Publisher: Any tips on working with religious texts?

[artjourney]

Regular books are straightforward, but I find religious text a bit challenging. For example: How do I have Running book chapter instead of Running Header? Like, on top of having your regular page number at the bottom (usual place) of the page, how do you detect Chapter number within a given book? I tried Section Manger, but that doesn’t seem to do it. Think of the Bible as an example. There are about 1000 chapters.

[MikeTO]

The Running Header feature should do what you want. I provided a fairly thorough description of Running Headers in the manual I've shared in this forum (free download, see link in my signature). I didn't provide an example of doing this with the Bible but I did provide an example of dictionary-style usage which should get you half way there.

Also please see these two threads in which another user is using Running Headers for a Bible project. They ran into an issue but that might be fixed by now.

 

[artjourney]

Thanks a lot. I will definitely check them out. Earlier I slowed down a bit and gave the Section Manager another go after I realized that you can just right click on the active page to start a new section. Doing it via Section Manager was confusing at first. For the section name, I just give it a number and then use that as a variable. Not sure if this is the most optimized way of doing thing, and not sure if the section/number will be altered if new pages are deleted/or removed.

[Old Bruce]

14 hours ago, artjourney said:

Think of the Bible as an example.

Here is how I set up Running headers for the Book Names and Chapter : Verse numbers. I used find and replace to give the Chapter and Verse numbers in the text a Character Style which I then used to specify the C&V numbers for the running headers. You could do the same (Use find and replace to find the numbers for the New Chapter Paragraphs) and specify those for a Chapter <Running Header> in a text frame.

gospels version 2.afpub

[artjourney]

Thanks for the file. Will definitely check it out. I have been reading through the PDF manual by @MikeTO and it has helped me to stay a bit more organized with the way I do things. Currently for me, the Section manager seems to do the job, since I’m only after the Chapter number and not verse number.

I can even create a separate page within the same document to jump to any chapter in the document via Insert Hyperlink and then choose a particular Section (as chapter). At first I targeted the page number, but then quickly found out that it can break if new page is added/removed because that would alter the page count/number. So Section Manager seems to work great IF I’m exporting that document to PDF.

HOWEVER, I have to think further down the road and will be using the Books feature, so I made a test Book and imported two documents. The first document has just one page, and the second document, which is the main one with chapters/sections that I have setup etc..,  and then I exported both of these documents as PDF via Books’ hamburger menu. But then the chapter index with hyperlink to each Section as Chapter doesn’t work in the PDF.. it has blue links (hyperlink) etc.. but nothing works when I click on it. BUT it worked if I opened that document separately and exported just that document.

Not sure if this is solvable. Based on my limited knowledge of AP, I guess one way to solve this is to revert back to Hyperlinking to page number instead of Section as chapter. But that would mean I would have to be careful with adding/removing page(s) in that same document.

 

EDIT: Strange… not sure what I did the first time that throw everything out of sync, but this time hyperlinking to page number works. Even by adding extra pages, the hyperlinked auto-update. So this is one solution. But I’m still curious if the Section problem above can be solved for Books.

 

EDIT2: Well, looks like hyperlinking to page number is off by one page when exporting it via Books. I’m guessing it’s because of the extra page in the test doc…

[artjourney]

Strange, even hyperlinking to ANCHORS doesn’t work perfectly in Books. But by itself exporting it to PDF in its own document works perfectly. If I don’t use the Books feature, this would mean a single file would have to have 2000+ pages for the final export. Not sure how my computer will handle that, even if it’s 98% text. 😃

[MikeTO]

My two-year-old MacBook Pro with just 16GB of memory can handle 2,000 pages. I tested it with a single story but I recommend breaking a long document like that up into separate stories for each chapter to improve performance.

[artjourney]

I decided to recreate my main document file to use NON-facing pages as a test, and that seems to solve it. Hyperlinking to anchor works as expected, no jumping to wrong pages. Looks like facing pages confuse Books. Anyway, my workflow is this: Each book of the Bible is its own document file. That means there would be 66 documents. But each document (bible book) can have many chapters. With that in mind, how would I go about doing what you described?

> I recommend breaking a long document like that up into separate stories for each chapter to improve performance.

[MikeTO]

17 hours ago, artjourney said:

I decided to recreate my main document file to use NON-facing pages as a test, and that seems to solve it. Hyperlinking to anchor works as expected, no jumping to wrong pages. Looks like facing pages confuse Books. Anyway, my workflow is this: Each book of the Bible is its own document file. That means there would be 66 documents. But each document (bible book) can have many chapters. With that in mind, how would I go about doing what you described?

> I recommend breaking a long document like that up into separate stories for each chapter to improve performance.

You can break a chapter document up into multiple sections, each with their own story. If a "bible book" is a chapter and a "bible chapter" is a section, then use one story per "bible chapter" section.

[Old Bruce]

1 minute ago, MikeTO said:

You can break a chapter document up into multiple sections, each with their own story. If a "bible book" is a chapter and a "bible chapter" is a section, then use one story per "bible chapter" section.

