Highlight Page Thumbnails with Scrolling?

[Eusebius]

Hello,

I worked on a large book project today in which most of the pages used the same Master Page and generally looked similar. When fixing things like overset text, I found it quite difficult to see where I was in the document, because Affinity Publisher (Mac, latest version) doesn’t highlight the current page in the Page Thumbnails panel. There is an option in the hamburger menu of that panel to scroll the thumbnails to reflect which pages are showing in the main window, but on a large screen with many page thumbnails, it’s nearly impossible to see which thumbnail is active. 

I would like to suggest the developers add a highlighted box effect around the page thumbnails that match whatever pages are visible in the main window. I believe InDesign does something like this for easier navigation. That highlighted box does show up in Publisher if one flicks on a page thumbnail, but that doesn’t help if you don’t know which thumbnail to click because all the pages look similar in the panel. 

My apologies if I’m missing something or if this is a known issue that is already being addressed. 

Thank you. 

[walt.farrell]

4 hours ago, Eusebius said:

There is an option in the hamburger menu of that panel to scroll the thumbnails to reflect which pages are showing in the main window, but on a large screen with many page thumbnails, it’s nearly impossible to see which thumbnail is active. 

...

My apologies if I’m missing something

I think you are missing something.

Simply scrolling the workspace does not change which page is active. To change the active page you need to select it, by using the page navigator (lower left of screen), or clicking in the page in the workspace, or clicking on the page in the Pages panel.

If all you do is scroll the workspace by using the Pan Tool, or the scroll bars, you have not changed which page is active. (You can confirm that by looking at the Page Navigator, which shows the "current" page.) And therefore the highlighting in the Pages panel does not change. And that is correct behavior in my opinion.

 

[Eusebius]

Thank you for your response.

After further testing, I found that the page highlighting is much more readable when Affinity Publisher is not in Dark Mode. The current active page is indeed highlighted in the Pages panel, but in Dark Mode, it is a thin dark grey line surrounding the page, as seen here:

It looks prominent in this closeup photo, but when using a large display with many pixels (like the Apple XDR), it's barely visible to me. When switching to Light Mode, it's much easier to see:

As a result, I would like to modify my humble suggestion to instead use a lighter color around the thumbnail in the Pages panel for Dark Mode. The Pages panel is wonderful, but this change would make it even more usable in my opinion.

Thank you

[AlanH]

I have just found this topic while preparing to make the same suggestion.

Dark Mode is much more relaxing to work in, so would it not be possible to replace that barely-discernable grey border on the active thumbnail with, say, a bright yellow one?

Like Eusebius, I also struggle to identify active pages in documents with near-identical pages.