Copying Styled Text between Publisher Documents

[Seneca]

This issue has dogged Publisher since the very beginning and was reported a number of times by other users of the forum and me. So, I'm hoping that this problem will be addressed in this beta cycle.

My work involved working with liturgical documents. The text, once formatted, never changes. That is, once styles are applied to the text, this text is done.

What changes is that every year or so, this formatted text needs to be put into a new template, e.g., different underlying font face, different format of headings, etc. 

But when one copies the text from the old template to the new one, Publisher creates a new branch of all styles, creating new Base 1, Heading 1, Body 1, etc.

I would expect that an incoming document with exactly same style names (one to one mapping) would adopt the look of the new template. That's how other competing software works. But that's not the case with Publisher and I see no way of finding a workaround.

Is this the desired behaviour of Publisher or is this a bug? I sincerely hope that this is a bug because otherwise I don't think Publisher is suitable for this kind of work.

Please see my recording that illustrates the problem.

 

 

[walt.farrell]

5 minutes ago, Seneca said:

Is this the desired behaviour of Publisher or is this a bug?

I believe that unless the Text Style names in the text you're importing match the Text Style names in the file you're importing into, and the characteristics of the Text Styles also match, new Text Style names will be created. The goal, I believe, is that the imported text should not change its appearance.

7 minutes ago, Seneca said:

What changes is that every year or so, this formatted text needs to be put into a new template, e.g., different underlying font face, different format of headings, etc.

Why not simply make a copy of the document, then edit the Text Styles to change the appearance as needed? I think that is the intended workflow for Publisher.

[Seneca]

22 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Why not simply make a copy of the document, then edit the Text Styles to change the appearance as needed?

That's not workable in a situation where you have to move hundred of files to a new template.

I would like to hear from the "management" what the expected behaviour of this scenario is as that would be a real show stopper for people working with long documents constantly repurposing and updating it to new templates.

[MikeTO]

2 hours ago, Seneca said:

That's how other competing software works

Which competing software? Page layout apps and word processors typically retain the source formatting when pasting text or paste as plain text and use the destination formatting. They don't pasted as 'tagged text' and use the destination style sheet.

Obviously other people have this need and there are solutions for other apps. For example, in InDesign you could export the text as tagged text and then import that into the new template. I don't recall the exact mechanics but the idea is to exchange the text with style tags but not style definitions. Affinity doesn't have this capability. InDesign also offers Style Packs which I haven't tried myself, which automatically styles placed text using the destination style sheet by analyzing the formatting of the source content.

Since Affinity doesn't have those features nor a feature to remap styles, the solution for you in Affinity is to replace the styles after placing. Use Find and Replace for each style - i.e., search for Body Text 1 and replace with Body Text.

[Seneca]

1 minute ago, MikeTO said:

Which competing software?

Hello @MikeTo,

inDesign makes it very simple. Copying text from one template to another will make the text adopt the style of the new template. This, to me, is so natural that I'm surprised people find it strange. Let me stress that this works only if the templates have the same style names.

No need to engage in any of the processes descried above. Please have a look at the video below and how it works in inDesign.

Just copy the text to another template and boom, I'm done.

If I had to go into the root of F&R styles in 200 documents I would be still at it.

I'm hoping that someone from the team Affinity will chime in because otherwise Publisher is not going to replace inDesign for me any time soon.

 

 

[MikeTO]

46 minutes ago, Seneca said:

inDesign makes it very simple. Copying text from one template to another will make the text adopt the style of the new template. This, to me, is so natural that I'm surprised people find it strange. Let me stress that this works only if the templates have the same style names.

No need to engage in any of the processes descried above. Please have a look at the video below and how it works in inDesign.

Just copy the text to another template and boom, I'm done.

That to me is the wrong behaviour. It might be convenient for your use case but it's not good for other use cases.

Here's another approach that requires just one more step before you copy and paste. Just ensure your new template has the same style names.

