Affinity Publisher - Windows - Select same needed or similar

[Angie Chaverri]

Hello, I'm new using Affinity Publisher. I'm editing a book. I placed a document from MS Word and it brought in a lot of lines, which I would like to remove at once. These lines are included in the Layers as Rectangle objects. I would like to select them all and delete at once. There is a Select same function on Affinity Designer, but I can't find this in the Publisher app. How else can I achieve this without selecting each of the hundreds of Rectangle objects of the 750-page document? 

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

There is a Select Same function, in Publisher's Designer Persona (if you also own Designer). But I'm afraid it won't help you completely as it only works on a single spread at a time.

You could, perhaps, export your Publisher file as a PDF. Then Open the PDF in Designer which will give you 1 Artboard per page/spread. In Designer, Select Same will select across Artboards. That might let you delete all the rectangles. Then you could Save the file, and Open it in Publisher. The Pages panel will let you convert the Artboards to Pages. You'll lose any Text Styles across the PDF export, though. And the text frames probably will need to be relinked. And you'll need to recreate any Master Pages.

As a better alternative, perhaps someone can suggest why the import generated the rectangles (which I've never heard of before), and suggest a way of preventing that from happening.

[Angie Chaverri]

19 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

There is a Select Same function, in Publisher's Designer Persona (if you also own Designer). But I'm afraid it won't help you completely as it only works on a single spread at a time.

You could, perhaps, export your Publisher file as a PDF. Then Open the PDF in Designer which will give you 1 Artboard per page/spread. In Designer, Select Same will select across Artboards. That might let you delete all the rectangles. Then you could Save the file, and Open it in Publisher. The Pages panel will let you convert the Artboards to Pages. You'll lose any Text Styles across the PDF export, though. And the text frames probably will need to be relinked. And you'll need to recreate any Master Pages.

As a better alternative, perhaps someone can suggest why the import generated the rectangles (which I've never heard of before), and suggest a way of preventing that from happening.

Hi Walt, 

I appreciate your response. I did not know I could switch to a Designer Persona. I checked it out, but I have only bought Affinity Publisher, not the Designer app.

I have worked a lot on the text styles and text frames, so your workaround is not an option for me right now, but good to know in a future case.

The imported rectangles are probably because the Word document had a lot of lines in it that had been added, they were decorations for foot notes and headings. But when I imported the document, they just flew all in like in disorder and bunched up in different pages. I will not be importing a Word document like that for now, lol.

Thanks again.

Edited June 17, 2022 by Angie Chaverri

[v_kyr]

It might be easier for you to delete unwanted text + lines in a copy of the Word document then, before importing that one afterwards into APub.

[Angie Chaverri]

23 hours ago, v_kyr said:

It might be easier for you to delete unwanted text + lines in a copy of the Word document then, before importing that one afterwards into APub.

Hi v_kyr, yes, that is actually a good idea. Thank you! I appreciate you helping me.