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Format in Word First? or Import the docx first?


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If the intention is to release the book in AP, why spend time modifying the Word document? You will still have to go through the entire document after conversion -whichever way you do it- to see if the conversion went well.

Everyone will have to make their own assessment of this. The aforementioned workflow is my personal assessment.  Based on a decades-long experience with Word and a very short experience with AP.

Since by the looks of it everyone chooses to import from Word I don't know if problems come from the different ways of converting. So I continue to read along but rarely respond to avoid interpretations. 

 

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You might try this...

APub use Edit > Paste  - Text retains bold and italics but also creates a new style based on the Imported style formatting

From Text Styles tab select hamburger icon to the right of the required style

Choose "Apply body text to paragraphs and preserve character formatting"

 
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15 hours ago, jamesgangcreative said:

The "adding a couple master pages for standardization" is the "just simply" part that didn't work. I created the pub doc, placed the pdf and wanted to "add a couple master pages for standardization" which I thought I did. but the pagination did not appear. Or the test of the header's did not appear. I created the master page and the text frames, the number # shows up, but not on the pages that now have the pdf on them. So, any help (steps vs. concept) would be appreciated. Thanks. 

I'm not sure if I understand what you really want to do, but a PDF is not a storage file for content that you can "unpack" to a layout document as you like. If you write a PDF, all content on the source document will be coded in Postscript. It is not meant to work in the opposite way. As I already said, initially it was only meant to transfer layouts savely to the printing house. It was not supposed to be manipulated after that anyway. Since that days some inventions have been done that made it possible to manipulate even PDF files. But it is risky, because there can be made several adjustments on writing the PDF that can cause damaged files if you try to "unpack" a PDF, to use its content in other documents. Sometimes the text gets totally fragmented, as I experienced.

Unless, sometimes it may work anyway. So try it if you want. But it is at your own risk. You should always be aware of that printing is verry expensive, and a goofed print job can't be reversed.

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12 minutes ago, iconoclast said:

As I already said, initially it was only meant to transfer layouts savely to the printing house.

I may be wrong, but initially PDF was meant as a document format looking consistent / exchangeable over several platforms. In those ol' days working in a prepress company (RIP50 and Linotronic 330 rule!) we experimented if we could use a PDF for making films and it was a bit adventurous. Anyone knowing Crackerjack, a plugin we used for separating colours? :D

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Windows 10 | i5-8500 CPU | Intel UHD 630 Graphics | 32 GB RAM | Latest Retail and Beta versions of complete Affinity range installed

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I still don't understand the problem. I agree with Joachim's first sentence.

What I do is using the pdf as a structured import document. Changes nare not made in the pdf, but in AP. So what is the risk?

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32 minutes ago, Joachim_L said:

I may be wrong, but initially PDF was meant as a document format looking consistent / exchangeable over several platforms. In those ol' days working in a prepress company (RIP50 and Linotronic 330 rule!) we experimented if we could use a PDF for making films and it was a bit adventurous. Anyone knowing Crackerjack, a plugin we used for separating colours? :D

That's how I learned it in my apprenticeship as a Media Designer, about fifteen years ago. You can also read the Wikipedia or other sources for this issue.  I made some experiments with PDFs by myself, some years ago, f.e. using PDF Expert. But I never got any usable result. Nevertheless, venturesome users may risk it anyway. But don't grouse if the result is messy printing. The verry verry least that you need to use the formated text of a PDF file for a new document would be the absolutely identic font, because every font has its own spacing and kerning, individual thickness (in german we call it "Dickte") and so on. And there is f.e. a huge amount of Garamonds, Times', Helveticas...  from different Providers available.

As I said, try if you really want. It's not my cup of tea.

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4 minutes ago, FredVN said:

I still don't understand the problem. I agree with Joachim's first sentence.

What I do is using the pdf as a structured import document. Changes nare not made in the pdf, but in AP. So what is the risk?

In my opinion, you can import and use a PDF file in Publisher like an image file. But you can't edit the content of the PDF, except using adjustment layers etc.

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7 minutes ago, FredVN said:

No. Open a pdf, not import as a image. 

With open you have normal text and images. You can move them, change the layout and change the style of the text.

Yes, that seems to work somehow. That's interesting. But not really with normal text. As I tested it a minute ago, the text was fragmented into text frames for each line (not as bad as I experienced it soe years ago). So it is not really a normal running text. But maybe good enough for jamesgangcreative's demands.

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3 minutes ago, iconoclast said:

As I tested it a minute ago, the text was fragmented into text frames for each line (not as bad as I experienced it soe years ago). So it is not really a normal running text.

There is the option "Group lines of text into text frames" to avoid that when you open the file in APu.