With the old document open, choose Import Styles from the Text Styles panel's menu. Click OK. Now the styles will match between the documents so you can copy and paste and get the results you want.

[Seneca]

5 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

That to me is the wrong behaviour. It might be convenient for your use case but it's not good for other use cases.

I'd be interested to know what those other use cases are.

Frankly I don't understand what you mean by a wrong behaviour. I struggle to see the downsides of it.

I've used inDesign since the first beta release so I don't remember when this feature became available but I've always used this without any issues. Your solution works as well and it should be employed when the need arises. Both have its place. 

[Seneca]

19 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

choose Import Styles from the Text Styles panel's menu.

Hello @MikeTO,

Your quote above made me realise that this actually works in Publisher.

Just import the styles of a new template over the old one overriding the old styles. Problem solved.

And all done in one step. Thanks for that hint. 🙂

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, Seneca said:

I'd be interested to know what those other use cases are.

The standard use case for any app that supports rich formatting is that when you copy text from one document to another it should look exactly the same after pasting. This is how apps like Affinity, Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, and so on all work.

The most common way it's done is if you paste in text that uses the same style with different attribute definitions that the result should be that the pasted text will have individual character attributes applied on top of the style to make it look like it did when it was copied. If Body Text is Helvetica in the source document and Times in the target document, you'll have Body Text + Font Family:Times after pasting.

The way Affinity handles this produces a similar result but it doesn't do it in the same way, and in my opinion there's room it's backward and inconsistent. Publisher will give you two results that are visually identical but defined differently depending on the style setup. In most cases, instead of the pasted Heading 1 text having individual attributes applied to make it look like the source document even though Heading 1 is defined differently in the target document, Publisher will update Heading 1 in the target document to match the pasted text and then apply individual attributes to all existing text styled with Heading 1 to retain its original appearance. I believe this is backward.

But if your styles are set up in a certain way, you will instead have two definitions for the style instead - for example, Custom Style and Custom Style 1. This inconsistency is likely leading to some of the confusion.

[gw_westdale]

Yes - I have had a bit of a hard time with importing in this last couple of weeks. [ And I qualify this with saying I love the Affinity suite. ]
I have several related political leaflets all with the same set of text styles set up as a hierarchy .  content -> intro para -> intro para bold ......
One candidate has a good idea with his text and I  copy it to another candidate's leaflet. Bingo - multiple 'content/ content 1/ content 2' styles that then have to be cleaned up rather that smoothly dropping the text in 'content' para style into the destination 'content' para style.   
PLEASE can we have a paste that moves text to the intended target style where the style names are the same.
Probably a  'paste keep style' would satisfy those that want a literal image of a source document in the  target and there is a clash of style names.
 

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, gw_westdale said:

I have several related political leaflets all with the same set of text styles set up as a hierarchy .  content -> intro para -> intro para bold ......

...

PLEASE can we have a paste that moves text to the intended target style where the style names are the same.

In my experience, it only creates a new text style if the definition of the current text style and the pasted text style are different. If the names are the same, and all the attributes are the same, it simply uses the existing text style.

This leads me to wonder if your "same set of text styles" are actually different in some way.

[gw_westdale]

Just so.   As I say    "dropping the text in 'content' para style into the destination 'content' para style.  "

Similar to the behaviour of HTML styles where the CSS may have (usually small) differences. What we used to call 'white labelling ' on our web sites for credit card - all the semantics and intentions are the same in the hierarchy ( content is content, a header is a header, header 2 is header 1 at a smaller size) )

In my case the hierarchy is the same structure and there are deliberately changes of detail - colour, spacing or perhaps the bullet characters>
Using target style would be brilliant.

CSS was a great leap forward in web design ...
Although we have some of this ( style A depends on style B with small changes, which is great when couple with global colours) )
but not full separation of structure and presentation but I can see that would be a radical step.

I'm not yet 100% convinced that the same definition and same name will reuse....
I have a feeling it also it depends on how you reach the definition - the order of creating it for instance.  - will research when I have some time