But we cannot use Sections for bible chapters as there can be more than one 'chapter' per page. We cannot have more than one section per page.

[MikeTO]

3 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

But we cannot use Sections for bible chapters as there can be more than one 'chapter' per page. We cannot have more than one section per page.

Oh sorry, I didn't realize chapters could be that short.

In any case, if each "Bible book" is a separate Affinity chapter, and there are 66 of them, that's plenty of division and I don't think multiple stories are needed within each document.

[Old Bruce]

On 11/10/2023 at 5:28 PM, artjourney said:

how do you detect Chapter number within a given book?

The question must be asked why you need to detect the chapters? Is it for a ToC? Are you wanting to have them as text like Page Numbers are done? Do you want them as Headers/Footers?

There are different solutions for many different requests. I am always up for a challenge. While I am not a Christian I confess to being a big fan of the King James translation, still solid after all these centuries.

[artjourney]

After messing around I finally found that Running Header is actually very effective for what I’m trying to achieve. This saves me from having to manually adjust the Section(s) when I start to pad the page via Enter key, so I’m no longer using Section. It works perfectly as a standalone PDF export.

However, there is something that is confusing me a bit when it comes to importing each file into the Books. Let’s say I import 3 separate pub files into Books to be exported as a single PDF. What will happen in the final PDF export is that it shows <RUNNING HEADER> instead. Yes, that exact string. I decided to have all three pub files opened and then export them as one via Books and the running header is as expected. Does this mean I have to have all the pub files OPENED before exporting them via Books?

[artjourney]

Come to think of it, why doesn’t AP have an option to bake the running header? This way people can get the number to be exactly as it is. This of course means that they need to have a backup of the original file if they need to change/modify it in the future, but I assume that people back up their stuff just in case, so turning Running Header into actual values (baking it) can a void a lot of hassles.

[MikeTO]

41 minutes ago, artjourney said:

However, there is something that is confusing me a bit when it comes to importing each file into the Books. Let’s say I import 3 separate pub files into Books to be exported as a single PDF. What will happen in the final PDF export is that it shows <RUNNING HEADER> instead. Yes, that exact string. I decided to have all three pub files opened and then export them as one via Books and the running header is as expected. Does this mean I have to have all the pub files OPENED before exporting them via Books?

I believe this is a known issue however I'm unsure if it's been logged for fixing so perhaps Serif could check.

12 minutes ago, artjourney said:

Come to think of it, why doesn’t AP have an option to bake the running header? This way people can get the number to be exactly as it is. This of course means that they need to have a backup of the original file if they need to change/modify it in the future, but I assume that people back up their stuff just in case, so turning Running Header into actual values (baking it) can a void a lot of hassles.

You can convert any field, including a running header, to plain text by right-clicking it and choosing Expand Field.

 

[artjourney]

11 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

You can convert any field, including a running header, to plain text by right-clicking it and choosing Expand Field.

I have a masterpage with the <RUNNING HEADER>. I right click on that and Expand Field. Every page now has the string <RUNNING HEADER> instead of numerical value. Looks like AP converts the Field <RUNNING HEADER> into actual “RUNNING HEADER” string for all pages?

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, artjourney said:

I have a masterpage with the <RUNNING HEADER>. I right click on that and Expand Field. Every page now has the string <RUNNING HEADER> instead of numerical value. Looks like AP converts the Field <RUNNING HEADER> into actual “RUNNING HEADER” string for all pages?

That won't work on a master page because the field has no value on a master. You'd have to expand the filed on a document page and the value on that page will be expanded. It works the same way as page numbers - if you expand a page number field on a master you'll just get a # sign.

[artjourney]

17 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

That won't work on a master page because the field has no value on a master. You'd have to expand the filed on a document page and the value on that page will be expanded. It works the same way as page numbers - if you expand a page number field on a master you'll just get a # sign.

Looks like this is still a lot of work to do it manually. I was thinking of letting AP does its thing(s) with the running header, once AP calculated then it convert them all at once but baking isn’t a feature yet. Expand Field seems to work only for the page that it was expanded on.

[R C-R]

12 hours ago, artjourney said:

I was thinking of letting AP

@artjourney, just a minor thing but note that "AP" is the abbreviation for Affinity Photo, not Affinity Publisher. (It is automatically underlined in posts & if the pointer is hovered over it "Affinity Photo" will pop up.)

You can use APU or the like as an abbreviation for Affinity Publisher.

[artjourney]

For the benefit of those following, Expand Field works and will affect all pages EVEN when you’re doing it on the Master page.

The only problem is that if the Field such as a Running Header is depended on a style to get its value, then Expand Field on a Master will output <RUNNING HEADER> (for example) for all pages with that master.

If the Field is not depended on any style, then Expand Field works as expected. In my case, I can bake the Book Name, but not Book CHAPTER. The chapter number has a specific style and baking the Field will give a blank (if doing it on a regular page), or <RUNNING HEADER> (if doing it on a master page).

I have no problem baking the Book Name because the Field is not looking for any style. It’s just a static string (variable) I can easily change in the Fields manager.