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Windows 10 | i5-8500 CPU | Intel UHD 630 Graphics | 32 GB RAM | Latest Retail and Beta versions of complete Affinity range installed

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Yes, that option is selected too here.

The only place where it goes wrong here is in large headings with a kind of special open 3D font. They are diveded into a lot of small frames with one or two characters. Just delete them all and type the header again is the quickest way.

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12 minutes ago, Joachim_L said:

There is the option "Group lines of text into text frames" to avoid that.

Have you tried it out? In my case it was activated as I tested it. There are also some other problems as it seems. Some characters seem to cause breaks between text frames also. Will check this out a little bit in the next days. Interesting hint. But I'm afraid, not really a solution.

By the way, I already had many similar discussions about PDF in other forums. It seems that there are many people out there to whom PDF seems like a kind of swiss knife or even a holy grail. Most times they finally got really angry if one clarifies the limitations. And in the end, as far as I experienced, it ended up most times with a lot of wasted time and bad results or no result at all.

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1 minute ago, iconoclast said:

Have you tried it out? In my case it was activated as I tested it.

I had no choice so to say, at that time where I tried it first, APu was not able to open IDML so I opened a 300 pages PDF. To my surprise it went well, apart from some text lines not meant to be grouped.

------
Windows 10 | i5-8500 CPU | Intel UHD 630 Graphics | 32 GB RAM | Latest Retail and Beta versions of complete Affinity range installed

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19 minutes ago, Joachim_L said:

I had no choice so to say, at that time where I tried it first, APu was not able to open IDML so I opened a 300 pages PDF. To my surprise it went well, apart from some text lines not meant to be grouped.

That would be cool. In my case, as I already said, the "Group lines of text into text frames" was already activated by standard. And it didn't work. Every line had its own frame. And depending on the content of the lines, some lines even were fragmented in several frames. May depend on how the PDF was exported. Possibly even from which software. However, you can try it, but it doesn't seem to be reliable.

I tested it with two PDFs. One didn't work at all, because the text was converted to curves. The other one was probably written in Publisher, because it was an Affinity Tutorial.

Edit: Just tested a third one. It's the same issue as the second one.

Edit again: Tested a fourth one, I created with LibreOffice myself. This one worked better. It created text frames for every side. And, of course, no separation between Headlines and running text. So even not really normal running text, but a lot better than the other PDFs.

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3 minutes ago, FredVN said:

This is how I use it.

PDF's only from my own Word files.

If a Document is text with no more then a handful of images it remains in Word. When more I convert it to AP.

That is absolutely okay, if it works for you. But in general, if you want to create bigger projects, you should better only import pure unformatted text into Publisher (or even InDesign- or Quark-) documents, and do all the formating in the layout software. That would be a rational workflow and would prevent a lot of problems and unnecessary work.

It is generally a question of what you want to do. If you do all alone (text, photos, graphics and layout), and it is a small project, you can of course even write the text directly in Publisher.

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59 minutes ago, iconoclast said:

That is absolutely okay, if it works for you. But in general, if you want to create bigger projects, you should better only import pure unformatted text into Publisher (or even InDesign- or Quark-) documents, and do all the formating in the layout software. That would be a rational workflow and would prevent a lot of problems and unnecessary work.

It is generally a question of what you want to do. If you do all alone (text, photos, graphics and layout), and it is a small project, you can of course even write the text directly in Publisher.

That I fully agree and was what I mentioned some posts ago.

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4 hours ago, iconoclast said:

That is absolutely okay, if it works for you. But in general, if you want to create bigger projects, you should better only import pure unformatted text into Publisher (or even InDesign- or Quark-) documents, and do all the formating in the layout software. That would be a rational workflow and would prevent a lot of problems and unnecessary work.

It is generally a question of what you want to do. If you do all alone (text, photos, graphics and layout), and it is a small project, you can of course even write the text directly in Publisher.

I specifically chose this program so I wouldn't get near InDesign, Adobe's exhorbitant pricing and I was trying to avoid the learning curve. If I wanted to use InDesign I would have learned it 20 years ago :-)

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11 hours ago, FredVN said:

If the intention is to release the book in AP, why spend time modifying the Word document? You will still have to go through the entire document after conversion -whichever way you do it- to see if the conversion went well.

Everyone will have to make their own assessment of this. The aforementioned workflow is my personal assessment.  Based on a decades-long experience with Word and a very short experience with AP.

Since by the looks of it everyone chooses to import from Word I don't know if problems come from the different ways of converting. So I continue to read along but rarely respond to avoid interpretations. 

 

 

11 hours ago, FredVN said:

If the intention is to release the book in AP, why spend time modifying the Word document? You will still have to go through the entire document after conversion -whichever way you do it- to see if the conversion went well.

