How to link several textboxes

[moxione]

Hi

I've been searching all over this forum, and the internett, but I can't find any answers to my question.

I'm creating the layout for a huge documents with several hundred pages (a book sort of), and I've created the masters to link the textboxes, but these 

masters only span across two pages, so my question is. Do I really have to link all the text boxes to the next page manually, or is there any way publisher can do this for me?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I've been procrastinating the daunting task of linking all the textboxes, for too long now.

Edited August 28, 2020 by moxione

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

If you create the first document page, and apply your Master to that page, then you can simply put (Place, paste, or whatever) all your text into the text frame on that document page, and let it overflow. Then you Shift+Click on the red linking triangle on the lower right of the text frame, and Publisher automatically creates the rest of the necessary document pages for you.

[moxione]

Thank you, good to be here.

Actually that's not exactly what I need. I already have the pages, layout and everything, all I need is for the text to flow through all the pages when I paste it.

 

[Alfred]

Please see this Affinity Publisher Help article: Linking text frames (in particular the section headed ‘To link the selected frame to an existing unlinked frame’).

[walt.farrell]

3 minutes ago, moxione said:

I already have the pages, layout and everything, all I need is for the text to flow through all the pages when I paste it.

If you have a Facing Page document, and you have a 2-page spread Master Page, and if you linked the left and right text frames in the Master Page before you created the document pages, then all the text frames should be linked. And in that case pasting into the very first frame should flow the text between all of them.

If any of that is not true, or if the reflowing doesn't work, then I would need much more information about exactly how you created everything in your document, and in what order.

Or, if you could provide a subset of the document (the first few pages, without those text frames populated) we might be able to offer more suggestions. It might be, for example, that you'll simply have to manually create about half of the links. (For that, hover over the blue linking triangle at the lower right edge of the source frame until you get the linking cursor, then click the triangle. Then click on the target text frame.

[moxione]

I did not make the masters before the document pages, and that was the issue. Didn't know that would make any difference. 

Thanks for helping me out 

[walt.farrell]

6 minutes ago, moxione said:

Didn't know that would make any difference. 

Yes, it does. But generally that works out automatically as one creates Masters to control the layout before creating the document pages, to ensure consistency between the document pages

[GarryP]

In addition to the advice above, if you are creating a “huge” document then I would not recommend that you link all of the text frames together as that could slow the software down.
If you have lots of text then you should probably think about manually linking the frames in such a way that you don’t have long text-frame-chains as any changes to the text and/or formatting could force all the later text frames in the chain to update (more updating ~= more waiting).
Probably better to link the frames by chapter or section, wherever you have a logical ‘break’, rather that the whole lot in one long chain.
P.S. It might be possible to have different master pages for different chapters/sections so that the technique given by Walt above might be better-controlled but I’ve not tried that myself.

[moxione]

12 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Yes, it does. But generally that works out automatically as one creates Masters to control the layout before creating the document pages, to ensure consistency between the document pages

Yeah, that makes sense, never really worked with masters before, as I usually work with small documents. Also it was my first time using publisher, so I'm still learning. 😊

2 hours ago, GarryP said:

In addition to the advice above, if you are creating a “huge” document then I would not recommend that you link all of the text frames together as that could slow the software down.
If you have lots of text then you should probably think about manually linking the frames in such a way that you don’t have long text-frame-chains as any changes to the text and/or formatting could force all the later text frames in the chain to update (more updating ~= more waiting).
Probably better to link the frames by chapter or section, wherever you have a logical ‘break’, rather that the whole lot in one long chain.
P.S. It might be possible to have different master pages for different chapters/sections so that the technique given by Walt above might be better-controlled but I’ve not tried that myself.

Yes, I actually did all that, sectioning and different masters, however my computer (or the software) could not handle it anyway. So I ended up deviding it into 6 different documents.