[Publisher] Text Styles shows extensive properties, even when already defined in the style

[Oufti]

(This is my first question on these forums, and I am only discovering Affinity softwares. English is also not my mother language, so please excuse me if I don't write it well or use incorrect terms or menu spelling…)

I am using Publisher v. 2.1.0 on a Mac M1 with Monterey (last version).

I have composed a whole book, with paragraph and character styles very neatly defined and consistently used. Altogether I sometimes derogate to this and modify locally some properties (e.g. space after paragraph or align on the reference grid), even if this is not the rule. Normally, I can control if such modifications happened, via the side panel "Text Styles"; on the top of it there's a recap field, showing something like this: "Name of the style + Space after: 6pt". 

My problem is that now — after some unknown operation I guess I did (*) — when I click in any of my paragraphs, let's say a very ordinary unaltered "Corps (body)" paragraph, and look at this field, all the formatting included in the style is repeated.

E.g., instead of "Corps" I have "Corps + Corps de police: 10,5 pt; Échelle X: 100.4 %; Interlignage: 12 pt; Retrait de la première ligne: 12 pt; Taquets par défaut: 36,1 pt; Dernier mot de zone de césure: 8 pt; Zone de césure dans les colonnes: 12 pt; Taquet de tabulation: Droite 328,1 pt". 

Tested: If I click on the rightsided tool "Reapply text style", nothing changes apparently on the page but it resumes to the expected short description "Corps". 

So if I hadn't locally modified some paragraphs, the solution would be as simple as clicking in all of the paragraphs, reapplying the style, etc. Daunting but feasible. What bothers me is that I could easily miss and erase any local modification — as I can't see it quickly anymore  in this little field. 

My question would be:
What should be the best way turning back to a simplified description of my paragraphs? 

My subsidiary question:
How did this happen? 

(*) About this, I –maybe– have finally a clue. 
Above I highlighted in blue the properties I suspected being not normal, mainly the X-scale: 100,4% and the tabs values, because they were not round cyphers when expressed in points. — Normally, I always work in points (PostScript points, which are exactly 1/72 inch), as it is precise enough and the unit used internally in Apple and Adobe softwares since the very beginning of DTP. 

That's why these values seemed weird to me, and it let me remind that last week I corrected the dimensions of my A5 book, created with the predefined Print A5 model. At the time of the creation I didn't notice the dimensions used for it: 148 x 210 mm precisely — seemed sensible but converted in points, it is 419,5 x 595,3 pts. When I lately discovered that, I routinely corrected it to the standard usual values of 421 x 595 pts. This 1,5 point increase is in fact a 100,4% X-scale transformation! 

My last question will then be:
How can I confirm the software that the actual dimensions are, finally, the good ones, and reset the X-scale to 100% as it is?

(I'm also OK for resizing the text box to 1000/1004, if this could help. I am just wondering which part(s) of the design could have been affected by my unfortunate desire for accuracy… Should I try to modify the text box in the parent page template?)

 

Edited June 9, 2023 by Oufti
Punctuation…

[Oufti]

I investigated further:

1) Reducing the size of the text box was of no effect.

2) If I click in a "cell" containing a value displayed in the recap field, e.g. Font size, and validate that selected value, it disappears from the recap field, i.e. the value has been "reset"; and so on for each modified property reported in the recap.
(For the same effect, it is easier to click once on the "Apply the paragraph style" button… but this tends to confirm that the problem is related to rounding numbers.)

 

I am convinced to have found the origin of the problem (modified pages proportions) but still wondering how to remedy it?

Edited June 9, 2023 by Oufti
Reformulation

[Old Bruce]

14 hours ago, Oufti said:

My problem is that now — after some unknown operation I guess I did (*) — when I click in any of my paragraphs, let's say a very ordinary unaltered "Corps (body)" paragraph, and look at this field, all the formatting included in the style is repeated.

E.g., instead of "Corps" I have "Corps + Corps de police: 10,5 pt; Échelle X: 100.4 %; Interlignage: 12 pt; Retrait de la première ligne: 12 pt; Taquets par défaut: 36,1 pt; Dernier mot de zone de césure: 8 pt; Zone de césure dans les colonnes: 12 pt; Taquet de tabulation: Droite 328,1 pt". 

