Publisher tutorial for novel creation and importing pdf or text?

[Creative-Writer]

I'm new to Affinity Publisher. Used InDesign for years but latest Mac OS on my iMac does not support my old CS5 so I bought Affinity Publisher as I'd heard it does the same job as InDesign and after playing with it and watching some YouTube tutorials it seems to be pretty decent.

Question. I have a novel that I want to typeset and I know exactly how the process works in InDesign i.e. how to prepare the Word Document and import it into InDesign while retaining all the formatting options, but I don't know how to do this in Affinity Publisher.

I also don't have Microsoft Word anymore, I'm using Apple's own Pages (but I have Text Edit too). 

So can anybody point me to a good online tutorial – video or text tutorial – on how to prepare a Text document or Pages document and how to import that to 'flow' the text throughout the book while retaining all the formatting. 

Alternatively, as I have to do all the formatting as I only have a PDF of this 100,000 word novel and I have to cut and paste that PDF text into either Text Edit or Pages and format everything anyway, so I suppose I could just cut and paste that text into Affinity Publisher and do all the formatting there if need be – swings and roundabouts really, but I'd like to know the fastest way of getting a text only PDF document cut and paste into Affinity Publisher so I can format all the text i.e. chapter headings larger than the rest of the text with a nice big gap between the chapter header and the start of the text and the relevant indent at each new paragraph, but with no paragraph line space, typical 'novel' layout.

Thanks all.

[walt.farrell]

6 minutes ago, Creative-Writer said:

I also don't have Microsoft Word anymore, I'm using Apple's own Pages (but I have Text Edit too). 

You can also use the free LibreOffice to create .docx files that will work with Publisher, rather than using Word. I have no idea what Pages produces, but I know that LibreOffice works.

7 minutes ago, Creative-Writer said:

So can anybody point me to a good online tutorial – video or text tutorial – on how to prepare a Text document or Pages document and how to import that to 'flow' the text throughout the book while retaining all the formatting. 

It's easy to import a .docx file. You just click in a text frame, then use File > Place, select the file, and Open it.

The setup for doing that is easy, but if you choose to use Facing Pages in Publisher there is one trick to get started:

1. Create your document, with a Master Page.
2. Draw a Text Frame on the Master Page of the size you want to use for the document. If using Facing Pages, draw one on both the left and right pages.
3. If using Facing Pages, Link the two frames. First, click on the linking triangle on the lower right side of the frame on the left page. Then click within the frame on the right page.
4. Then go to page 1 of the document. Click in the text frame, and then use File > Place.
5. Once you have opened that file, it will probably overflow the text frame. Just Shift+Click on the red eye icon on the lower-right of the text frame, and Publisher will create additional pages for you.

12 minutes ago, Creative-Writer said:

but I'd like to know the fastest way of getting a text only PDF document cut and paste into Affinity Publisher

If you must work with PDF, I wouldn't cut/paste. I would simply Open the PDF in Publisher, and work from there. But it's better to start with a formatted .docx file if you have one.

[Old Bruce]

Never work with PDFs. They are a Finished Product file format, not an Interchange file format. You will open yourself up to a world of pain if you use PDFs as an Interchange file format.

Pages can export to .docx and Publisher will import that.

[Creative-Writer]

Hi Walt and Old Bruce

Thanks for this.

Ok, Apple’s Pages is sort of a light version of MS Word, and form Pages I can export as a docx file, which is good.

Based on what you said, Walt, and Old Bruce, I will create a fresh document in Apple’s Pages and export it as docx so I can then use that, with the existing formatting.

But, first I will have to cut/paste my PDF document into Apple’s Text Edit document and then in their I can click on ‘Format’ and select ‘Make Plain Text’ which does just that, removes all formatting. I’ll then cut and paste that into a Pages document and go through it over a week while reading it through and doing all the formatting to get a nice starting document in Pages that I can then export as a docx file before importing that into Publisher.

How does this workflow sound?

[Archangel]

Also consider Only Office for a more MS Office like fork of LibreOffice. 

[walt.farrell]

41 minutes ago, Creative-Writer said:

How does this workflow sound?

If I was forced to start with a PDF, rather than copy/paste I would probably Open it in Publisher directly, and work on it there.

However:

1. Some people object to the text-editor functionality of Publisher, so perhaps using Pages would work better for you. And
2. If you're going to need an export format that Publisher can't handle, such as ePub, then having the .docx file might give you a better starting point when you get around to creating that format of output file.

[Old Bruce]

34 minutes ago, Creative-Writer said:

But, first I will have to cut/paste my PDF document into Apple’s Text Edit document and then in their I can click on ‘Format’ and select ‘Make Plain Text’ which does just that, removes all formatting. I’ll then cut and paste that into a Pages document and go through it over a week while reading it through and doing all the formatting to get a nice starting document in Pages that I can then export as a docx file before importing that into Publisher.

How does this workflow sound?

I will assume that you have the novel only as a PDF and that is why you are doing the cut and paste into Text Edit. Myself I would then go with the plain text version directly into Publisher and do the formatting there. This means formatting once in one application. I don't see any advantage to using Pages to format the text.

If you have the novel as a .docx file just import that into Publisher. If you have the novel as a text file, .txt (plain text) or .rtf (Rich Text, meaning it has formatting applied) then I would just place that text file into Publisher and do the formatting there.

Myself I work with plain text pretty much exclusively, whenever possible I will use my Text Editor of choice BBEdit (Bare Bones Edit)) to markup the plain text with some 'tags' of my own so as to easily apply Paragraph and Character styles in Publisher with some Find and Replace. I find that there is no real advantage to importing text that is already formatted. Frequently I have to do a lot of work to keep locally formatted text to be using Character Styles. Always a chance to miss something.

Most of the time most of my work is done preparing the plain text. Then some simple find and replace in the Publisher file to apply the Paragraph and Character Styles.

[Creative-Writer]

Makes sense having a nice clean docx, exported from Pages, or a bare bones Text document rather than putting PDF into Publisher and formatting there as I will be doing a Kindle version too.

I'm thinking a Pages formatted document that I can save as docx and put into Publisher.