Issues with Books

[UlrichW]

Hello,

I am using Publisher 2.03 on a Macbook Pro (OS 10.15.7) with 16 GB RAM. I'm trying to create a book with quite a lot of pictures, consisting of about 10 chapters, using several textstyles for headlines and text. Each day one or more than one style is changed after opening a chapter (any chapter, throughout the book). The change is always the same: size of the font and the distance of the lines is reduced to the half (see attached pictures).

I have tried to change the key-chapter for the styles: that does not always work (according to the symbol beside the chapter), but even if it works the problem stays. It does not occur each time I open a file, but each day: often enough to drive me crazy.

Any ideas?

[MikeTO]

Hi Ulrich and welcome to the forum.

Just to confirm, you're using the new Book feature of v2 and each Chapter is in a separate file?

Styles in Books are synchronized automatically. I think what's happening is you've got one or more text frames with content scaling applied. This is something that trips up Publisher users all the time and since there's no way to fix it you have to delete the text frame and draw a fresh one.

Here are steps so you can see the issue. My apologies if you know all about this and it isn't your issue.

1. Create a new document
2. Draw two small text frames on the same page.
3. Drag the content scaling handle (the one indicated here) and make the frame larger
   
4. Now drag the normal bottom right size handle and make the frame around the original size - it will look the same as before you scaled the frame
5. Type some text into the first frame and duplicate it until it is overset
6. Click the overset icon and link frame 1 to frame 2 - the overset text will appear in frame 2 but it will be larger than frame 1

Dragging the content scaling handle applies a scale factor to the text inside the frame. Unfortunately, Affinity doesn't indicate this anywhere and you can't find out how much it's scaled. There is no way to reset it to 100%. You can drag the frame smaller with the scale handle but you'll never get it to exactly 100%. The only solution is to delete the frame and draw a new one.

Once you've eliminated the text frames with content scaling applied then synchronizing your styles across chapters should work correctly.

[UlrichW]

Hi Mike

and thanks a lot for your interesting tipps. I don't think this does fit my problems, as there are no connected textframes. Instead the textstyles themselves get modified, for example from 10°/12° to 5°/6°, in all chapters simultaneously.

I do restore the all values, synchronize the book and everything looks fine. But next day - sometimes, not every day - its back to 5°/6° everywhere.

Exporting the books shows another problem: the first two pages (a separate chapter) are reduced to 50% of their size (shown as 108x151mm), which they are of course not. Exporting only the two pages gives them correct as 216x303mm including bleeds.

I have been working with QuarkXpress for 25 years and Indesign for 12 years, but this seems really strange and buggy.

[MikeTO]

That's odd. It's obviously an issue with the syncing of styles since they change in all chapters.

Just as a test, don't open the book, but open the key chapter and one other chapter. Correct the sizes in both files, save them, and close both files.

Then open the book and open the key chapter and that one other chapter. Compare the sizes now. Are both incorrect?