Publisher 2.1.0.1732 Books panel – chapter status icon behavior

[crdasneves]

Hi guys,

When you click on the chapter status icon "out of date" in the books panel, it synchronizes  the text styles of that chapter with the style source chapter, which seems odd to me. I would like to update the book regarding the chapters, not the other way around.

It's the same in version 2.0.4

[MikeTO]

This seems like the correct behaviour to me. If chapter 1 is the style source chapter and chapter 6 is outdated and I click to update it, I'd expect it to use the style source chapter and not modify other chapters to match chapter 6.

[crdasneves]

Hi Mike,

Sorry, I didn't express myself well; it's not about updating the styles of the other chapters, but about updating the status of the book in relation to that chapter that was modified.

I open the book and Publishers notifies me that there is an outdated chapter; well, if I already know that because I just made that modification, I would like to click on the icon just to confirm that yes, there was a modification and everything is alright. Note that if you make a different type of modification in the chapter other than styles (e.g local formatting), updating the status icon does not interfere with those modifications.

In other words, I would like the style synchronization to occur only through the specific command.

[MikeTO]

I understand now but I don't see a way around this. Publisher has to show the Out of Date icon because the chapter has been modified outside of the Book and at this point it doesn't know what changed, whether you added pages and impacted the numbering of other chapters, changed a style, or something else. Clicking the Out of Date icon is a shortcut for the panel's Synchronize command which is undocumented as far as I know.

I think what you're asking for is it to ignore the date stamp on the chapter and show that the chapter and book are up to date. But if you've added pages and impacted page numbering, this would lead to an incorrect situation.

Why do you not want styles to be synced? If the chapters all have the same styles anyway, syncing will have no effect on the styles.

You should be able to do what you want but I discovered a tiny bug while testing the idea. You can double click the chapter name (not the out of date icon) to open the chapter and then save the book - that should save it knowing that the chapter is updated. But if you close everything and re-open you'll still have the out of date icon.

1. Create a book with two chapters. Save and close everything
2. Open chapter 2 and modify it by typing a character or something. Save and close.
3. Open the book - chapter 2 is shown as Out of Date as it should be.
4. Double click chapter 2 to open it. Save the book and close everything.
5. Open the book - chapter 2 is shown as Out of Date - it should not be out of date, the book was updated in step 4.
6. Double click chapter 2 to open it. Modify it by typing a character or something. Save and close everything.
7. Open the book - chapter 2 is shown as up to date.

So Publisher requires that the chapter be updated while the book is open for the book to accept that it is up to date. It's a bit odd but not the most serious issue. Except for those of us with mild OCD who want a warning icon to go away. 🙂 

[crdasneves]

Thank you very much, Mike!

In my particular case, in a chapter with lots of figures and captions I had to slightly modify the captions line spacing (no other chapters with captions). Instead of changing the style in the source chapter (that I really use to syncronize styles after importing each chapter) or local formatting each caption I've just modified the style itself. Then I opened the book and do the update status just to get rid of the notification and not confuse myself later. Only then I realized the line spacing was back to the previous state, wich caused a frame with overflow text, and a new notification, this time in the preflight.

I've notice the "tiny little bug" also, and hope the Affinity Team doesn't consider it a bug at all, as I'm counting on this as a way to update the status and not be notified again 🙂

 

[Chris B]

Fair feedback in my opnion. I will pass this to dev.

[crdasneves]

Thanks, Chris!