Pinning is problematic

[Thom David]

New to Affinity Publisher, so maybe the problem is my unfamiliarity. I've searched the forum for an answer to this to no avail: 

Text frame on the left column, blank margin on right, into which I have inserted a picture frame to which I wish to pin to the second paragraph of the text. Select the picture frame, press the Pin icon (Float with Text) in the menu bar, and a pin appears which appears to attach to the start of paragraph one. According to Affinity's tutorials, my next move should be to move and select the pin to the desired position at the start of paragraph two, but the pin is not selectable in any way. The arrow icon changes as I hover over the pin position to appear as if it is selectable, but it in fact is not. I've tried this in multiple documents and the result is always the same: the pin defaults to the start of the text frame, and is not re-positionable.

Is there something I'm missing?

[Old Bruce]

Hi and welcome to the forums @Thom David

I think you may have things backwards here. I pin Photos to places in the text. Not Text to places in photos.

If you want to have the second paragraph of text over the photo just make a new text frame there and links those two frames together by using the little triangles on the text frames.

[thomaso]

13 hours ago, Thom David said:

Text frame on the left column, blank margin on right, into which I have inserted a picture frame to which I wish to pin to the second paragraph of the text.

If I understand right you want the image be placed in the right column of your text frame. To be able to set its pinning marker into this column you need at least 1 character there, e.g. the end-of-text symbol. – For a pinned object inside a text frame the method "Inline" might work more like expected than the "Float" method.

 

[sfriedberg]

This thread, with example file, may answer part of your question.

The business with the pin being "non-selectable" might be related to master pages if any of the elements in your file belong to master pages.  Try two experiments.  First, see if you can move the pin in the example file from that other thread.  You absolutely should be able to, and if you can't then there is something wrong with how you are trying to do it.

Then try a new document, with no master pages, where you create the text frame and picture frame "by hand".  See if the pin can be moved there.  If so, you should read the help for "Edit Detached", and may want to structure things a bit differently in your document so the picture frame doesn't end up "owned by" a master page element.  If not, then there's something else going on.

 

[Thom David]

Thank you @tomaso and @sfriedberg! The problem was definitely user-error on my part. As I mentioned, I am new to AP, and just working through tutorials on Affinity's site. What I was doing was trying to pin an image frame to a text frame -- that was filled with FILLER TEXT. I didn't realize that filler text was not considered by AP to be "real" text at all. Once I put in actual text (as in, typed my own text into the frame), I was indeed able to both pin the image to that text, and move the pin to any place within the text I had typed in.

Please forgive my newbie unfamiliarity, and thank you very much for your patience and helpful answers!

 

[thomaso]

Thanks for the feedback and good you managed to solve it. For further use of filler text you might want to change its behavior in the app Preferences > General. If activated then filler text would be pasted in the amount which fits during the paste action, whereas if unticked filler text gets "live" adjusted according to the frame / font size even if you alter these but is limited in some behavior, e.g. as you experienced.

[Thom David]

Thank you, thomaso! When I was trying to solve the problem I looked in Preferences but completely missed that choice to insert filler as text, and it didn't occur to me that it WOULDN'T be considered text, at least so far as pinning an image frame was concerned. This makes so much more sense now. Thank you again for your help!😊

[sfriedberg]

A related tip.  If you insert some filler text as "infinitely expandable filler", you can later convert it to ordinary text by right-clicking and choosing Expand Field.

[thomaso]

And: as field you can get it highlighted. Also you can combine both ways. (though honestly I can't really imagine a use case , maybe to keep a specific amount of text as minimum before the overflow marker appears?)