Pet Peeve: Deleting paragraph mark preserves old paragraph formatting as character overrides

[sfriedberg]

This is by no means one of those "absolutely essential must-fix immediately sine-non-qua, how could you be so stupid!?" issues that the forums seem full of these days, but I would like to report a persistent irritation with Affinity Publisher.

Suppose I have a Body paragraph followed by a Heading1 paragraph.  The formatting for the Heading1 paragraph text style is quite different than the Body paragraph text style, different font and font size, etc., etc.  While I am editing the Body paragraph, I inadvertently remove the paragraph mark between the Body and Heading1 paragraphs.  The content for Heading1 is now concatenated with the content for Body, but the character formatting based solely on the properties of the Heading1 paragraph text style is preserved.

Now I notice what I have done, perhaps after another couple of keystrokes, so I plant the cursor between what should be two paragraphs and hit return.  It now appears that I have restored the original situation, but I have not.  I now have two Body paragraphs, one of which has character formatting overrides so it looks like a Heading1 paragraph.

If there is a defect here, it is in transferring the paragraph style properties of the Heading1 content as character formatting overrides within a Body paragraph.  Returning to the original scenario, I would much prefer that when the paragraph mark between a Body and a Heading1 paragraph is removed, merging the two paragraphs into a single Body paragraph, that the content formerly in the Heading1 paragraph is reformatted as Body content.  Because it now is Body content!  This would make it clear that I need to not only separate the two inadvertently merged paragraphs, but also restore the correct paragraph text style for the 2nd one.

If there are also character formatting overrides to the paragraph style formatting before the merger of the two paragraphs, I do not object if those overrides remain.  My peeve is about the transformation of pre-merger paragraph style properties into character formatting overrides.  No doubt this was thought by someone to be "helpful to the user", but it is just about my largest day-to-day annoyance during text entry and edits.

And just to be painfully and abundantly clear, there is nothing special about "Body" and "Heading1" in this example, except that they are two distinct paragraph styles with notably different formatting.

[MikeW]

The issue as I see it is the ability to apply paragraph styles to character strings, which someone thought was a good idea.

I'm not at a computer right now, if I were I would try reapplying the head1 paragraph style via a right click and choosing one of the apply and retain overrides options until I either obtained what I wanted or gave up. 

[Fixx]

Behaviour is exactly similar to InDesign. No surprises here. Unless I missed the finer points.

[MikeTO]

IMO, the way Affinity handles it is a modern and logical way to do so. Back in the old days, word processing and page layout apps did it the easy way, well easy for the programmers. Deleting the paragraph mark simply added the second paragraph's text to the first so it inherited all of its attributes.

But it makes more sense for somebody completely new to these apps to have the formatting preserved when joining two paragraphs - it would be confusing to that new user to have the font, size, colour, and language change just because they pressed backspace or delete. The paragraph attributes have to be changed because they apply to the whole paragraph, but I believe it's logical for the character attributes to be preserved.

When I read this thread yesterday my knee-jerk reaction was that Serif should change it to the way it used to be in the old days because that's the way my brain works, but after reflecting on it I realized the way Affinity works is the better way.

[MikeW]

5 hours ago, Fixx said:

Behaviour is exactly similar to InDesign. No surprises here. Unless I missed the finer points.

And QXP, Viva Designer and likely some other layout applications. But not all.

One of the opportunities Serif had when "reinventing" a layout application was to review & assess layout application functions--how and why they do what they do. I feel--with my own absolutely ignorance--that Serif chose to emulate how ID/QXP/VD/etc., versus how PagePlus and some others handled this situation.

[Wosven]

It was something I also found annoying switching from QXD to ID.

 

2 hours ago, MikeTO said:

it would be confusing to that new user to have the font, size, colour, and language change just because they pressed backspace or delete.

It's not confusing: it's just plainy and automatically evident that you just did a mistake and need a Ctrl+z before keeping working to not mess anymore your text.