Font and style changed in Placed Word document

[Marathon1908]

I'm a new user and am not sure if this is a bug or I'm missing something.  I cannot find a tutorial on Placing a text document.

I Placed a Word document where the principal text was in Calibri 11, first line indented.  I have imported the Calibri fonts into my Mac font library and Publisher shows them.

However the whole document has been converted into Times New Roman and the first line indentation is gone, although the font style is described as first line indent+

Is this a bug in the Placing process or am I obliged to pre-set the fonts and styles before Placing?

[walt.farrell]

Do you have a sample .docx file you could share that demonstrates the problem, and a sample .afpub file after you Placed it?

What macOS version are you using, and what release of Publisher?

[Marathon1908]

Walt, 2 specimens attached Mac OS Ventura 13.5.1; Word 365 v. 16.74 Publisher 2.2.

Interestingly the specimen creation did take Cambria, although it changed the paragraph settings (unattractively). Endnotes came across Ok (no hyperlinks) but I would still have to reformat them to clear the superscript text; Word's formatting for them was not followed.

I don't know why the 2 exercises are different. I attach a screen print of the first page from the long document placed.

 I do know that in Word you have various paste options, including keep source formatting or use destination formatting.  For the purposes of the book I would want to move my Word documents into Publisher with source formatting.

Specimen re Word placing.afpub Specimen from MS Word re Placing.docx

[walt.farrell]

Thanks for the samples.

And, just to confirm, you are Placing the .docx file into the Publisher document, not Copying and Pasting it in from Word?

[Marathon1908]

Walt, yes. I had other problems with copy & paste, so am trying placing.

[walt.farrell]

I'm not seeing quite the same results as you, when I Place your .docx file.

I get indented paragraphs, as you want, so I'm not sure why you don't.

The numbered heading "1.1 Mills..." comes out quite bad:

LibreOffice:

Publisher 2.2.0 (with Shot Special Characters):

I'm not sure why there is so little space between "1.1" and "Mills".

Nor am I sure why the Endnotes reference characters changed number format (from Roman numerals to Arabic), but it may be that's just not supported for Placed files. It can be fixed by changing the number format shown in the Notes panel.

[Old Bruce]

It appears that you have simply used overrides in the Word document's Body paragraph style instead of updating the style definition(s).

[Marathon1908]

Bruce, I used word's standard pre-set first line indented from the styles menu.  My basic point is that I would not expect a placed file to be changed.  I would expect it to arrive as it left, with all its attributes carried over.  Copy and paste I can understand that the default might be for the pasted text to adopt the destination format on the Publisher page.  When you paste in Word you get a choice of source or destination format.  Is there such a choice mechanism in Publisher?  That's what my question is about.  I hope someone can help.

[Old Bruce]

1 hour ago, Marathon1908 said:

When you paste in Word you get a choice of source or destination format.

By Placing (not pasting) into Publisher you get the Paragraph and Character Styles from the Word document. You seem to have used only one Paragraph Style and it is full of overrides, in Word not just Publisher. Multiple different overrides for various paragraphs is a not great way to work.

Now this could well be down to the fact that I don't have any of the fonts you used, not to mention that I have to use Pages or LibreOffice to open the Word file in order to look at it before Placing it into Publisher.

[Marathon1908]

Bruce, I simply select the style from the menu.  If it has a host of over-rides that is down to Microsoft, not me.  you mention that you use Pages to read Word.  My experience of Pages is that it is not good at reproducing Word, which is why I gave up using it.  It could be that it has introduced issues on your machine which then affect Publisher for you, I don't know.

[Old Bruce]

6 minutes ago, Marathon1908 said:

It could be that it has introduced issues on your machine which then affect Publisher for you, I don't know.

Yes, it very well could be. But I do see the problem you describe about Placing the Word file into Publisher, 12 point text in both Pages and LibreOffice becomes 10 point text when the original DOCX file is Placed into Publisher. I don't see that in other DOCX files.

[Marathon1908]

Bruce, out of curiosity I opened a Word document in Pages, and it made quite a good job of it.  There was a slight change in the text area, and one missing font (which I can easily put right).  I then tried to place the Pages file into Publisher, and it won't accept it at all - it was greyed out.  Interesting.  That said, if Pages can now reasonably faithfully open a Word document, what is the problem with Publisher?

[MikeTO]

7 minutes ago, Marathon1908 said:

Bruce, out of curiosity I opened a Word document in Pages, and it made quite a good job of it.  There was a slight change in the text area, and one missing font (which I can easily put right).  I then tried to place the Pages file into Publisher, and it won't accept it at all - it was greyed out.  Interesting.  That said, if Pages can now reasonably faithfully open a Word document, what is the problem with Publisher?

If you save it from Pages it would be a Pages document which Publisher can't import. You'd need to Export it from Pages to docx so that Publisher can import it.

With regard to the fonts, Cambria is missing because it's an unsupported font in Publisher but Times is missing because of the difference between Times and Times New Roman. While not a bug, I think it would be better if Publisher offered to do this automatically. But an easy change for you, although it would be much easier if you used text styles in MS Word.

21 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I'm not sure why there is so little space between "1.1" and "Mills".

Nor am I sure why the Endnotes reference characters changed number format (from Roman numerals to Arabic), but it may be that's just not supported for Placed files. It can be fixed by changing the number format shown in the Notes panel.

