How do I set font styles globally?

[Sunil Wu]

Hi. I'm new to AP2 and desktop publishing generally.

I've been pointed to an old video tutorial that uses AP1, and I'm trying to follow it.
But some of the UI differences between the versions make following old guides difficult.

At the moment I'm trying to figure out how to set font styles globally.

I've imported a word document. I'd like to set the styling for all body text.
If I go to the styles panel and set styles for the body, then the styling gets applied to the first paragraph of my document.
That's fine, but I'd like to set the styling for the body of the entire document.

Likewise, with chapter headers: I'd like to set the styling for all chapter headers rather than set them one-by-one.

How do I do this?
 

[firstdefence]

2 hours ago, Sunil Wu said:

the styling gets applied to the first paragraph of my document.

A. That is probably where the cursor is, use the move tool (V) to select the text frame, easiest way to do that is selecting it in the layers panel.

Using the move tool (V) select the text frame. using the text styles panel; shown by going to Windows > Text Styles, create a text style based on Body, check the box bottom left of the text styles window to see the settings applied in realtime.

The headers you will have to manually assign a header style for each line of header text, once that is done you are good to go and can make edits globally to header text.

 

[Sunil Wu]

3 hours ago, firstdefence said:

A. That is probably where the cursor is, use the move tool (V) to select the text frame, easiest way to do that is selecting it in the layers panel.

Using the move tool (V) select the text frame. using the text styles panel; shown by going to Windows > Text Styles, create a text style based on Body, check the box bottom left of the text styles window to see the settings applied in realtime.

This took me a bit of figuring out, googling and watching videos, but I finally found the dialogue box for creating new text styles.

I created a text style, and selected 'body' as the base.
The box at the bottom left of the dialogue was selected.

However, the new text style was only applied to a few paragraphs in the first two pages of my document.
Also, for the paragraphs that were transformed, some of the spacing settings in the new style were not applied.

[Old Bruce]

11 hours ago, Sunil Wu said:

At the moment I'm trying to figure out how to set font styles globally.

I've imported a word document. I'd like to set the styling for all body text.

The text from your Word document may or may not have the same styles applied to all the text. You may have a lot of styles named similarly, Body, Body 1, Body 2, etc.. These styles may well be exact copies of one another differing only in their Names. Or there could be a subtle difference in the leading or indent or colour of the text.

Move the text caret through the text by using the down arrow on the keyboard and see what happens in the Text Styles panel as you go from paragraph to paragraph.

[Sunil Wu]

7 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

The text from your Word document may or may not have the same styles applied to all the text. You may have a lot of styles named similarly, Body, Body 1, Body 2, etc.. These styles may well be exact copies of one another differing only in their Names. Or there could be a subtle difference in the leading or indent or colour of the text.

Move the text caret through the text by using the down arrow on the keyboard and see what happens in the Text Styles panel as you go from paragraph to paragraph.

Before I do that: I'm working out things as I go.
I'm groping around in a darkened labyrinth, given the lack of beginner material.

Can you tell me if this assumption is correct?

If I hear you correctly, then it might be the case that the text that I imported from a docx file carries metadata;
and that that metadata affects what happens when I try to apply styles to that text within Affinity Publisher.

If that is the case, might it be easier to transform the docx body text entirely to plaintext before importing?

At this point I'm not even sure how I'd do this. But if I can figure it out, then I might be able to get consistent behaviour from my attempts to transform text inside Publisher.
 

[thomaso]

3 hours ago, Sunil Wu said:

If I hear you correctly, then it might be the case that the text that I imported from a docx file carries metadata;
and that that metadata affects what happens when I try to apply styles to that text within Affinity Publisher.

If that is the case, might it be easier to transform the docx body text entirely to plaintext before importing?

If the word.doc has the styles not properly used (defined + assigned) then it can cause issues and confusion in APub if you try to apply text styles.

Yes, in that case it can be easier and more useful to ignore the word.doc styles and format from scratch in APub. This can be especially the preferred way if the author of the word.doc respectively their formatting quality or discipline is unknown.

Since we are there: word.doc authors often use styles and special characters (e.g. line breaks / paragraph breaks) in an inconsistent way or haven't space before / after defined for paragraph styles but use double paragraph breaks instead, as they often use several space characters instead of indents or tabs. Therefore it can be useful to search for such spots via the Affinity Find & Replace panel to achieve the proper special characters. This enables you to layout with clear defined styles without the need of manual adjustments / corrections across the book. And, for longer stories like a book which uses several text styles the feature of "Next Style" can be very handy to get automatic switches from one style to the following (the next), for instance from headline to body text.

[Old Bruce]

15 hours ago, Sunil Wu said:

If that is the case, might it be easier to transform the docx body text entirely to plaintext before importing?

At this point I'm not even sure how I'd do this. But if I can figure it out, then I might be able to get consistent behaviour from my attempts to transform text inside Publisher.

If you have Microsoft Word on your computer you can most likely choose to either Save As... or Export the file as Plain Text from within Word. Myself I do not have a copy of Word so I rely on either Apple's Pages or LibreOffice ( free open source from https://www.libreoffice.org ) to import .docx files and make them .txt from there.