Adding a page near the front of a long document

[wdmartin]

I'm nearly done setting my copy of Pride and Prejudice, and I've run into an aggravating issue. I wanted to insert a single blank page after the Table of Contents, so that the first page of Chapter I would not be the verso of the last page of the Table of Contents.

But after inserting a new page with blank masters, suddenly the layout of the entire book changed. All of the text frames on all of the pages shifted about half an inch towards the spine of the book, along with their contents, including the illustrations.

Here's a screenshot showing what it looked like before adding that extra page:

Everything nicely lined up. Now here's a screenshot after inserting the blank page:

Note the shifted text frame. The same has occurred on all the subsequent pages.

I tried using my main text master page for the new blank page instead of a blank master page, but the same thing happened.  Why should the addition of an empty page alter the layout of any other page, let alone all of them? I do not understand why this has happened.

I could fix it manually by repositioning everything.  But I really, really don't want to.  There are 481 pages affected. And from my brief experiments, moving the text frame does not move any image frames within them, meaning I would have to reposition all the illustrations as well, of which there are about 160-ish.  I've already positioned all those damn things twice, and I am not thrilled at the prospect of doing it a third.

Is there some way I can get this blank page inserted without incurring multiple hours of work fixing everything? I'm so close to being done ...

[firstdefence]

Hang in there @wdmartin In the meantime, could you export a copy of the .afpub file with some of affected pages to look at, so maybe the first 10 pages?

[walt.farrell]

Just to confirm: Your topic title says "Missing ToC entry" but your question is, instead, about inserting a page? If so, it would be nice to change the topic title. You can do that with a long-click on the title using a browser on a computer, or by editing your initial post here and changing the Title field.

In general, adding a single blank page into a Facing Pages document will cause problems like you have experienced. I don't think there's any good way to do it. It will probably be easiest to add 2 blank pages, and just accept having a blank page that you don't want. Or, find something interesting to put on one of them  

[MikeTO]

There is an easy way to add a blank page in a long book with linked frames. Just go to the first page of Chapter 1 and insert a page break before the first character.

If there's a page number or chapter heading on that blank page you don't want shown then just edit the master page detached and delete those objects.

Cheers

[wdmartin]

@walt.farrell Ugh.  Sorry about the title.  I was initially having a problem with a missing ToC entry, but figured that out on my own. (The problem was that the first chapter has an illustration, not a heading, so Publisher couldn't find any text to use as a header. The solution was to put one in and make it invisible.)  Then when I ran into this issue I re-used the unsubmitted topic but forgot to change the title.  I have updated it.

@MikeTO I gave that a try, and it worked partially. The text moved, but the images didn't, leaving them all one page away from where they were supposed to be.

@firstdefence I have attached a zipped .afpackage, which should have the images and fonts as well.  The images are all public domain, having been made in 1894, and the fonts are freely downloadable from Google for IM Fell or assorted font sites for the title font, Jane Austen, which is licensed free for personal use but not commercial.  I shortened it to the front matter plus the first three chapters.

 

Pride-and-Prejudice-shorter.zip

[Old Bruce]

After a quick look at the package I think that the biggest problem is the use of Text Frames on Actual Pages instead of having them on the Master Pages. A linked pair of Text Frames on the Master Page should help keep everything where it should go when you add a page.

[MikeTO]

My suggestion of inserting a page break won't work because the illustrations are not pinned. It's a best practice to pin the illustrations so they move with the text.

And I agree with Bruce, it's a best practice to place the text frames on the master page.

[wdmartin]

Okay, I'll take another crack at it later this evening.  Going through and pinning the images shouldn't be too hard.

As for text frames on the master pages, well, it may be a bit late to do that in this particular project, since it sounds like I would probably wind up redoing the entire book. (That sound you hear is me, banging my head against the table repeatedly.)  But I'll definitely look into that for future.

