Importing formatted text and selectively applying styles

[CylonRaven]

I am copying text from a word processor into a Publisher document. I want to apply my main paragraph style to this text, which includes optical alignment.

Problem: Sometimes the text I am copying includes local formatting, e.g., italicized text.

Applying my style and clearing character formatting will unitalicize the italics.

Apply Style and Preserve Character Formatting will keep the italics, but then it will not apply optical alignment.

Is there a way to do this, short of manually reapplying italics?

[Old Bruce]

13 hours ago, CylonRaven said:

Problem: Sometimes the text I am copying includes local formatting, e.g., italicized text.

Try this work method, go through and take local formatting and assign a Character Style (I make one with no changes other than the Italic is checked and I name it Italic) for italic text then go and apply your main Paragraph Style.

[CylonRaven]

Sorry, I think I was not clear. I am talking about paragraphs where some words are italicized.

Suppose I have a sentence like this with a mixture of character formatting.

If I paste it into publisher as-is, all the formatting is retained. I want a way to apply a style that includes some other character formatting (e.g., Optical Alignment), but will not erase the preexisting formatting.

 

[LFGabel]

I format long-form documents and what I have had to do is create character styles for bold-italic, bold, and italic. Then I search and replace the actual bold-italic/bold/italic formatting and replace it with the character styles. It's a damn pain in the butt, but it works.

[Engineering_text]

First: Here in 2022 right clicking on the style name under "text style" allows not only for editing the style, but has a lot of options for using paragraph style without over-writing your character styles. 

Second: Big thank you to Cylon Raven! It really never occurred to me to just cut and paste from my original document into Affinity. With other DTP software I would import and then apply styles. If I imported something like rtf or old *doc files it would at least still contain my tabs and if I was lucky, the subscripts and symbol fonts for variable names. With Affinity, I was disappointed that I could only import plain text. I'm not going to import pdf -for various reasons that's a hot mess for me. Importing plain text wouldn't be such a pain if the import text menu (Affinity calls it something else -place?) used the feature that strips out extra carriage returns so the text will wrap correctly. That problem was solved long ago, not sure where Affinity hides the feature to do that.

I was about to start using text like [tab] when creating in my word processor, so at least I wouldn't have to manually retype all the tabs (this for numbered lists, and for aligning expressions to the "=" when defining variables in a list. I figured a global search and replace could replace the [tab] with the non-printing tab character. then my styles setting would handle the tab length, and whether its a left, tab, right or center tab. Then I realized I was taking the first steps to creating my own Tex language, or min-HTML and decide to check here to see what others are doing.

Cut and past will be tedious for all the pages I'm doing, but not 1/10 as tedious as all the insertion of tabs, getting rid of carriage returns, redoing symbols, etc. 

Third: I am still trying to figure out what "optical alignment" means. I've seen it in the menus but it makes me wonder what alignments are not optical? I would expect options like vertical alignment, horizontal alignment, top alignment, bottom alignment, align center, . . . This sounds like some sort of display adjustment. Like aligning the photon guns on a CRT monitor. (Cathode Ray Tube -for younger readers who don't recall saner times.)

[Alfred]

9 minutes ago, Engineering_text said:

I am still trying to figure out what "optical alignment" means.

Please watch this short (six-minute) video tutorial:

https://affinity.serif.com/tutorials/publisher/desktop/video/337311429

[kenmcd]

12 minutes ago, Engineering_text said:

I am still trying to figure out what "optical alignment" means.

https://affinity.help/publisher/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=pages/Text/opticalAlignment.html?title=Optical alignment