Publisher 2 keeps making new duplicate paragraph styles when copying and pasting content! Extremely laborious when cleaning up.

[Cogent30]

Dear all, as the subject line suggests ~ I have been noticing that Publisher keeps on duplicating new paragraph styles from another documents even though they are 1:1 identical....this is not only a nightmare but really a fundamental issue. 

As I am troubleshooting and trialling my way as a newbie (but decade worth of background in ID) ~ whenever I am copying and pasting content even though they're the same styles, Afpub keeps adding NEW variants into the paragraph styles....very frustrating and extremely laborious to "clean up" ~ I had manually reassign the "based upon" on the previous style, then "reset formatting", before then I can delete this duplicate redundant style. 

Body normal then gets inundated with Body Normal 1, then Body normal 2, then 3, then 4, etc.. and that's just for body. Imagine each and everytime new headings are imported.... quadruple handling galore. 

Where or how is there a way to easily "replace" or substitute paragraph style? Or is that a coming-soon feature?

regards,

cg-30. 

[Seneca]

14 minutes ago, Cogent30 said:

Where or how is there a way to easily "replace" or substitute paragraph style? Or is that a coming-soon feature?

Hello @Cogent30,

Yes, this is a problem for me too. A number of users have already noticed that and have reported it as an issue but until this is looked at by the Affinity team you need to accept the fact that this is how Publisher works.

The only way to clean up styles at the moment is to use Find & Replace and then select Paragraph Style/Character Style in Find/Replace options.

For simple text processing this sort of dealing with styles is acceptable but as soon as your document needs to import/paste text from different sources with same style names this becomes a problem.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Cogent30 said:

As I am troubleshooting and trialling my way as a newbie (but decade worth of background in ID) ~ whenever I am copying and pasting content even though they're the same styles,

For Publisher, they are not the same style unless both of these are true:

• the style name matches the name of an existing style; and
• the style definition matches the definition of the existing style.

If one or both don't match exactly, a new style will be created. It is not based simply on the style name; Publisher (and the other Affinity applications) want to keep the same appearance as the original text had.

You might also consider Paste Without Format from the Edit menu, and then assigning the style(s) you want to the text.

[Old Bruce]

Further to what @walt.farrell has written I would think that if there are overrides applied to the text in the source document this may cause a "new" style to be created in the destination document.

Plain Text text is our friend.

[Seneca]

2 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Plain Text text is our friend.

For simple scenarios plain text rules.

There are other ways of working with text in Publisher/inDesign that does not involve constant reformatting of the text.

Imagine you share chunks of text among various publications using different templates and styles. You have carefully formatted your text in Publisher, applied styles to it and saved it for further use later. You also made sure that you name Paragraph/Character appropriately so that they are the same among various publications (in view of sharing).

Sharing this text among publications in inDesign is easy because what unites them is the same paragraph/character style name. Copy and paste portions of that text and voila, done. The copied text adopts the look of the paragraph/character style of the publication you copy your text to. That saves a lot of time.

Publisher instead applies strict rules to the copied text as explained by @walt.farrellearlier creating another style name to the publication, say Heading 1.

To me flexibility exemplified by inDesign trumps Publisher's rigidity any time in my books.

I hope one day we get some sort of preference switch where you could choose strict rule or name based rule when coping formatted text, and I can finally move 90% of my work to Publisher. 

[Jered]

Struggling with this as well. I understand the value of keeping the whole apperance and therefore adding new text styles. However, there are numerous scenarios, where you want to keep the various styles (Heading1, Heading2, Paragraph etc; so plain text is no solution), but want the styles of the destination document applied.

In particular, I’m trying to create a workflow for importing Markdown. It’s already working from MD → ICML (via Pandoc) → IDML (with a generic template) → opened with Affinity. However, I then want to copy my content into a document that already has everything (such as page format, master pages, all the styles) prepared, which would be a cumbersome job right now.

So +1 for a pasting option with destination styles!

[PaoloT]

It looks to me that the basic essence of styles is to keep everything coherent. Therefore, I should only have a single style called "Heading 1", to which any text having a style with the same name should conform. Using styles is exactly the opposite of preserving the source appearance, that invariably ends up into a total mess.

Paolo

 

[garrettm30]

I agree with the others requesting this change. I’ve commented on this issue before in other threads, but the current Affinity UX in this regard continues to be a friction point in my work.