Not able to access and edit pages.

[Alfred Moussali]

I can not access 71 pages of a book, I can read them but not edit them.

I can start writing and formatting a new chapter, though; what am I doing wrong?

I tried the UNLOCK ALL feature in the Layers menu to no avail

any help is greatly appreciated.

La Tora - Shiurim.afpub

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums, and thanks for providing your document.

Starting at page 20 you have applied your Master Pages multiple times to the document pages, and that seems to have caused your problem.

I am not sure of the best way to resolve that problem, nor exactly why it has caused this problem.

[Old Bruce]

Thanks for including the file. Makes life much easier.

I agree with Walt's assessment. Myself I would rebuild the document. First I would Name all the items on the Master Page. You have a mysterious Art Text Text frame there on the left hand page.

I think the problem occurred with reapplying the Master page in order to get the Section names to show. I don't know how you changed that. I would use (including the Left and Right) Text, Page number, Grey Rectangle, Section name, etc.

As a test here first I deleted the topmost extra (mostly empty) Master Pages. Then I renamed the Master Page items and arranged them accordingly, Left all together and Right all together. Seems to have fixed the hidden Section names.

[MikeTO]

8 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Starting at page 20 you have applied your Master Pages multiple times to the document pages, and that seems to have caused your problem.

I am not sure of the best way to resolve that problem, nor exactly why it has caused this problem.

Hmm, Publisher lets you apply the same master to a page as many times as you like. This seems like a design flaw.

18 hours ago, Alfred Moussali said:

I can not access 71 pages of a book, I can read them but not edit them.

You can edit them but the layer with your text is below the duplicate layer, so when you click into the text frame you're actually clicking into a blank frame on top of your text frame.

This will be a pain to fix and each page is different. In these four screenshots you can see that as we mouse over each thumbnail Publisher shows us which master(s) are applied.

• For spread 16,17, you've applied Master A to both pages which is correct.
• For spread 18,19, you've applied the Left and Right sides of Master A separately to both pages in the spread so you have duplicate frames even on this page.
• For spread 20,21, you've applied two copies of the Left side of Master A and one copy of the Right side of Master A.
• For spread 22,23, you've applied two copies of Master A to the spread.

I think the easiest way to fix this would be to:

1. Back up your document
2. Open it and delete all the pages except for page 1. Even delete pages 2-17 which have the master correctly applied.
3. Go to Master A, click in the left frame, choose Edit > Select All, and then delete. Repeat for the right frame. This will delete the blank lines in the frames.
4. Click in the left text frame. Click the overset frame linking icon (the triangle on the right side toward the bottom of the frame) and then click on the right frame to link them together. You always want your master frames to be linked together.
5. Now go to page 1. It will be a mess but that's okay. Right click the thumbnail and re-apply Master A. That will mostly clean it up.
6. Delete the first two layers on the page that aren't in the Master A - Right group. These are stray layers that need to go.
7. Click in the text frame. Shift-click the overset icon and Publisher will create pages 2 to 19.
8. Your chapter only had 15 pages worth of text so select all the blank lines at the end of the chapter and delete those. Then delete pages 18-19.
9. Save your work - now you have chapter 1 created properly.
10. Add 2 pages (1 spread) to your document. It's better to create them from scratch so they're not linked to chapter 1 although you could have kept the two blank pages that had been created and just broken the linking, but this was easier to describe.
11. Open the backup of your document, click in the first frame of chapter 2, choose Select All, and then Copy all of its text to the clipboard.
12. Go to the new document and Paste that into the blank frame on chapter 2. Shift+click the overset icon and Publisher will generate the rest of chapter 2 for you. Delete any blank lines at the end of the chapter (I didn't check if there were any) and get chapter 2 in good shape. Save your work.
13. Continue for the rest of your book. If you come to a chapter where you can't select the text because there's one of those duplicate blank frames on top of the frame with your text, click the layer visibility icon beside the master groups in the Layers panel until you've turned off all the groups except for the one containing your text. When just that one is selected, then you'll be able to easily click into its frame and copy the text.
14. Good luck!

   

[Old Bruce]

6 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

Hmm, Publisher lets you apply the same master to a page as many times as you like. This seems like a design flaw.

I can see a situation where someone applies the Master Page A then Alters some things by using the Edit Detacthed and then reapplies the same Master and Alters the same things by using the Edit Detached, edits them in a different way. Then reapplies Master A ... you see where I am going?