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Change in text flow


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Looking for some guidance please.

1. I used Affinity Publisher to typeset a physical book in April this year. When I completed the project, I exported the book from AFPUB to PDF as "spreads". Everything looked ok.

2. Yesterday I opened the same AFPUB file with the intent to make some changes requested by the book's author. I noticed that the text flow now looks different. I re-exported from AFPUB to PDF, again as spreads, and can see that the text flow indeed has changed. The spacing between letters seems tighter, in some instances causing more words to fit on a line of text, and throwing off the overall page formatting throughout the entire text. Please see the example in the attached image.

I know everyone says this, but I made no changes whatsoever to the AFPUB file since last April. The "date modified" on the AFPUB file still shows as 11 April 2023. Within Affinity Publisher, I've also reviewed all the various character, paragraph, text style, and text frame settings that I can think of, and I see nothing that has changed since April.

I did upgrade to a new version of Affinity Publisher (version 2.2.0) a few days ago, but I find it hard to believe that that is the cause. I would appreciate any and all suggestions on what else to look at to problem-solve this. Thanks.

 

Temp.png

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3 minutes ago, pomme27 said:

I did upgrade to a new version of Affinity Publisher (version 2.2.0) a few days ago, but I find it hard to believe that that is the cause.

The only way to ensure that your text looks exactly the same as before is to use the same software version. By updating to a new version you should be prepared for some changes as the text algorithm gets updated/tweaked all the time. 

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In addition to what Seneca said above, if you are using a font which was supplied with the operating system, upgrading/updating the operating system may cause the font to be changed – and therefore give a different text flow because of tweaks to glyphs/kerning/spacing/etc. – since fonts can also be upgraded.

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12 minutes ago, pomme27 said:

I made no changes whatsoever to the AFPUB file since last April

How about fonts? For instance in macOS some fonts delivered by Apple may get updated in a modified version which could cause a different text flow.

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24 minutes ago, pomme27 said:

I know everyone says this, but I made no changes whatsoever to the AFPUB file since last April. The "date modified" on the AFPUB file still shows as 11 April 2023. Within Affinity Publisher, I've also reviewed all the various character, paragraph, text style, and text frame settings that I can think of, and I see nothing that has changed since April.

A shot in the dark here. One thing you may have changed is the [No Style] paragraph and character text styles. Ultimately these are what all your text styles are based on.

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Thanks for the tips. When I upgraded to Affinity Publisher 2.2.0, the upgrade overlaid my prior Affinity Publisher 2.app file. Is there any way I can re-download the prior version of Affinity Publisher, just to test if my issue is related to the new software version?

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OK. I downloaded prior versions of Affinity Publisher, then opened my AFPUB file from April 2023 within each of the versions. See the results in the attachment.

In April, I would have been on Affinity Publisher version 2.0.4. When I open my AFPUB file in that version, the text flow looks fine. In any later version, it does not. So it could be that something changed in the Affinity Publisher software after 2.0.4.

I also was on macOS 13.3 back in April, and am on macOS 14.0 now. I have no easy way to test my AFPUB document under different versions of macOS. There is some possibility that my issue relates to macOS changes, but the timing doesn't line up quite as well. 

Anyway, I'm not sure if there is anything further I can do to get the text flow back the way it was, other than to re-build the book page by page. If that's what I need to do, ok. But if anyone has any other thoughts, pls let me know. Thanks.

Screenshot 2023-10-02 at 10.07.00.png

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1 hour ago, pomme27 said:

So it could be that something changed in the Affinity Publisher software after 2.0.4.

Thanks for the research.

It's of course possible a bug was introduced in 2.1.0, but it's also possible that a bug was fixed.

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