Marking scene breaks

[Dungarven]

Hi. I am using an empty line, the three asterisks centered horizontally, then another empty line to mark scene breaks in a chapter.

I note that the asterisks are not centered vertically in the space between the text above and below. Is there an easy way to make the *** sit on the grid base line so it is properly centered? It looks closer to the line above than it is to the line below. Many thanks!

[Alfred]

In the ‘Positioning and Transform’ section of the Character panel there’s a Baseline value that controls the position of the bottom of text characters.

[Dungarven]

Alfred, You rule! Thank you! I am very happy with those scene breaks now.

Hope you have a great day in bonny Scotland.

Cheers

[Dungarven]

Is there any way to automatically apply this treatment to all my ***? I have just clicked Find *** and there are tons of them! Thanks!

[joe_l]

4 hours ago, Dungarven said:

Is there any way to automatically apply this treatment to all my ***? I have just clicked Find *** and there are tons of them! Thanks!

Use the Find and Replace panel for replacing with a format or an already defined Character Style.

[Dungarven]

Thank you! That works well to move the *** down to where I want it, but I can't get it to shift to the centre. Have tried to format it to do that, but it is not working. Is there something else I need to do?

[Old Bruce]

I would think that that would work. Have you tried using a pair of purpose built Character and Paragraph Styles and applying them?

[Dungarven]

Unfortunately, it is not working! Mystery.

How do I try a pair as  you suggest... is it easy? I am a novice as you will have guessed. thanks Bruce.

[Old Bruce]

7 hours ago, Dungarven said:

Unfortunately, it is not working! Mystery.

How do I try a pair as  you suggest... is it easy? I am a novice as you will have guessed. thanks Bruce.

I have to admit that I am not absolutely certain about what you are trying to do. Here is a document that uses a Scene Break Paragraph style for the ellipsis, there is an adjustment for the vertical offset. I also include a space before and space after in the Spacing part. I do not like using multiple Paragraph Returns for formatting text, I haven't used them since my typewriter days.

Here is the document

Scene Break.afpub

[R C-R]

20 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Have you tried using a pair of purpose built Character and Paragraph Styles and applying them?

I am probably missing something obvious, but why would you need any special Character style for this? From what I can see what is being found & replaced is in each instance a paragraph consisting of just three asterisks, all with the same character style (& of course the return).

[Old Bruce]

Just now, R C-R said:

I am probably missing something obvious,

Wasn't you missing something, it was me not paying attention and typing without thinking. Just a Paragraph style should work, no need for a pair.

[Dungarven]

Thanks for your help and suggestions, friends! It is a mystery as to why my *** to mark a scene break will shift down to the baseline grid where I want them, but will not shift to the centre of the page. They remain stubbornly at the left!  I will just have to do them all manually using Find to get them all. Sigh!

Happy about lowering them to better position though! 😊

Thanks!

[walt.farrell]

20 minutes ago, Dungarven said:

They remain stubbornly at the left!  I will just have to do them all manually using Find to get them all. Sigh!

If you can give us a sample .afpub file that has the problem, we can probably tell you why it happens.

[Old Bruce]

5 hours ago, Dungarven said:

Thanks for your help and suggestions, friends! It is a mystery as to why my *** to mark a scene break will shift down to the baseline grid where I want them, but will not shift to the centre of the page. They remain stubbornly at the left!  I will just have to do them all manually using Find to get them all. Sigh!

Try setting the various indents to 0 (zero). [No change] is often at the root of these problems.

[Old Bruce]

@Dungarven, I just had a thought... (does happen)

Are these actually Paragraphs or are they made with Line Returns?

Turn on Text > Show Special Characters. Look for the paragraph return Pilcrow on the line before the *** Scene break. 

Paragraph

A space and a Line Return

[R C-R]

8 hours ago, Dungarven said:

It is a mystery as to why my *** to mark a scene break will shift down to the baseline grid where I want them, but will not shift to the centre of the page.

The best (& maybe only) way to solve this would be like @walt.farrell suggested & post  a sample .afpub file that has this problem. It could be just one or two pages. As long as there is at least one of your page break characters, it should be enough to at least provide a good starting point for further investigation.

[Dungarven]

The first image shows what I imported from Word. As you can see, I have highlighted the *** scene break. Visually it is closer to the line above than it is to the line below, because the letters above sit on the base line and the *** sit raised above their baseline.

When I placed this text in AffPub the *** appeared raised above the baseline and at the far left of the line. See second image. 

I have managed, thanks to Joe's advice to shift all the *** down to the baseline,  😊 by doing a Find and Replace, (see third image) but even though I applied Paragraph spacing Centre, the asterisks remained at the left. I have manually centered them all now, so no worries. Just extra work, but it might be useful to know what the problem was for future reference. 

What I wanted was *** centered and on the baseline. See fourth image. I hope that helps. Thanks everyone for your help and support. 

 

 

 

[Dungarven]

PS Now I have corrected them, my *** look like this

[R C-R]

8 hours ago, Dungarven said:

I hope that helps.

What would help more is to post the twice requested sample afpub file. The screenshots do not help very much.

[Dungarven]

Unfortunately, I do not know how to post a sample afpub file, or I would have done it! I am so sorry. Please accept my apologies for my shortcomings as a novice, and for having used your time and expertise.

I have looked on Google to find out what is involved and unfortunately, it looks too complicated for me. The person who helped me set up Affinity is not available, so I hope you understand but I would prefer to let the matter drop for the moment.

It has been very kind of you all to offer to help. Please accept my sincere thanks for your efforts. Kind regards.

[R C-R]

14 minutes ago, Dungarven said:

Unfortunately, I do not know how to post a sample afpub file, or I would have done it!

Just drag the file into the area at the bottom of the reply editor or click the link to choose the file you want to attach (where it says "Drag files here to attach or choose files...).

[Dungarven]

Thanks for your patience, RC-R! That wasn't too hard after all! I started a new document using the same Master A as before and I placed some filler text in from Word just like I did before. I included a good few scene breaks as you and Walt suggested. In Word the Scene breaks *** are centered but once again as you see, they showed up in Afpub over at far left. I tried to move them all down, and centre them by using a formatted one that I copied into Find and Replace. Unfortunately I could not get it to work at all this time. Any ideas?

To Be Determined 20220824.afpub

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, Dungarven said:

Any ideas?

From what I can tell, all the scene break paragraphs are set to justified left. I am not very familiar with using find & replace, but manually changing that to center align properly centers each of them.

Someone better at using find & replace can probably tell you how to use that to fix all of them at once.

[joe_l]

3 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Someone better at using find & replace can probably tell you how to use that to fix all of them at once.

Just added a Paragraph Style to the attached document and an image on how to use "Find And Replace". Of course you can adapt this Paragraph Style to your needs.

To Be Determined 20220824-with-Paragraph-Style.afpub

[Old Bruce]

The easiest way to do this is to first download this altered file; TBD edit bruce.afpub and copy the settings from the Scene Break Paragraph Style to your own Document. Then use Find and Replace with a Regular Expression. You will need to escape the asterisks so type \* for each asterisk. 

In the replace field choose from the Format list your pre-made Paragraph Style called Scene Break.

Note: I assume you have actually used Paragraph Styles in the actual document and not done there what you have done here which is use only one style and override everything locally. If this note doesn't make sense to you then please learn about, and use, Paragraph and Character Styles.