The lack of spacing between the paragraph number (1.1) and the paragraph text (Mills in St Mary...) is because the paragraphs have the default tab spacing set to 0 and it was set to 0.5" in MS Word. I don't think this bug has been previously reported.

I did a test with all the formats and with footnotes and endnotes - Publisher imports them with Arabic numerics regardless of what's defined in MS Word. Another issue to be reviewed.

 

[Marathon1908]

Mike, I imported Cambria (and Calibri) into the Mac font library and Publisher accepts them.  However it still messes up the paragraph formatting and insists on putting the endnote text as superscript (as well as the number format issue) and spacing the notes wide apart.  I'm an author not an editor, and I just want to create the pdfs for publishing with the minimum of hassle and technical knowledge.  Everyone who has replied is trying to be helpful, I appreciate that, but there is still the fundamental question as to why Publisher does not seem to want to import (paste or place) Word cleanly as it is - it may be importing all the text, but it does not seem to be importing all the settings.  Is this a wider issue to be reviewed?

[MikeTO]

9 minutes ago, Marathon1908 said:

Mike, I imported Cambria (and Calibri) into the Mac font library and Publisher accepts them.  However it still messes up the paragraph formatting and insists on putting the endnote text as superscript (as well as the number format issue) and spacing the notes wide apart.  I'm an author not an editor, and I just want to create the pdfs for publishing with the minimum of hassle and technical knowledge.  Everyone who has replied is trying to be helpful, I appreciate that, but there is still the fundamental question as to why Publisher does not seem to want to import (paste or place) Word cleanly as it is - it may be importing all the text, but it does not seem to be importing all the settings.  Is this a wider issue to be reviewed?

I've explained that there are two issues here, Publisher is not accept default tab spacing and the selected note numbering style. But those are trivial to adjust in Publisher so I don't think this will prevent you from doing your work.

But we all recommend that you learn to use text styles in Word and Publisher - you are making it hard on yourself by not using text styles. Regardless of whether you're using a word processor or publishing app, text styles are the only way to avoid inconsistent formatting and to make future formatting changes much easier.

Good luck

[Marathon1908]

Mike, I have been using text styles for years, and work with document maps and tables of contents - I could not have created a 400 page bok in any other way. Styles is not the issue here

[kenmcd]

I think there are multiple issues - both font issues and formatting issues.
And you need to deal with the font issues first.

Times is an Apple "Document-support font" - so it is only supported in existing documents, and only in applications which support Apple's font controls. Apparently Word 365 does support Apple's font controls, so the font is available in your existing Word document. Affinity applications do not support Apple's font controls, so fonts which Apple has now deemed a  "Document-support font" do not appear in APub. Which is why Times got converted to a fall-back font - Times New Roman - which is still supported both by Apple, and Office 365.

I think Microsoft has now started restricting the fonts installed with Office 365 on Mac to use only in Office 365. So Calibri is normally not going to be available to APub now. That may only be on the Mac. Do not know for sure.
Calibri is installed with Office 365 for Mac.
Office 365 Cloud Fonts are not available to APub on Mac or Windows.

So the first thing to do is convert to fonts which do not have any restrictions.
There are lots of free OFL licensed high-quality text fonts with none of these OS font issues.
There are lots of commercial high-quality text fonts with none of these OS font issues.
Once you have fonts which will transfer properly then you can deal with the format issues.

Some of the format issues may be because of different character widths in the fall-back fonts.
Having fonts which transfer properly would eliminate that as a potential issue.

[Marathon1908]

Ken, this is a helpful reply, but doesn't solve my problems and raises some serious issues.

Calibri is the default font in MS365. I find it astonishing that it is not automatically in APub. Affinity advertises the program as able to import Word documents yet it cannot import documents in Word's default font.  Something is seriously wrong.  I presume it has it in the Windows version.

Affinity's guide on fonts is all very technical but I was able to work out from it how to import Calibri, Cambria (etc) from the Word font library into the Mac font library, and I now have it in Apub. I should not have had to do this!

I've also found a method of successfully importing Word files.  I have done it by reformatting the Master pages with the styles I use in Word before placing the Word file.  I also imported the missing fonts.  Then it was almost painless.  Pre-flight check is useful in detecting any issues. (I had 6 words that Word called "inserted" font, which is not a font at all.  Easy enough to sort out, but weird.)

Mike, do you think there should be something in your guide to clarify how to import Word files, without the hassle I've had?  Is it also worth a mention it cannot import Pages files, given that Mac users will often be using Pages? (It would not let me place a Pages file, but maybe copy and paste will work, I haven't tried)

 

 

[kenmcd]

3 hours ago, Marathon1908 said:

Affinity's guide on fonts is all very technical but I was able to work out from it how to import Calibri, Cambria (etc) from the Word font library into the Mac font library, and I now have it in Apub. I should not have had to do this!

That is caused by Microsoft, not Affinity.
Note: you can do the same thing for O365 Cloud Fonts (on both Windows and Mac).
On Windows you highlight the fonts, and select Install for all users, and then delete them from the cloud fonts location. This will install the fonts in the main Windows Fonts folder, and make them available to all programs, including Affinity.
For Mac, do the same as you did above.