Pasting text into Publisher causes formatting issues (split)

[Keithyd]

This is driving me nuts, and it seems to apply to all versions of Publisher, beta and non-beta. I'm currently converting a series of novels into hardbacks, using Publisher to design and create new versions.

I copy and paste the whole book from Word, which is formatted perfectly for a previous paperback version. When I paste, the last page of a chapter changes its leading so that the number of lines on that page fill the whole of the text frame. So sometimes, if there are a lot of lines, the leading between each line increases marginally. But if there are only a few lines on the page, there can be an inch or more between each line as it attempts to fill the whole frame. I've created the pages using text-flow (pasting, then shift-clicking the red page-flow icon to create sufficient extra pages to hold the whole document); but it also does this if I create sufficient pages beforehand and paste the document into them, clicking the red page-flow icon each time to populate the next page's text frame. The formatting for character, paragraph, leading, text-style show as identical between the second-to-last page (format and leading correct) and the last page - there seems to be nothing I can alter that will format the page correctly. Is this a bug, or is it something to do with pasting in from Word? Image attached.

[h_d]

Hi @Keithyd and welcome!

First thing to check: in the Context Toolbar, with the text frame selected, make sure the vertical justification is set to Top Align, not Justify Vertically, or the text in the final frame of the flow will spread out vertically to fill that frame, as in the two linked frames below.

Beyond that, if you can supply a small sample of your .afpub file it will probably make it easier to troubleshoot.

[Keithyd]

In fact posting the message spurred me to do a bit more investigation, with some success this time as I had a bright idea ... I think it comes down to copying Word text with all of its formatting functions. It seems that at the end of a Chapter, my use of the Word Insert Page Break function led to the issue. Starting in the following Chapter in the Publisher (pasted) text, I could backspace from the new page back to the last sentence of the previous chapter. This obliterated the Page Break symbol imported from Word (though invisible in Publisher) and the formatting of that last page, and it then reverted to a 'normal' formatted state, with the correct leading. From there I could just use Enter-Enter-Enter to take the first line of the new chapter over the page to the appropriate text frame for this first line. A bit tedious, but it got there in the end. I think next time I'll save my Word file as an rtf file and see if the less-strict rtf formatting avoids this problem. 

 

As a matter of interest, I did have it set to Top Align but in fact moving from this to vertical align and back again had no impact - the 'bad' formatting from Word was obviously stronger.

Thanks for your help anyway!