I'm new to Affinity Publisher and still learning, mostly from assorted tutorials off Google searches.  The basic approach I started with came from a series of three YouTube videos on laying out a book in Publisher (one, two, three) which had me set up the text frames in the actual pages, and I didn't know any better. It's sometimes hard to know which tutorials are solid when you're approaching something as a newbie.  I found Elaine Giles' presentation on Working with images in Affinity Publisher very helpful, but either she didn't mention pinning or I missed it.

[Old Bruce]

6 minutes ago, wdmartin said:

I found Elaine Giles' presentation on Working with images in Affinity Publisher very helpful, but either she didn't mention pinning or I missed it.

After my (quick) look at the package you uploaded I myself would not bother with the Pinning of the images. My experience with large images being pinned caused me more headaches and problems with text flowing erratically compared to just having the images placed as you have done.

Just my two cents worth.

[jmwellborn]

@wdmartin  I have a solution for you for this book, so you don't have to go through the whole thing, page by page and revise stuff.  Naturally, you will want to use the advice provided above for future projects, but for this one, I thought you might try this.  

1.  Open your Pride-and-Prejudice-shorter file, and delete everything except the first seven pages, ending with the table of contents.  Now add a blank eighth (left-hand) page. Save the document as a new .afpublish file.

2.  Open your file with each (or all) of the Chapters and Export it as a PDF, using the option "ALL PAGES" not All Spreads.  You will get a PDF with each page separately - not as facing pages. Save this as an .afpublish file. You will not be able to alter any of the text wrapping or move your illustrations, but if they are positioned the way you want, it shouldn't matter. (I would probably do this as several files, since you don't want a major mess somewhere in the middle to wreck the whole thing.) 

3.  Open your saved document (from step 1.)  Go to the Pages Panel, and highlight the blank page 8. Then go to DOCUMENT>Add Pages From File and select the .afpublish file from step 2. When the dialog screen opens, select "all pages" and check "group lines into text frames" and be sure that you start after page 8 (your blank page.)

4.  You should get the result I have attached below.

It will be a bit of a project, but shouldn't be anything like the struggle of moving margins and images, and etc. from all those pages!

(An aside. I like your project! I recently recoloured and enhanced every illustration from the 1907-1909 editions of Jane Austen's six books, using Affinity Photo.  It was a lot of fun.)

By George I've Got It.afpub

 

[firstdefence]

My observations are that the pages are acting as they should and where they are set.

You are knocking a left page within the two page spread that has been set to sit to a a smaller margin(left-hand page outer edge) and by adding a blank page you are now pushing that page to a right-hand inner margin that is wider to accommodate the centre spine, the text frame sits where it thinks it should on the page, margins be damned.

The Green blocks are the same size as the left hand margin

[wdmartin]

Okay, I went away and did other things for a couple of days.

Quote

I like your project! I recently recoloured and enhanced every illustration from the 1907-1909 editions of Jane Austen's six books, using Affinity Photo.  It was a lot of fun

Glad you like it. And yours sounds pretty cool too.

@firstdefence's observations helped me understand why this was happening. Of course it shifted when I added just one page, since I set up the pages to allow a more generous gutter in the middle.

Knowing that, I figured that if I added an even number of pages at the beginning, then it would even up again.  And I was correct!  It worked out. 

The whole point in adding pages was that I needed the total number of pages to add up to 496 so that I could have 31 signatures of 4 sheets (making 16 pages per signature).  So I added some more pages until the main text lined up again, and then a few at the end of the file as well.  I did wind up having to reposition the text blocks on the Table of Contents pages, but that's just 3 pages, so big deal.

And now it's all done!  I've exported it to PDF, run it through an imposer to prep it for printing on US letter sized paper in a standard duplex printer.  And now I can get on to the fun part, which is the bookbinding.  I've got a nice ream of short-grain printer paper ready to go and now I'm excited.

Many thanks for the help, everyone!

[firstdefence]

@wdmartinGlad we all helped you move forward with your project, all the best. 

