or edited paragraph style to a paragraph did not change the character formatting applied with the character style. In a test I had a paragraph styled using Arial "roman" for body text and Arial Bold for emphasis—the boldface was a character style. I edited the paragraph style and changed its font to EB Garamond and used a different point size—and all of the Arial Bold remained as-is (both typeface and size) due to the character style. Totally undesirable. Clearly this was my error in setting up the character style. Ok—then what would have been the right way to do it? Possibly defining the character style as based on "[No change]" for both its typeface and size? I have to test this...

[walt.farrell]

2 hours ago, MikeA said:

That you know of, is there a way to originate a style of either sort in Publisher that is truly based on "no style" (neither paragraph nor character style)?

Perhaps I'm not understanding the problem you're seeing, but have you tried:

2 hours ago, MikeA said:

Another way to resolve the problem is creating character styles for local formatting (like italics, bold and bold italic). This way it is not lost simply because another paragraph style is applied to text.

There's no reason to create them. They already exist:

 

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[MikeA]

7 hours ago, Lagarto said:

2) It is a good practice to start from the scratch, or by using e.g. Word imported or tagged styles, not "factory defaults", bindings and implications of which you do not know.

Agreed.

The combination of certain default behaviors in the word-processing program + certain similar (but not identical) default behaviors within Publisher make "the rules" downright perplexing. For example, in both programs I can explicitly change a paragraph style's typeface, only to see no change at all on-screen. The reason? The underlying character style — by default controlling the paragraph style — has not changed. (In Publisher I can change the "based-on" value to "No style," but this isn't possible in the word-processing program.)

I start in Publisher with an empty text frame, open the text-styles panel, and select Delete Unused Styles. Now the styles palette is empty except for "No style." Now import the .docx file. The result in the text-styles panel is just the few styles created in the w.p. program. They are all based on style "Normal." The body text is in a style I created in the w.p. program, called "BodyText." It appears to be based on "Normal."

If I edit style "Normal," changing its typeface, nothing happens to style "BodyText." So is "BodyText" truly based on "Normal"? Clearly not.

As it turns out, "Normal" is itself based on a character style called "BodyNormal," which — how weird — Publisher insists is based on style "BodyText"! So which is it? Is BodyText based on Normal? Clearly not entirely. Is BodyNormal based on no style, or on Normal? No, it's reported as being based on the paragraph style that is supposedly based on the very same character style that's based on the paragraph style! What sort of hellish recursion is this, anyway?

Ok, start over. New Publisher document, new text box, remove all unused styles. Now import .docx file again. This time, first change the typeface for the underlying "BodyNormal" character style to something very different from what it has been—this change will really stand out in the document. That does change the body text's typeface. But the body text's assigned paragraph style remains in the originally defined font. Once again this is unexpected. Perhaps it's expected in terms of how Publisher works, but it's very much "counter-intuitive." Because now you see the paragraph style defined one way in the style editing dialog, but appearing another way entirely within the document — and without any "hard" formatting having been applied. This is just far too weird to keep track of — especially in light of not being able to make a printed catalogue of style names and attributes to study for clues or possible errors or whatever. I will keep trying to figure out how to simplify it...

[MikeA]

Hard formatting might be "deprecated," but the (so far baffling) complexity with the text styles tempts me to use an approach from the ancient days when Compugraphic (and other) typesetting hardware roamed the Earth. We had a simple text-coding system for material that customers telecommunicated to the shop. To indicate "italics here," the customer would add this string immediately preceding the text in question:

;i

";" followed immediately by "i" could be considered unique enough for tagging purposes.

To end the sequence:

;i

again. The typesetters had a translation table to execute the formatting commands as the text was received via modem or null modem cable. This saved a lot of time and reduced the cost of the typesetting — assuming the customer had entered tags correctly. Something similar could be done in a program like Publisher. Would it save the user more pain later on? I don't know yet. A string of text:

;iocould be surrounded by simple tags;ix

Meaning "italics on" and "italics off." Then, in the find/replace dialog

Find:
;io(.+?);ix

Replace: $1
PLUS whatever formatting was needed — in this case, italics. This replacement ignores the two tags; thus, they are deleted. It works.

Crude but effective. The wrinkle is that absent any scripting, the s/r instructions have to be entered manually and you have to put some thought into the order in which you run them. But for replacements within a long stream of text it's pretty quick. A tagging error in the original text would of course contribute to ruining your whole day. Fortunately, there's "Undo" — not something we had in those old typesetting systems.

 

[lmarcos]

On 4/1/2020 at 11:09 PM, MikeA said:

character style based only on the underlying paragraph's attributes—

Try Libre Office before purchasing a Word licence. That's how it works.

Regarding the comment on character styles, you can set your own ones by clicking on the +a in the menu, either the one in the picture or a different one. You can set the font, font color, font style...  After fiddling around with Apub, my take is that those three are the ones that will map the default bold, italic and bold italic from any default bold, italic or bold italic you copy from other programs/documents, and only if you have the three styles for the given font.

Regarding paragraph styles, there is a no style (which is using arial font and I don't know how to change), a base style build over that and then body /body text build on top and equivalent to body text in word/Libre Office. Normal would be equivalent to Default Style. If you want body text to modify when normal is modified you need to manually link it to normal, because both are based on base style by default.

[MikeA]

8 hours ago, lmarcos said:

Try Libre Office before purchasing a Word licence. That's how it works.

My recollection of Libre Office is that it did not play nicely on my machine, but I'll give it another look.

One of the reasons I settled on SoftMaker's TextMaker program is that it does a bang-up job of exporting to PDF format. I tried several other MS Office "clones" — can't remember now what they all were — and their export-to-PDF features ranged from poor to middlin'.

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[MikeA]

20 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

Does not "Reset" button do that? I

Above, Garry P pointed that out to me. It does work, and I'm embarrassed to have missed it in the UI.

 

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