Pages - Icons and Text

[cdw]

There seems to be no way to alter the size of the Master Pages Icons and Text separate from the Pages section as in InDesign allows; nor can you apply a colour to these to make them stand out... would be a nice update too have.

[MikeTO]

4 hours ago, cdw said:

There seems to be no way to alter the size of the Master Pages Icons and Text separate from the Pages section as in InDesign allows; nor can you apply a colour to these to make them stand out... would be a nice update too have.

That's correct, you can't show the master page thumbnails at a different size separately from the page thumbnails.

Colour tagging has been requested many times but since Affinity allows you to apply multiple masters to a page it's not really practical. We've discussed possible solutions in other threads so perhaps someday the Pages panel will be enhanced with some sort of tagging option.

[Pšenda]

1 minute ago, MikeTO said:

That's correct, you can't show the master page thumbnails at a different size separately from the page thumbnails.

I don't understand why I would need to display different thumbnail sizes for Pages and Master Pages. I choose the size of the preview according to the need to see and distinguish the content of the page, and this need is the same for both views.

[MikeTO]

10 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

I don't understand why I would need to display different thumbnail sizes for Pages and Master Pages. I choose the size of the preview according to the need to see and distinguish the content of the page, and this need is the same for both views.

It's just a convenience feature. On a small screen, I need to keep the master page section of the panel collapsed because it takes up too much space. But if I were working with a document with 3 masters and I could display them as text and see all 3 at once in very little space and thus drag them onto page icons. With Affinity, displaying all 3 at once would take up far too much space so I'd keep them collapsed and right click the page icons to apply them. If you give masters a useful name like 2-column layout you wouldn't need to see a big thumbnail like you would for a page icon.

ID suffers from a legacy design that isn't as good as Affinity in some ways. It uses a traditional panel divider instead of disclosure triangles (expand/collapse icons) and because you can't collapse it to as small of space ID allows you to also move the masters to the bottom of the panel list. I think this over complicates things and they could find a way to improve their panel design.

[Pšenda]

2 hours ago, MikeTO said:

thus drag them onto page icons

The fact is that I avoid the Master Page application on already prepared Pages as much as possible, because then there is a need to re-correct the content of the pages. So I assign the Master Page already when creating the Pages.