[jmwellborn]

@wdmartin  that is very good news.  I wish you much success with your new version of a wonderful book.  

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[firstdefence]

@lacerto 7th Dan Ninja level selecting acquired 

[TheOtherRoland]

(I didn't read all the posts but I'll just put this here, in case it helps any)

I had to deal with this issue in v1 (I still haven't updated yet but I think it's applicable).
When you set up master pages, also set up single page masters for Left and Right (or "verso/recto" for those who don't speak English ) so that you can drop them on a spread individually to reorient the page. You then have to realign the content to the margins - depending on what you're presenting and what the inset is.
I'm just going off memory from a year ago.  Hope my memories serves me recto.

 

[wdmartin]

It's been a few months since I posted. This project has definitely been a learning experience. On the one hand, I made a very nice copy of Pride and Prejudice!

 

 

But then, there are also these:

These are the other two text blocks I made for this project.  I printed them, folded the pages, made end papers, punched the holes, spent about five hours apiece on sewing, glued up the spine ... and ruined them.

That's right.  Twice -- twice! -- I ruined the book by slicing straight through the chapter titles at the top of the pages.

...

This is a flaw in my design. I allowed a half-inch margin at the top, but then built the chapter titles into that space.  The result was just 0.275 inches of white space at the top of the text block, making it much, much too easy to cut into the text when trimming it on the guillotine.   I promised  a copy of this for a charity auction in two weeks, but after ruining the second text block last night I concluded that the only real solution is to go back to the source file and add some more white space at the top, shifting everything down by another quarter of an inch.  This is undoubtedly going to involve manually resizing the text frames on every last page and probably repositioning all of the images.  God knows how many pages it will be afterwards, or if the page count will be evenly divisible by sixteen for purposes of imposition.

I don't know what my next book will be, but I'll go into it with some definite lessons learned.  Particularly adding sufficient white space at the edges, because ruining 8-12 hours of work in a couple of seconds on the guillotine is miserable.

[walt.farrell]

8 hours ago, wdmartin said:

the only real solution is to go back to the source file and add some more white space at the top, shifting everything down by another quarter of an inch.  This is undoubtedly going to involve manually resizing the text frames on every last page and probably repositioning all of the images

Can't you just increase the top Bleed by .25 inch, and leave all the page content alone?

[Oufti]

So sad… 

At this point, you could perhaps only resize the whole frame altogether with its content, using the external handle at the right bottom. You will have slightly smaller text but everything else will remain the same on the page. 

You'll also have to 'replace' (edit: I meant 'to move back on the right place') the resized frames, or directly choose the best origin point for the transformation — I would choose the inner bottom corner as invariant since I find the spine and foot margins large enough, but not the outer and header ones.

Yet, images that are not pinned will also have to be resized independently. 

[thomaso]

On 4/27/2023 at 4:21 AM, wdmartin said:

And now it's all done!  I've exported it to PDF, run it through an imposer to prep it for printing on US letter sized paper in a standard duplex printer. 

8 hours ago, wdmartin said:

This is a flaw in my design. I allowed a half-inch margin at the top, but then built the chapter titles into that space.  The result was just 0.275 inches of white space at the top of the text block, making it much, much too easy to cut into the text when trimming it on the guillotine. 

In design, not in cutting? (You can "miscut" any format, regardless of the margin). Apart from layout and margins I wonder if you printed without cropping marks?

Also, it seems that the final size (~ 5.5 x 9 inches) leaves you flexibility in cutting from the printed letter size (8.5 x 11 inches). Either just for a different positioning on the guillotine (… or even for a slightly larger size if the covers have not already been produced).

[thomaso]

6 minutes ago, Oufti said:

At this point, you could perhaps only resize the whole frame altogether with its content, using the external handle at the right bottom. You will have slightly smaller text but everything else will remain the same on the page. 

Or how about leaving the layout untouched but printing the existing print PDF in a size below 100% ?
(… without changing the final cutting size + caring accordingly for cutting marks / or ignoring them)