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APub: List all pages with their applied masters …?


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Is there an interface in APub which gives an overview of applied master pages? Currently I only know the way to hover over page thumbnails in the Pages Panel to get the pop-up-info for one spread at a time.

For instance, I would expect it in a window like the "Spread Setup…" (which seems to be the only place in the UI which lists all pages).

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I don’t think that functionality exists.

Can you explain why you want to be able to see, en masse (so to speak), which master page(s) are applied to each spread?
Or, even better, could you explain what you are doing which let to you wanting that?

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be able to do that, I’m just trying to understand the situation a bit more.

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6 hours ago, GarryP said:

Can you explain why you want to be able to see, en masse (so to speak), which master page(s) are applied to each spread?

The simplest use case is to determine whether a master page is being used/applied at all. A more complex use case is to understand how an .afpub is set-up and organised, and in this way obtain information about possible improvements, such as combining/linking existing master pages. Or, more rarely, to find discrepancies between the page dimensions of different templates or between a template and its document page (which can be difficult to detect, especially with maintained aspect ratio) that may have chosen erroneously.

This option is more a matter of convenience to get an overview of aspects and settings in an .afpub. Similar to the various "manager" windows in APub. While such a list does not necessarily need to be combined with an interface for editing the associated elements (as all managers in Affinity do), it can already be sufficient to display that information in a list that pops up when hovering page by page.

4 hours ago, NathanC said:

Looks like a similar request for this has been raised previously in Requests & Suggestions to have better functionality on managing the master pages rather than just hovering over each individual page to identify the applied master.

Okay, thank you, this confirms that such a list or overview doesn't exist yet. Also, thanks for the link to the existing Feature Request!

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Although I always dislike comparing APub with the old PagePlus, I always thought it was handy to be able to click a button and change the thumbnail view to show which Master Page(s) were applied to each page. Not what is being asked for here, I know, but nevertheless, useful and, I would have thought, not that difficult to implement.

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thomaso: Thanks for explaining the issues a bit more.

17 hours ago, thomaso said:

The simplest use case is to determine whether a master page is being used/applied at all.

As for determining whether a master page is being used, might I suggest that a ‘marker’ (or some other visual ‘clue’) is added to the master pages in the Master Pages Panel to show that? Maybe a little icon next to the master page which shows that it is not being used (not being used is probably the least probable case and therefore the case which may need some attention).

Note: In your explanation I think you may be asking for two different things: master page ‘meta data’; and spread ‘meta data’, which might not be good if mixed together.

17 hours ago, thomaso said:

A more complex use case is to understand how an .afpub is set-up and organised, and in this way obtain information about possible improvements, such as combining/linking existing master pages.

I’m not sure what you mean by that. It could be a perfectly reasonable thing to do but I don’t understand what you mean.

17 hours ago, thomaso said:

Or, more rarely, to find discrepancies between the page dimensions of different templates or between a template and its document page (which can be difficult to detect, especially with maintained aspect ratio) that may have chosen erroneously.

By templates do you mean ‘Affinity templates’, or master pages, or something else? Again, I’m not sure what you are describing.

I’m not trying to be deliberately awkward. I’m asking the questions as I am interested in the request and think what you are requesting may be very useful if implemented in a nice way. The questions are so I can try and understand better what you want so I can think about if I might want a similar thing but implemented in a slightly different way.

It might be useful if you can split your needs into single separate ‘atomic’ requirements rather than use cases. That may make it easier to see what all the individual requirements are and then they can be looked at separately and maybe combined as necessary.

Again, I think what you are asking for may be beneficial to many people but if you can’t describe precisely what you want then it will probably be difficult for the developers to implement precisely what you want. And that may mean that, if anything is implemented, you might not get what you want – development time used but eventual user disappointment.

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I have to wonder how this could be implemented, considering that a document could have hundreds of pages & each of them could have zero or more master pages applied to them, & beyond that some of the pages could have one or more of their master paged edited detached so even though they are using the same master page(s) as other pages using that/those master pages, it/they would not all be using the master(s) in the same way.

I'm not saying it would be impossible or not useful to implement this, just that it could be very tricky to do it in a straightforward. practical way.

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8 hours ago, GarryP said:

As for determining whether a master page is being used, might I suggest that a ‘marker’ (or some other visual ‘clue’)

My question in this topic was rather wondering if there exists a more pure, e.g. text based summary, being aware there is no according UI items in the pages panel yet. But correct, such a 'marker' was discussed already in related feature requests. For instance here with an illustrated idea …

However, I prefer to continue in one of the existing feature request threads where it seems to make more sense. I'll do it the next days.

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27 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I have to wonder how this could be implemented, (...)

(…) in a straightforward. practical way.

Since all data exist within the document at least a pure text list would be the simplest way for an overview. And definitely more comfortable than hovering over every single page or spread.

