Request: better handling of imported styles when copying and pasting

[big smile]

Issue:

In my Affinity Publisher documents, I tend to use the same text styles. When copying and pasting text between the documents, the styles get duplicated with a number added at the end. This happens even if the styles are identical. Example:

^ These are all the same style which have been duplicated when copy & pasting between documents. 

Solution:

When copying and pasting between a document, Affinity should ask the user how handle duplicate styles rather than just numbering them.

 

Here is an example of how it could work:

This dialogue box would pop up whenever copying and pasting text in situations where Affinity would currently just duplicate the style.
This dialogue box would be optional, activated first via an option in preferences, so users who like the current handling of style can choose not to activate the option. 

Explanation of options:

• Merge Styles - Keep incoming definition This option will cause the two styles to be merged. All values will follow the source document. 
• Merge Styles - Keep local definition This option will cause the two styles to be merged. All values will follow the local document. 
• Create new style - This will create a new style (which is how Affinity currently handles it by duplicating the style and adding a number to the name).

Additional options:

• Clear Overrides - Any differences between the local and incoming style will be discarded. 
• Keep Overrides - Any differences between the local and incoming style will be kept as overrides. 
• Save Overrides as character style - The differences can be saved as a character style. 

Example:

I have  "Document A" which has  text that has a style called "English translation". This is just Helvetica, bold text 12pt. 

I copy and paste this text into "Document B" that already has a style called "English translation". If I select "Merge Styles/incoming" then the style from Document A will be used. If I click clear overrides, then any differences between the text in document A&B will be lost. 

Who would this be useful for:

This would be useful for users who regularly copy and paste text between Publisher documents. 

History

This feature request is actually something I requested back in 2019 for Affinity 1. I am making a new request, because the issue still plagues Affinity 2 and it's super, super annoying. It still happens even when the source and destination have the same style sheet with the same style definitions. 

I literally spend 20% of my time using Affinity wrangling with styles. Grr!

As a workaround, you can copy and paste into a new document, go to the text styles menu and then select "Detach and Delete all styles". And then, from there, you can copy and paste into the destination document. You can then re-apply the styles in the destination document. (If you are on a Mac, you can use Keyboard Maestro to copy and paste your text without formatting, thus saving the step of pasting into a new document). But even with this work around, it's a still a time waste!

I appreciate that development of new features is complicated, so I just hope things work out to make having a solution viable one day, hopefully sooner than later. 

[walt.farrell]

On 11/8/2023 at 6:22 AM, big smile said:

When copying and pasting text between the documents, the styles get duplicated with a number added at the end. This happens even if the styles are identical.

In my experience, if they are truly identical then the style is not duplicated. The existing style is used.

Can you provide a sample document where the style was duplicated, even though it was identical, that I can look at?