The + sign shows what has be overridden, or changed in that particular paragraph. You can reapply the Paragraph styles by hitting the squared arrow in the Text Styles Panel. Or using the Menu Command.

 

One caveat to remember is that the + sign won't show up if the text caret is not in an altered bit of text in the paragraph. Here I have changed the colour for one word.

 

[Oufti]

Thank you @Old Bruce for your explanations and screenshots. These are things I understand well.

As stated before, reapplying the paragraph style works well but I have two difficulties with it :

• My document (a cookbook) contains several hundreds paragraphs, of many different styles ;
• Some of these paragraphs (or parts of it, as you illustrated) had their format already been altered from the standard style definition, for different reasons, and I don't want to loose these modifications.

So I don't want to have to change every paragraph style by hand, but I can't reapply these blindly in a batch. 

++++++++++

23 hours ago, Oufti said:

I am convinced to have found the origin of the problem (modified pages proportions) but still wondering how to remedy it?

What I've found out is that the global modification of the document size (proportions) resulted in an horizontal upscaling of different text parameters, negligible (and indiscernable in most of the dialogs, which is why I first thought they were unchanged — as erroneously indicated in the topic title) but enough to have broken the conformity to the style description. 

Finally, as describing here the problem let me remember which had been the fatal move, I stepped back and reintroduced round cyphers in millimetres as the document size. By doing so, all the distorted values turned out to be correct, and the description of the styles came back into line (without this stupid micro upscaling).  

I'm just still wondering how one can resize an existing document (in this case, only slightly changing paper size from 148 × 210 mm to 148,625 × 210,25 mm) but not applying this resizing to the content? I mean, just enlarging the margins but not the (text) blocks? 

[steday]

Bonjour,

 

Je vous répond en français, c'est plus simple pour moi !

Deux choses qui pourront vous aider : 

Vous pouvez utiliser le panneau Rechercher / Remplacer pour remplacer un style (caractère , paragraphe) par un autre ou un certain formatage de texte par un autre. très pratique, très puissant. Par exemple remplacer le style de tous les paragraphes en Corps1 pour leur appliquer le style Corps2. Ou rechercher tout le texte formaté en rouge (pas par le biais d'un style) pour les remplacer par un formatage Bleu souligné ( la aussi sans passer par un style). Ou une combinaison : remplacer tout le texte formaté en rouge (sans style) par le style de caractère Hyperlien. Je vous conseille de tester sur un document simple pour vous faire la main.

Le panneau Fichier > Configuration de document permet de changer le format de votre document, ainsi que les marges, avec option de redimensionner ou non le contenu. Il se peut cependant qu'il vous faille rajuster manuellement la position des blocs, suivant les options retenues.

Ceci devrait vous aider à résoudre vos problèmes (si j'ai bien compris votre de mande en anglais), même s'il faudra probablement reprendre un peu manuellement.

 

 

[Oufti]

Merci beaucoup @Steday. 

L'onglet Facteur d'échelle avait échappé à mon attention lors de mon redimensionnement intempestif. Je vais explorer un peu plus ces options mais je crois que je devrais m'en sortir ainsi… 

Heureusement, j'échapperai cette fois à la séance de rechercher-remplacer !

[steday]

Avec plaisir.

Une remarque, la fonction rechercher / remplacer des styles ou des formatages est très utile dans certains contextes, et franchement pas compliquée à utiliser !!

[Oufti]

Entièrement d'accord ! C'est même une des interfaces les plus efficaces et puissantes que j'ai connues. 

En l'occurrence toutefois, remédier par ce moyen aux déformations du texte s'annonçait très pénible (et peut-être impossible) à faire. Les quelques essais de rechercher/remplacer corps 10,004 pt vers 10 pt n'ont pas été convaincants (il y a probablement un bug d'arrondis incohérents, je ne parvenais pas à retrouver ce corps), et il m'aurait fallu le faire pour chaque taille, puis pour chacun des paramètres affectés… 

Heureusement, en venant poster ici, j'ai dû récapituler tous les éléments et ça m'a permis de remonter à la source du problème — bien maîtrisé maintenant grâce à vos indications sur les facteurs d'échelle.