Consider what exists already "by design" as "practical" way in APub when it is about more than just displaying but using as interface, too … for instance switching to the last page of a placed 100 pages PDF. Or the space demanding thumbnails of the presets in the "New…" file dialog window, (some in portrait, others in landscape but regardless of their orientation, some with one border stroke, others with two … in fact without an advantage over the alternative as pure text list there). Also the purely text based summary of text style parameters appearing in the Text Style panel / the Text Style Editor panel (both not resizable) are examples of Serif's understanding of "straightforward practical" usability. So, sorry, it is definitely no reason or excuse for not having such a page overview with all assigned master pages because of not knowing a comfortable way to display – in particular if I didn't ask for a comfortable interface for this overview but rather referred to "lists all pages".

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  1466722842_textstyleEditorwindowsummary.jpg.661e6afe45ae1df3253f7f2f7531bf1c.jpg  512332659_textstylespanelsummary.jpg.b0d83242be24906d0a426ad8d9875d01.jpg 

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50 minutes ago, thomaso said:

So, sorry, it is definitely no reason or excuse for not having such a page overview with all assigned master pages because of not knowing a comfortable way to display – in particular if I didn't ask for a comfortable interface for this overview but rather referred to "lists all pages".

Again, I am not saying such a feature would not be useful, just that implementing it could be difficult because of all the possible variations in how Masters could be applied to document pages.

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44 minutes ago, R C-R said:

implementing it could be difficult because of all the possible variations

A list view would be definitely easier to generate / display than the current pop-ups-on-hover solution. Compare the already existing list view of all spreads with page numbers in the "Spread Setup…" window. No doubt such a list could also contain assigned master pages, it is just a question of space, not of complexity, regardless of where such a list would be displayed.

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4 minutes ago, thomaso said:

it is just a question of space, not of complexity, regardless of where such a list would be displayed.

It is a question of space, & one not easy to implement if you consider that Master pages could have long names (or duplicate names for different ones), & various pages could have many different Master pages applied to them.

IOW, it a question of implementing something that can scale well for all possible page & master layouts.

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5 minutes ago, thomaso said:

it is just a question of space, not of complexity, regardless of where such a list would be displayed.

It's both space and complexity, I think, depending on what you want shown.

  1. A page can have multiple Masters applied. Probably we want to see all of them in the list, as we see now when hovering over a page in the Pages panel.
  2. However, a Master can also have other Masters applied to it, which then apply to the document pages, too. We can only see that today by hovering over a Master Page in the Pages panel. Would we also want to see those "nested" Masters (and to what depth) when we look at the Masters applied to a document page? We can't see that at all, today, when looking at document pages.

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1 minute ago, walt.farrell said:

It's both space and complexity, I think, depending on what you want shown.

I think so too. It might help if @thomaso could explain more about what exactly he wants displayed, how much scrolling is acceptable to see all of it, & so on.

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This seems strange to me now, or at least like a somewhat inflated discussion. All I asked for was a list – and that still seems to be considered too difficult or unclear, although the pop-up-on-hover method already exists and is definitely more complex. The issue of nested masters is not really relevant here, as that is not yet the case with the pop-up-on-hover solution. With some existing text based but cumbersome UI items in mind (see the 4 screenshots above) my goal was to keep it simple, not to invent or develop a perfectly polished UI design that would rather have no chance of being realised.

I think we should not continue here in this Question thread but in one of the existing Feature Request threads.

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32 minutes ago, thomaso said:

The issue of nested masters is not really relevant here,

It is for me.

I do agree that a list view of the applied (nested or otherwise) Master/Parent Pages would be a very good thing. I would like this to be on a separate pages panel, so I could toggle between the thumbnail view of stuff on the pages and then call up the list view and see the applied Master/Parent pages.

38 minutes ago, thomaso said:

With some existing text based but cumbersome UI items in mind (see the 4 screenshots above) my goal was to keep it simple,

I like the one with the colours on the side for the current one Pages panel concept. Meaning this:

1806006311_ScreenShot2022-05-21at1_10_41PM.png.1a4d43db03563d7a7f8c58f912221955.png

=======================

I am not too sure about how I would like the list view presented, haven't actually thought about it too much.

I also agree that this discussion would be better served with a request thread.

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4 hours ago, thomaso said:

All I asked for was a list – and that still seems to be considered too difficult or unclear, although the pop-up-on-hover method already exists and is definitely more complex.

What is unclear to me is what this list view should include, specifically when there are hundreds of pages in a document & a lot of different masters applied in various ways to different pages, and/or there are masters with long and/or duplicated names.

What I was thinking about instead may not be what you want, but what if hovering the pointer over a Master page in the Pages panel popped up a list of every document page it was applied to -- IOW, the same thing we have now for the popup in that panel for document pages? It just seems more manageable/scaleable & maybe even more useful than trying to list every page's masters in one long list.

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