Can I change spread layouts in existing document?

[moonliiner]

Publisher V1 Q? - I've been working on a 44 pg booklet with Letter size, facing pages for months. Suddenly the pages have changed to 17 x 11 single spreads and all of my styles are gone. I can rebuild the styles, but can I split the 17 x 11 back to 8.5 x 11 facing pages? I tried making a new Publisher doc to cut and paste pages into but apparently only one doc can be open at a time.

I have no idea how this happened. I've never set up a 17x11, however I did export the doc to that once.

[Old Bruce]

12 minutes ago, moonliiner said:

Suddenly the pages have changed to 17 x 11 single spreads and all of my styles are gone.

Sounds like you have opened up a PDF export of the Publisher file.

[moonliiner]

Old Bruce, I believe you are correct about the pdf and that solves the mystery of the layouts and styles going away. However I have discovered one more issue: If I try to apply a paragraph style, make any style changes, or even copy and paste text from the opened pdf into a plain text document in Text Edit, all of the spaces between words go away. I thought it might be a bad font issue so I changed the text to Arial regular, but the spaces still disappear. I even copied the pages into a V2 document and the problem followed. Any ideas?

[MikeTO]

36 minutes ago, moonliiner said:

Old Bruce, I believe you are correct about the pdf and that solves the mystery of the layouts and styles going away. However I have discovered one more issue: If I try to apply a paragraph style, make any style changes, or even copy and paste text from the opened pdf into a plain text document in Text Edit, all of the spaces between words go away. I thought it might be a bad font issue so I changed the text to Arial regular, but the spaces still disappear. I even copied the pages into a V2 document and the problem followed. Any ideas?

I can't duplicate the problem of spaces going away but when you open the PDF each line of text will become its own paragraph. You'll have to do work to reformat that text regardless before you can use it again in your original document.

Are you on macOS? It hides the file extension automatically which makes it easy to open the exported pdf instead of the original afpub file. I recommend turning on Show All Filename Extensions in Finder > Settings > Advanced to avoid this.

Cheers

[thomaso]

44 minutes ago, moonliiner said:

However I have discovered one more issue: If I try to apply a paragraph style, make any style changes, or even copy and paste text from the opened pdf into a plain text document in Text Edit, all of the spaces between words go away.

Odd. Do you remember what text handling option you have selected when opening the PDF in APub?

Does the PDF opened in APub contain spaces as separate glyphs? They would occur if you activate "Show Special Characters".

Can you upload a sample PDF page which shows this behaviour in Apub?

[moonliiner]

I don't know about the text handling settings. The problem was that I left the file name the same when exporting the .pdf and they were therefore next to each other in a folder. I just chose the wrong one, saved it, and continued editing in the bad copy. When I 'Show Special Characters' there are no invisibles between most, not all words. So a copy and paste or style change of any kind results in this:

Yogaisanancient exerciseoriginatinginIndiaover5000yearsagothatbridgesmindfulnessofbreath(pranayama)with bodyposes(asanas).

Itisacomprehensivesystemofguidance,techniques,andchoicestoimprovewell-beingonalllevels:physical,mental,emotionalandspiritual.

I found my last good afpub backup of 11-18 and have collected all of the client's emailed changes since then so I'm just going to do them again rather than try to figure this out. It's apparently something in the export after opening back up in Publisher. Lesson learned, will definitely NOT export a pdf with the same name again!

Thanks to all.

[thomaso]

8 hours ago, moonliiner said:

I don't know about the text handling settings. (…) When I 'Show Special Characters' there are no invisibles between most, not all words.

Whatever file type you opened the result of no spaces appears still odd and should not happen.

A) When opening a PDF then Affinity displays at first a "PDF Options" window for page selection, document resolution, colours space and this two text handling options:

B) In case I overwrite the already exported file type suffix ".pdf" by ".afpub" then APub opens the file without this options – but it still contains the space characters within the text and every line of text within paragraphs turned to a separate text frame:

C) If I overwrite the suffix during the export process In Affinity then it displays a warning message and disables me to export a PDF with suffix .afpub.

8 hours ago, moonliiner said:

Lesson learned, will definitely NOT export a pdf with the same name again!

Actually it should not matter or cause any unwanted result coincidentally (because of the displayed PDF Options).

Nevertheless, this is why I prefer not to display file icons as preview but the default file type icons instead. When navigating through files in macOS (don't know about Windows) I easily can press the space key to get a file preview displayed in a pop-up window.

[MikeTO]

2 hours ago, thomaso said:

Whatever file type you opened the result of no spaces appears still odd and should not happen.

I figured why it happened. If you export text to PDF with very tight tracking, upon opening the PDF Publisher won't identify the spaces between words as spaces.

I typed "this is a test", changed tracking to -100, exported and opened the PDF. Then I selected the text and copied it to another app and there were no spaces. So it can happen.

As the OP said, it's better not to worry about tit and revert to the original afpub file.

I've opened the PDF accidentally several times but seeing the PDF Options dialog is the warning that I've made a mistake.

[thomaso]

19 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

I figured why it happened. If you export text to PDF with very tight tracking, upon opening the PDF Publisher won't identify the spaces between words as spaces.

I typed "this is a test", changed tracking to -100, exported and opened the PDF. Then I selected the text and copied it to another app and there were no spaces. So it can happen.

I had also thought of tracking or kerning at first, but I assume the OP would have mentioned it initially as an issue – not only after the font got changed. Instead, mentioning "all of the spaces between words go away" indicates there have been visible spaces before the font got changed.

If a custom tracking is set it doesn't get overwritten by choosing a different font, right?

[MikeTO]

Somebody else asked the same question today and I provided a more detailed answer to it along with a screenshot of a test.

[thomaso]

@MikeTO, thank you. (maybe it is also font related: I don't get missing space characters with -50 in Arial but with -60)

Now I am curious whether @moonliiner had set negative tracking in the initial .afpub?

[moonliiner]

Thanks for looking into this. I had 0 tracking, it was the first thing I checked. I then tried changing the tracking and going back to 0 as well as using Arial for the font. No difference. Bugs in .pdf export have been common forever, I think this is just another one.

[MikeTO]

2 hours ago, moonliiner said:

Thanks for looking into this. I had 0 tracking, it was the first thing I checked. I then tried changing the tracking and going back to 0 as well as using Arial for the font. No difference. Bugs in .pdf export have been common forever, I think this is just another one.

Just to clarify, it's not a bug in the export, the resulting PDF is completely fine. It's the importing of a PDF as editable text where the problem lies.

[moonliiner]

It might be a bug in the export. I just opened some random pdf files not created in Publisher and they come in fine with the proper invisibles between words.

[MikeTO]

2 hours ago, moonliiner said:

It might be a bug in the export. I just opened some random pdf files not created in Publisher and they come in fine with the proper invisibles between words.

For the test file I created, I opened it in Apple Preview and copied the text to a text editor and the spaces were present. I opened the same PDF in Publisher and copied the text to the same text editor and the spaces were not present. For the test file I used, the issue was with the import.

If you have a Publisher text that lacks spaces when exported to PDF, please upload a sample afpub file for testing. You don't need to upload an entire confidential document, you could simply copy a line or two of text to a new document and that should be sufficient. This would be helpful to determine if there's an issue with export.

Thank you

[moonliiner]

OK, the pdf I imported was not a live text, I guess the program OCR’d it. My main concern is opening a V2 file in V1. I thought using a pdf would work but this negates that.

I will upload a sample per your request.