Affinity Publisher resizing from A4 to A5 problem causing distorted objects

[regix]

Hi, everybody:

Tried to resize a very small  Publisher (1.10.4) project (just to show the problem) of only 4 pages from A4 to A5 on my iMac.  Despite following the advice from Affinity Spotlight https://affinityspotlight.com/article/resizing-projects-with-confidence/  that did not work properly. The objects (photos) in the A5 project  pages are distorted (or do they show the original size?), though I did rescaling. Is it because I used master pages in the A4 project?? 

Could somebody please give me a step-to-step guidance what it really takes?

I am attaching screenshots of the A4 project and the resized to A5 project.

Thank you, regix from Konstanz, Germany

 

[Dan C]

Hi @regix,

Sorry to see you're having trouble!

I've tried this here and it's working as expected for me - unfortunately your screenshots do not show the relevant tab for 'Scaling', which is applied when resizing the spreads.

Please see the below screen recording of the steps I took -

If you follow the same steps, does this work correctly for you please?

[regix]

Hi Dan,

It worked!

You are definitely right. Thank You.  What mixed me up was the somewhat problematic translation to the German Version!  In order to resize I had to first

go to "Layoutseite einrichten"  and then I had to choose "Alle Layoutseiten", but then under "Abmessungen festlegen für" one has to choose "Seite"  and not

"Layoutseite" as I did.  "Skalierung" (Skaling) I got right.  

So thank you once more.  Maybe the developers should check some of the translations 🙂 , also in next editions of the German Workbook :-))

 

Best regards, Regix

[thomaso]

55 minutes ago, regix said:

"Alle Layoutseiten", but then under "Abmessungen festlegen für" one has to choose "Seite" and not "Layoutseite"

@Dan C The Affinity term "Layoutseiten" versus "Seiten" appears to confuse the German bubble since "ages" …

… and appeares to affect e.g. Spanish as well …

Not to forget the sticky default setting for "Area" which refuses to remind the last user choice and obviously disturbs users of various nationalities …

[regix]

Hi Dan,

 

There is more to it:  Resizing ONLY works correctly if the page (or the pages to resize) are not dependent on Masterpages! I just tried it out : In the screenshot below

you shall see pages 6&7 NOT correctly resized because they depend on Master B, but all other pages without Masterpages are correctly resized. This

may have been my real problem (apart from the mixup between pages and layoutpages I mentioned in my earlier answer).

So what to do if one has a big project where most of the pages are dependent on Masterpages and you have to resize the project???

[Wosven]

1 hour ago, regix said:

ou shall see pages 6&7 NOT correctly resized because they depend on Master B, but all other pages without Masterpages are correctly resized.

From memory, there's a post I did somewhere explaining it's better to resize Master first... but perhaps the document was only with different Master pages applied. Did you tried it?

[regix]

How to resize just Masterpages?   I can`t find such an option ... just Layout Pages ...

The Master are all correct.  It is easy to reproduce the afore mentioned problem 🙂

[Wosven]

Perhaps you did it like this:

(Selecting "All master pages", I didn't checked it for the screen shot)

[Dan C]

2 hours ago, thomaso said:

@Dan C The Affinity term "Layoutseiten" versus "Seiten" appears to confuse the German bubble since "ages" …

2 hours ago, thomaso said:

Not to forget the sticky default setting for "Area" which refuses to remind the last user choice and obviously disturbs users of various nationalities …

Thanks for raising this, I'll be sure to bump these issues once again with our team internally

 

1 hour ago, regix said:

There is more to it:  Resizing ONLY works correctly if the page (or the pages to resize) are not dependent on Masterpages!

18 minutes ago, Wosven said:

From memory, there's a post I did somewhere explaining it's better to resize Master first... but perhaps the document was only with different Master pages applied. Did you tried it?

As Wosven has mentioned, you need to resize the Master pages first, using the same dialog. Select your Master Page and follow the same steps to resample the page to a smaller size, you should see a dialog asking if you want to adjust all pages associated with the master to be updated also. Select YES for this option, then perform the same steps as previous to adjust the sizes of pages that aren't associated with a Master. This should hopefully work as expected!

[regix]

RE: Resizing Publisher Projects (i.e. for instance from A4 to A5) with only some Master Pages used is a VERY tedious process, in my humble opinion!

Resizing does work, but it is a very cumbersome process if you have some layout pages depending on masters and others not: First you have to resize the masterpages

which transform the pages dependent on them to the proper size, but then you have to find out which pages are not dependent on master pages and resize them

separately. After all, it is a very error prone process.  And, the terms used in the German version add up to the confusion. The whole dialogue really has to be reworked in

a future update of Affinity Publisher, not only in the German language version.  There also should be an Info Panel to show the properties of the (final) layout pages (size etc.) - or is there?   Ally or Ezra should prepare a decent Publisher tutorial to clarify things.

Regards, Regix

[thomaso]

3 hours ago, regix said:

but then you have to find out which pages are not dependent on master pages and resize them separately.

This sounds like a misunderstanding. As shown in Dan C's video after changing the master and its child pages, the second step changes the size of ALL spreads to the desired size. So, there is no need to filter, manually detect or select those pages which have been changed already in step one with their master.

Nevertheless, an improvement could be to enable the user to set the size for more than 1 master spread at a time. Or, easier, to have an additional option in the dialog for document pages to include in their size change the master spreads, too.

[Truthseeker10]

I've been creating a book in Affinity Publisher 1.10.4 on a Mac for a friend with its pages set to A5, laid out in spreads of facing pages with Master pages applied. They then asked me if I could do a larger print version with the pages sized to A4 and content scaled up to help their ageing relative read it.

Like this thread, I learned that if you do the instinctive thing and resize the actual spreads of the book the content of the body pages is resized but that of the masters isn't. I also discovered the trick of resizing the Master pages instead and then saying yes to apply the resizing to their child pages.

However…

As well as a bug I found to do with paragraph rules (which I'll start a separate thread for), I found that resizing from A5 up to A4 is not great: it leaves placed images very, very slightly distorted, which then annoys the preflight checker: warning me that non-proportional scaling has been applied to the images. For example, 113.8% x 113.4%

I assume this is because Affinity Publisher believes the size of A5 to be 148mm x 210mm, which technically is not correct (but is as far as printing companies are concerned!) — it should be 148.5mm x 210mm. So instead of upscaling from 148.5mm x 210mm to 210mm x 297mm Affinity Publisher upscales non-proportionally from 148mm x 210mm to 210mm x 297.

This leaves your images distorted by a tiny fraction unnoticeable to the eye, but incurring the wrath of the pre-flight checker.

If this could be looked into too when improving resizing as discussed above it would be great. (Although I'm not too sure what the correct procedure would be. As I say, A5 is technically 148.5mm x 210mm, but if you're preparing A5 material to go to a printing company they want 148mm x 210mm. Sigh.)

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, Truthseeker10 said:

If this could be looked into too when improving resizing as discussed above it would be great. (Although I'm not too sure what the correct procedure would be. As I say, A5 is technically 148.5mm x 210mm, but if you're preparing A5 material to go to a printing company they want 148mm x 210mm. Sigh.)

As I understand it, the A paper size ISO standard specifies that the sizes should be rounded off to the nearest mm, & there is a small fractional mm tolerance built into the actual physical size spec because pages are cut in bulk so their actual dimensions cannot be controlled any tighter than that.

I have no idea how this relates to improving the resize option in the Affinity apps, or even if it does at all.