Publisher: Restore ability to import a document into itself

[big smile]

Prior to Affinity Publisher 2.2, you could import a Publisher document into itself. This was super handy for making things like covers for a series of book, where the back of the book shows thumbnails of the other books in the series.

You could put all the book covers into a single Affinity Publisher file and have them share master pages to ensure consistency between the different covers. 

Then when finished designing, you could import the file into itself and use it to display thumbnails of the different covers on the back page of each cover. 

Then, if you later made any changes to the book covers, these thumbnails would be instantly update.

However, since 2.2, if you important a document into itself you get an error warning saying “Recursive Resource” and this action is cancelled.

The workaround is to make a copy of the publisher file and import the copy. But it's not as an efficient work flow, as you have to remember to make a copy each time any changes are made to the main document. 

It would be nice if the ability to import a document into itself was restored. 

[MikeTO]

I think this was probably due to fixing the file locking issue so it was a necessary change. Although it worked well for your need, importing a complex document into itself can lead to crashes.

The other recursive hole is still open though - you can import file 1 into file 2 and file 2 into file 1. I tried it with a Book for fun. I even added a cross-reference from 1 to 2 and from 2 to 1. Then I placed chapter 1 into chapter 2 and chapter 2 into chapter 1. Needless to say, saving either chapter was lots of fun. I don't recommend this. 🙂 

 

[big smile]

21 hours ago, MikeTO said:

think this was probably due to fixing the file locking issue so it was a necessary change. Although it worked well for your need, importing a complex document into itself can lead to crashes.

Aah I see. 

Out of interest to continue doing this, what's the best way. Should I just duplicate the file in the Finder and then import the copy? Or should I just export the file as a PDF and import the PDF?

I'd prefer to duplicate a copy, because it's quicker than waiting for PDF to render out. But I am not sure if I am creating troubles for myself down the line. 

[MikeTO]

28 minutes ago, big smile said:

Out of interest to continue doing this, what's the best way. Should I just duplicate the file in the Finder and then import the copy? Or should I just export the file as a PDF and import the PDF?

IMO the best way is to export the cover alone as a bitmapped format (TIFF for CMYK or JPG for RGB). Although importing a PDF would work fine, this would avoid any bugs with linked PDFs and there have been a couple of those this year. Using a bitmapped format also reduces the load on Publisher. Instead of having to interpret (process) an afpub or pdf file when exporting the page with all the cover shorts to PDF, it could just include the bitmapped image which is much less work. The key of course is to ensure you choose the right resolution, not too low for your needs but not needlessly high which would bloat the file.

Cheers,

Mike