Books. Synchronising style

[MiriamNZ]

I have 4 chapters.

I set the second chapter to be the one with the main styles. The menus showed me this had been set ok.

I chose to synchronise styles: In the popup window I deselected everything except styles, so only the styles would synchronise.

I clicked to do it. Nothing appeared to happen. Wasn't sure if my click was successful. Clicked again. Still nothing appeared to happen.

Checking, I discovered: no styles synchronised at all. No change to styles in other chapters at all.

But, the master pages copied over, duplicating the existing masters. Since I clicked twice, I ended up with two complete sets of master pages that I had to delete, one master at a time from the other chapters, since the masters were already the same and complete and required no syncing.

--

I tried having chapter 3 selected, and choosing to synchronise. More duplicate master pages added, but no styles were added.

I tried having chapter 1 as the master chapter for styles.

Getting pretty sick of deleting all the extra masters by this time so when duplicating masters was all that happened I gave up.

Summary:

I can't use synchronise to get my styles aligned between chapters in a book.

I can't stop masters duplicating, even when the check box for masters is unticked in the synchronise dialog: they copy every time and every one of them, even when they are the same as what is already there, or the same as what it copied 2 seconds ago.

Masters duplicate what is already there, they dont just add new/different masters.  

You can't tell, when you click to action the sync, that anything has happened. (Well, leave your master page panel visible and you might see all the extra  masters cluttering things up.)

 

MacOSX 12.6 (Monterey). Publisher v2.0

 

[MikeTO]

I tested this and I agree, synchronize styles is not working if the key chapter is not #1. I thought I had tried this previously and it worked but I can't get it to work now.

And I agree it shouldn't duplicate masters but it does.

[stokerg]

Hi @MiriamNZ,

Thanks for reporting this.

We do already have this logged with the Dev team to resolve  

[GuyMiklos]

I'm having the same problems with no synchronisation and with extra master pages. And in addition the chapters I added to my Books-panel disappeared when I closed the app and restarted. 

The intended functionality is exactly what I need, so I look forward to it being fixed. 

It would also be VERY helpful if it were possible to select multiple master pages for deletion, since I now have about 40 after pushing the synchronise button many, many times in vain attempts to get feed back or after failing to see synchronsed text styles, and without realising that I was duplicating master pages each time. I only found out about duplicated master pages when I read MiriamNZ's post. Horror. And half my text has gone missing too - I'll try to trace it.

Which master pages should I delete? How do I know which copies of the 5 or 6 duplicates of each master are not applied and which I must leave so that I don't loose work?

[GuyMiklos]

Affinity crashes when I try to delete master pages that the synchronise process created. 

I thought perhaps the duplicates might disappear if I tried dragging and dropping them onto their namessake. This resulted in an instant and reliable crash every time I did it, even when dropped on master pages with other names. I'm attaching the afbook file here, in case it is useful in analysing the bug. But it seems not have updated since yesterday, and the crash occurred today after working with it for a couple of hours. If you need the two chapters I was using, then I can upload those to a drive you designate, but I don't want my unpublished book in this forum.

 

PC Design Meth Ref Book vols I&II v01.afbook

[Architext]

Same synchronise problems with books tool in Windows 11. Master pages are sometimes (not always) duplicated in stead of updated.

[LindaRushby]

I have the same problem. I am creating a book with multiple chapters, using the first chapter as the style source. I have a number of master pages (title page, front matter, new section page, new chapter page,  basic text with headers and footers, etc), all defined in the style source. When I was first developing it I was synchronising each chapter every time I made a change to one of the masters in the style source, then I discovered that I was ending up with multiple versions of the master pages in each chapter. I started again from scratch and just synchronised each chapter once when I created it, but then found that I needed to make changes to one of the masters. Please can you let me know when this is resolved, as it would clearly be very useful if this feature worked as it's intended to do.

[AndersWt]

I have found the same problem with multiple master pages after synch.

How is the bug fixing going? I haven't seen the bug being fixed for 2.2

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, AndersWt said:

I have found the same problem with multiple master pages after synch.

How is the bug fixing going? I haven't seen the bug being fixed for 2.2

Hi and welcome to the forums. This thread was about a bug in synchronizing styles when the Style Source Chapter was not chapter 1. That bug has been fixed.

The issue with master pages being duplicated is not a bug but a design limitation. I know that's frustrating and to us users it often feels like the same thing, but syncing master pages will duplicate them if you make any changes to them in the Style Source Chapter.

I recommend making your masters perfect in one chapter document before creating any additional chapter documents.