Everyone will have to make their own assessment of this. The aforementioned workflow is my personal assessment.  Based on a decades-long experience with Word and a very short experience with AP.

Since by the looks of it everyone chooses to import from Word I don't know if problems come from the different ways of converting. So I continue to read along but rarely respond to avoid interpretations. 

 

Yes, I think this is probably the best route. Keep the WORD DOC just as unformatted as possible and use the Af Styles, etc to build the pub. 

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7 hours ago, iconoclast said:

I'm not sure if I understand what you really want to do, but a PDF is not a storage file for content that you can "unpack" to a layout document as you like. If you write a PDF, all content on the source document will be coded in Postscript. It is not meant to work in the opposite way. As I already said, initially it was only meant to transfer layouts savely to the printing house. It was not supposed to be manipulated after that anyway. Since that days some inventions have been done that made it possible to manipulate even PDF files. But it is risky, because there can be made several adjustments on writing the PDF that can cause damaged files if you try to "unpack" a PDF, to use its content in other documents. Sometimes the text gets totally fragmented, as I experienced.

Unless, sometimes it may work anyway. So try it if you want. But it is at your own risk. You should always be aware of that printing is verry expensive, and a goofed print job can't be reversed.

I'm not trying to manipulate the PDF. As I understand it, i could do all my formatting in WORD, then save as a pdf and import that. My question is, after  you import the PDF, can you edit the master and the pages in the Af to add the headers, pagination, blank pages where necessary if the PDF flows strangely. I don't want to have to deal with setting the section breaks, pagination breaks, odd/even headers in the word; if I have to do that I might as well just build it in word and save it as a pdf as I have for five books. I chose this program to not have to do that. The question is: how do you import the BODY of the book as a pdf THEN edit all the other stuff? If that's not possible, I'll just import the word doc without much formatting, and use af Pub to create the final PDF. I need a final PDF to send for POD. PS Yes, printing can be expensive, but not using a self publisher. You get a proof online, you can even order a book for about $3 to have a physical one in your hands, and depending upon who you are using, you fix your pdf and re upload for free or $25. No big whoop. 

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6 hours ago, iconoclast said:

In my opinion, you can import and use a PDF file in Publisher like an image file. But you can't edit the content of the PDF, except using adjustment layers etc.

Don't know why people are thinking I'm asking about editing a PDF, which by the way, you can do with Adobe Acrobat. I do it all the time, for minor tweaks or typos. The reason this discussion is going on, is that I have seen that fixing and manipulating the placed copy of Word is tricky. I have attempted some tests with just small 20 page documents and there are issues with the bottom margin, line spacing, and so forth. If I can place the body content styled as a pdf, THEN make additions to pages with pagination, and such, that's my question. I tried to import the pdf and didn't see the pagination or headers. One suggestion is that I may have covered that up. I haven't had a chance to check that. But, this all begs the question: Is there an issue creating a PDF AFTER all this work to be able to upload the PDF finished exactly as it should look? Because if things shift or there are issues or the PDF doesn't work properly or there is some other asterisk or footnote I can't waste time with this. I will have to build the entire book in Word as I have in the past. 

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28 minutes ago, jamesgangcreative said:

Don't know why people are thinking I'm asking about editing a PDF...

As I said, I didin't really understand what you want to do. Even because what you want to do is a little bit, let me say, extravagant. I never heard that someone made a layout in Word to load it into a layout program, only to add pagination... To be honest, this sounds to me a little like to knock in a nail by using a screwdriver. There are no better programs on the market for doing layout than layout programs. Not even Word. And especially Publisher with its amazing amount of functionality will give you much better opportunities to create a professional layout than Word. That is the explanation for my reaction. But it is of course your choice, how to do this. And if it works for you, it is absolutely OK.

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If I may speak for myself, I have been working for roughly 40 years with all kinds of word processors. So from that habit you start with that.

You also have to look at the final product. For a novel, a report or even a thesis, anything with a lot of text and few illustrations, I will always choose Word. For all these things, Word's layout options are more than sufficient.

I myself have only known AP for a few months. So everything I have done is in Word. Now when I want to modify a document substantially I look at what makes the most sense: modify in Word or convert to AP.

If the choice becomes AP, I save Word as a pdf, open the pdf in AP, save the AP file and delete the pdf. Again the pdf is only a conversion medium because AP can't rightly open Word (at least in my tests).

All changes I then make in AP via text styles and master pages. And at the end, I create a pdf to distribute it.

I hope the how and why of my method is now clear. The final product determines the tool and the method. Not the other way around. Don't choose AP because you have so many options that you won't use for the end product in question anyway.

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