Text in a Placed PDF is No Longer Split by Layer Making it Difficult to Hide Individual Items

[Hangman]

Text in a Placed PDF in 2.1.0.1713 is no longer split by layer as it was in 1.10.6 making it impossible/difficult to hide individual lines of text using Edit Document as it’s no longer possible to toggle individual items off...

Text in the placed PDF now appears to adopt the ‘group lines of text in a text frame’ approach regardless of whether using Frame or Artistic Text, which isn’t helpful in this instance…

This is also compounded by the fact that in the 2.1 Beta's you can't actually hide any layers...

Note: This is also the case in 2.0.4 but reporting it here as I don’t believe it’s been logged as a bug before.

Frame Text.pdf

[Affinity Info Bot]

An issue raised in this thread ("Text in a Placed PDF is No Longer Split by Layer Making it Difficult to Hide Individual Items") has now been reported to the developers by the testing team (Ref: AFB-7481). Thank you very much for reporting this issue to us.

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "Text in a Placed PDF is No Longer Split by Layer Making it Difficult to Hide Individual Items" (REF: AFB-7481) has been fixed by the developers in internal build "2.1.0.1736".
This fix should soon be available as a customer beta and is planned for inclusion in the next customer release.
Customer beta builds are announced here and you can participate by following these instructions.
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Serif Info Bot to notify us.

[Hangman]

@Serif Info Bot, In the current Beta when editing longform text in a placed pdf, text is now split into individual lines rathrer than grouped into text frames (as per 2.0.4) making it completely impractical/impossible to edit. While the change was originally made for a specific use case, fully editable long form text is a must and really needs to take priority over editable text for individual items, so this ideally needs to revert to the 2.0.4 behaviour...

[Gabe]

I'm not sure I follow. Have you got another sample where it goes wrong? 

[Obscured]

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[joe_l]

21 hours ago, Hangman said:

In the current Beta when editing long form text in a placed pdf, text is now split into individual lines rathrer than grouped into text frames (as per 2.0.4) making it completely impractical/impossible to edit.

I am a bit confused about the term form text, as the Affinities discard text in form fields. If you just mean simple text, then it must be a Mac specific problem. No problem for me on Windows. Or is it just a certain file?

[Hangman]

Hi @Gabe,

It's really as @Return say's, if you receive for example a client formatted pdf file which you place into Publisher as an embedded document forming say one section of a larger Publisher file but you need to make some editorial text changes to certain parts of the placed pdf, in 2.0.4 when you select 'Edit Document', the text is maintained as editable frame text which means you can delete or insert text and graphics and in doing so the text flows within the text frame making editorial changes relatively practical.

In 2.1.0 this has reverted back to the 1.10.6 behaviour where text now appears as individual lines of Art text making longform text completely uneditable because you can no longer effectively edit, insert or delete sections of text and maintain the original layout and text flow.

The issue above was initially raised for two reasons with a view to hopefully finding a solution to the situation where you have:

1. Individual frame text, laid out in an almost table like format.
2. Text positioned at differing intervals forming part of a diagram, e.g., a chart.

In both instances, when either form part of a 'placed' pdf file which then needs to be edited in a Publisher file, two things happen.

1. The individual frame text laid out in a table like format, i.e, effectively forming rows and columns is interpreted by Publisher as individual frame text columns and means if you wanted to select the text in rows to either change the formatting, colour or even hide a 'row of text' you can't without completely reformatting the text.
    
2. Some items of text in certain graphic layouts end up grouped together in single text frames which means if you need to hide individual characters or words by toggling the appropriate layer off in the layers panel, again you can't without a lot of reworking of the graphic.

In an attempt to overcome these limitations, the dev team have subsequently reverted back to 1.10.6 behaviour which instead of converting the table like text to individual columns of frame text, it now appears as individual layers of Artistic text meaning each item of text can be toggled off so you can now effectively hide individual rows of text, albeit by hiding the relevant Artistic text layers one by one, however the intention was never to do this at the expense of longform text editability.

The 'side effect' of reverting back to the 1.10.6 behaviour is that it means longform frame text also now appears as individual lines of Artistic text and is subsequently no longer editable as flowed text.

It appears this is basically an either/or scenario, i.e., you can have one or the other but not both owing to the way frame text is interpretted but the much preferred behaviour is that of 2.0.4 where longform frame text remains editable which it isn't in 2.1.0 so the request here from everyone is to revert back to the 2.0.4 behaviour.

I've attached two rough and ready samples one a 2.0.4, the other a 2.1.0 Publisher document so you can hopefully see the issues described above, most importantly on page 3.

While the 2.0.4 behaviour is far from perfect and neither option resolves text grouping on the graph, it is most definitely preferred over the current 2.1.0 behaviour.

 

Text Sample 2 0 4.afpub

Text Sample 2 1 0.afpub

 

[Hangman]

4 hours ago, joe_l said:

I am a bit confused about the term form text

A typo, that should have read 'longform text' rather than long 'form text'...

[Obscured]

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[Gabe]

On 3/8/2023 at 3:35 PM, Hangman said:

Text in a Placed PDF in 2.1.0.1713 is no longer split by layer as it was in 1.10.6 making it impossible/difficult to hide individual lines of text using Edit Document as it’s no longer possible to toggle individual items off...

The original report was about this ^, so we reverted it to the v1 behaviour. 

I agree, the modal dialog you get when you open a PDF would be a better solution, but that would be an improvement request/new feature rather than a bug. 

[Hangman]

2 minutes ago, Gabe said:

The original report was about this ^, so we reverted it to the v1 behaviour. 

Hi @Gabe, while this is indeed the case, i.e., in relation to the video in the first post the reversion back to 1.10.6 behaviour which was deemed to be the resolution to this specific problem resulted in the unexpected (to me at least) reversion, side effect (or whatever you would call it) of flowing frame text reverting back to individual lines of Artistic text which makes it completely uneditable...

That wasn't the initial expectation, as in, the hope was that where individual frame text items in a table like layout become grouped into columns, making it impossible to hide rows of text, the desire was that these would or could remain as individual frame text items to allow them to be toggled on or off individually while leaving longform text as editable frame text (as per 2.0.4) so while the former has effectively been achieved by reverting back to 1.10.6 behaviour that has had a negative impact on longform frame text as well, i.e., the expectation wasn't that longform frame text would also revert back to individual lines of uneditable Artistic text.

The issue (unknowingly at the time) seems to be that it's one or the other, where the hope had been for a solution that combined the two if that makes sense... so even though this was initially a request for an improvement it was reported here because there was also the bug where toggling layer visibility on and off wasn't actually hiding the text on canvas which has now been resolved.

I think, the modal dialog would perhaps provide the best of both worlds and at least allow users to choose between the two, and I agree, now we are where we are, yes, this is really now an improvement request/new feature rather than a bug.

I hope some of that at least makes sense...