Update specific text frames with masterpage text

[Intuos5]

Hi,

I am working on a presentation in Affinity Publisher. I have masterpages with two text frames: one for the  title of the slide and the second for the chapter of the slide. Having started with my previous presentation file, I am now wondering how I could update all chapter text from the masterpage without affecting the title text of the slide. For the chapter text, I have a bar that contains all the chapters. Within this, I want to apply a different characterstyle to the active chapter, so I can have Chapter 1 displayed in bold when I talk about Chapter 1 and have Chapter 2 in bold for Chapter 2 etc. I prefer not to have individual masterpages for each chapter, because that would multiply the amount of masterpages by 7 (leaving me with 21 masterpages to manage). How could I approach the text updating efficiently?

[walt.farrell]

From just that description, it sounds like you should just be able to apply a character text style to the text you want to change.

To get into any more detail, it would help to have a sample .afpub document, set up as you're starting with, so we can actually see what you have.

[Intuos5]

In that case, I have prepared a bare-bones sample file with 4 slides. What I want to do is update the text of the Master page: Subject Bar to all of the regular slides. However, the regular slides all have text overrides for the title and for the "subject bar". Basically, I want to update the text of the bottom bar, while leaving the titles alone.

Update specific text frames with masterpage text.afpub

E: I doubt there would be a way to preserve the bold chapter override, for pages that have the right word set to bold, but if there is, I'd be interested to know.

[walt.farrell]

Thanks for the sample.

I'm probably not understanding, but on each page, why not:

1. Select the Master Page layer in the Layers panel, right-click, and Edit Detached.
2. Select the current chapter text that is "active" and assign it the character style for inactive.
3. Select the next chapter text (currently inactive) and assign it the character style for active.
4. Click Finished, move to the next page, and return to 1.

If you don't want a separate Master page for each chapter, I think that's what you'll need to do.

[Intuos5]

That seems to be a better approach than whay I did previously. But right now, I modified the text for each page. As you can see, the chapter names are different between the masterpage and the pages themselves. Same is true for the slide name on the top left. So how should I propagate the new chapter names on the masterpage subject bar to the regular pages without affecting the slide name?

[walt.farrell]

2 minutes ago, Intuos5 said:

So how should I propagate the new chapter names on the masterpage subject bar to the regular pages without affecting the slide name?

You're not updating the Master Pages with my approach. You're updating the Master Page layer and its contents on each document page. And you're only changing the styling of the text that needs to be changed.

[Intuos5]

I think we are discussing two different things. I want to apply your aporoach, however, there's old text on the pages from the previous presentation. So then I cannot overwrite all text with what's on the masterpage to then apply the styling by detaching the masterpage contents.

[walt.farrell]

Thanks for that clarification. 

If you keep that footer in a separate Master Page, you could remove that Master from all the document pages it's applied to. Then update its text for the new presentation, and re-apply it to all the pages.