[Welsbach]

Good to know. This means, it is a bug by design. Nice.

May be somebody at Affinity as a dictionary and can look, what the word »to synchronize« means. Until this happens it is clear the the book feature is useless. It will take a while until Publisher is ready.

[walt.farrell]

As documented, @Welsbach, the Master Pages will be duplicated when you Synchronize.

Assuming you have named the layers in the Master Page originally, you should simply be able to Apply the duplicate Master Page to the pages in the book chapter, and choose the Migrate option.

[laughart]

It’s all very complicated to me, I’ve uninstalled all three Affinity programs.

[MikeTO]

8 hours ago, laughart said:

It’s all very complicated to me, I’ve uninstalled all three Affinity programs.

The Books feature is complex but you don't need to use it to create a book. It's really only needed for those who have so many images or embedded documents that their computers can't handle the entire book as a single document. It's also useful for those who collaborate with others because they can "check out" chapters to work on separately. But for most people, it's easier just to create a book as a single document.

[Welsbach]

It is also much easier, if the book has many parts which one can locate easily and edit. If you have a book of 700-800 pages it is not easy to find the beginning of a particular chapter. But it is easy, if every chapter is a single file and part of a book. Here the advantage is, that you don’t need to care for the right page numbering etc.

The people of Affinity throw an eye to InDesign. They can learn there a lot.

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, Welsbach said:

It is also much easier, if the book has many parts which one can locate easily and edit. If you have a book of 700-800 pages it is not easy to find the beginning of a particular chapter. But it is easy, if every chapter is a single file and part of a book. Here the advantage is, that you don’t need to care for the right page numbering etc.

The people of Affinity throw an eye to InDesign. They can learn there a lot.

Until the Pages panel has visible sections to make it easier to jump to the start of a section (chapter), you can use anchors as a workaround.

Position the text cursor at the start of a chapter and create an anchor named "Chapter 1" (or "_Chapter 1" if you use have other anchors and you want these to be sorted to the top of the list). Then you can just use the Anchors panel as a chapter navigation tool.

You could do this with hyperlinks or cross references, too.

Cheers

[Oufti]

3 hours ago, Welsbach said:

It is also much easier, if the book has many parts which one can locate easily and edit. If you have a book of 700-800 pages it is not easy to find the beginning of a particular chapter.

I have found helpful having a summary – or a detailed table of contents – at the beginning and end of my documents to navigate through it via a ctrl-click > Go to the hyperlink target (at the bottom of the contextual menu), once the cursor put in a chapter title. 

In some documents, I even added a temporary TOC, specially tailored for navigation during work, aside the ones I will use for printing. 

[AndersWt]

Thanks for all your replies and suggestions. I think I would prefer a synchronise mechanism that is more intelligent, which recognises updates to master pages and don't replicate them. So this feature makes me return to a single document and not use a the Book building even though a book would be a natural way to do it.

[Aleksandar Kovač]

I agree with @Welsbach.

Regarding the ‘synchronization’ of master pages, the process that is executed when pressing ‘synchronize’ is not synchronization but rather ‘propagation’. If this is indeed ‘by design’ this is by very bad or incomplete design. As it is now, it is:

• damaging to the fluidity of the workflow – good preparation is important, by all means, but having to make absolutely perfect layouts beforehand eliminates the advantages of using this tool and this medium fully to the benefit of the user;
• unnecessarily wasting user’s time – if there are more than one master in the style source chapter, time needed to delete all the unneeded propagated masters (one-by-one!) in other chapters grows exponentially; propagated master versions accumulate quickly. Unless a user has been diligently renaming them before each synchronization/propagation, obsolete masters will have the same names as newer masters, which makes cleaning and maintaining the file a pain. E.g.: 3 changes on 6 masters in a book with 10 chapters will propagate 120 obsolete masters. 2000% increase of unneeded masters!
• confusing – text styles synchronize, masters propagate. Two different processes are executed with the same command;
• self limiting – Books concept should help manage complex publications but complex publications are precisely the kind of job where the current synchronization shortcomings are the most crippling.

I’d say all the above are no-nos, and that the Books feature is not up to the task.

Of course, I could be wrong. As I have been before...

 

[GuyMiklos]

Thanks Aleksander, for summarising the main issues. I think the book feature is well conceived, but has failed to fulfil it's purpose due to poor implementation that doesn't correspond with user needs, expectations, or intuition. What's more, unsuspecting users will be subject to a huge amount of extra work try to sort out the mess this function creates, as mess that cannot simply be undone.  

I hope the development team will rethink keeping in mind users' needs, expectations, and intuition, before "fixing".