pck1980 Posted November 27, 2021 Posted November 27, 2021 Hello everybody, I'm using Affinity Publisher for the first time to create the yearbook of the school I'm working at. The book also contains some advertisements of local companies. Those advertisements are PDFs or images that are placed across the book. Now I'd like to create a "table of contents" for those advertisements ("Inserentenverzeichnis" in German), but I'm not sure what's the best (or intended) way to achieve this. Of course, I have to enter some description for each advertisement, because otherwise, AP cannot know which text to display in the "TOC" for advertisements. So the idea I came up with is to place a text frame beside every advertisement and define a paragraph style that is used solely for that purpose. Now I can (hopefully) create a TOC that includes nothing but this paragraph style. Additionally, those text frames of course shouldn't be visible. It seems that if I uncheck the corresponding layer, the frame is hidden, but its contents are still considered for TOC creation, so I guess that's the way for hiding those frames?! Is there a better way to achieve what I want? I worked with Scribus before, where it was possible to add "attributes" (might have been called differently, I don't remember exactly) to objects such as image frames. When creating a TOC, one could select which category of attributes to include. Is there a similar concept available in AP? Working with hidden text frames feels a bit like a workaround to me. Quote
sfriedberg Posted November 28, 2021 Posted November 28, 2021 You probably have the best available solution at the moment. The Affinity suite is very weak on user-defined fields or attributes, and also weak on letting you select which field or attribute of a referenced object (e.g., caption, page, ...) is expanded or substituted at the point of reference. Ideally, in some future release, Affinity will make it possible to do something that directly parallels what you can do in Scribus. But I would not hold my breath. pck1980 1 Quote
thomaso Posted November 28, 2021 Posted November 28, 2021 9 hours ago, pck1980 said: Working with hidden text frames feels a bit like a workaround to me. I don't know what text gets used by Scribus for the TOC if the object type "image" or "pdf" gets selected – but in APub alternatively to set text frames to invisible in the Layer panel you could • place their text frame layer behind the PDF layers or • assign the color swatch no-color Ø to the text. I haven't tried but possibly it also works if the text frame gets placed near the edge of the page with its containing text in any color outside the page or bleed. … Though actually these are just other ways to hide the text which you do need in APub as content for a TOC. pck1980 1 Quote macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1
Old Bruce Posted November 28, 2021 Posted November 28, 2021 I make a style with no colour for the text and then just call it Something for ToC. With the Art Text tool I can place the labels anywhere, plus I can keep the text colour obvious until I am finished then I can just change the definition of Something for ToC to clear for the text colour and I am done. Yearbook w ads.afpub Currently turned off. Callum, thomaso and pck1980 2 1 Quote Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.6 Affinity Designer 2.5.7 | Affinity Photo 2.5.7 | Affinity Publisher 2.5.7 | Beta versions as they appear. I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.
pck1980 Posted December 2, 2021 Author Posted December 2, 2021 Thank you for you replies and suggestions. Changing the color of a text style that's used only for that purpose seems to require less steps/clicks than hiding each layer. I'll probably choose that solution, too. Quote
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