Some Questions after my first projects in Publisher

[Wolf-z]

Dear Forum,
I am relatively new to Affinity Publisher and am working on newsletters and a compilation of equipment collections with data merged from an EXCEL sheet. I am so glad I found MikeTO's user guide  - and thanks for such a responsive forum! In the following I describe features/observations which I could not find or apply correctly, maybe you could give me some pointers:

Artistic Text: define a fixed size text frame and allow the font size to adjust filling the given text frame

Running Header: I get unpredictable results with the running header field on a document page if the specific text style occurs in an artistic text frame (sometimes works, mostly not: field remains empty). No problem with regular text field.

Running header field adds a new line after filling the field and before next entry in the text frame, unless a termination character is added in the running header text - by design? That took me a while to figure out.

Master pages:
Can I find out which Master page was applied to a specific page and if it was modified? Will 'Clear Master' clear all masters applied to the document page?

How can I re-apply a master to a document page which had previously been changed (detached) but want to go back to the master page? Apply-Master will not change the changed properties

Parameters for Text wrap around newly inserted frames/images, currently always defaults to 'none'. I use a 'square' with .04" margins most of the time, would be helpful to set a default for that. (In case of the newsletter picture frames are not in the master page, as they vary in number, size and location from issue to issue)

'Unprintable text' in a Master page text box, which only serves as an instruction for the content but does not print or show in preview mode on the document page. If no text is entered, the field stays empty. I use a custom field as a workaround (by emptying the field value before publishing).

Legend under or above an image frame. I use a text box and group it with the image, but resizing will change the font and size of the text box in vertical direction, even if I select 'lock' in the transform panel.

A means to clearly indicate that one edits the Master page instead of the document pages (green bar?) or is this just a beginners mistake?

Enter discrete zoom level when manipulating images in an image frame, rather than the slider.

Enable page-up/down keys in editing.

Remember zoom setting when opening an existing project - it defaults to 'fit on screen' which is not suited for the newsletter

- Thank you and a happy Holiday Season!

[Oufti]

6 hours ago, Wolf-z said:

Artistic Text: define a fixed size text frame and allow the font size to adjust filling the given text frame

You could use the mouse like this:

1. Double click on the middle handle on right side of the frame to adjust width to the tightest
2. Double click (in this order) on the middle handle on bottom side of the frame to adjust height to the tightest
3. Resize the frame using the outer handle (unattached) [#2] at the right bottom of the frame.

 

Please compare the two handles behaviour:

Handle #1 resizes the frame but not its content. Handle #2 resizes all together.

(N.B. In this video, I double clicked a bit too quickly on the middle handles, so it's not easy to see but I actually used double clicks for adjusting size.) 

 

 

6 hours ago, Wolf-z said:

Master pages:
[1º] Can I find out which Master page was applied to a specific page and [2º] if it was modified?

1º Hover on the page thumbnail in the Pages panel and wait half a second. You will see the name(s) of the applied master page(s) and on which page(s). 

2º You can see what has been modified in the Layers panel if you deploy the Master page layer by clicking on the down arrow on utter left.

• Modified layers of the Master page are noticed by a dashed line on the thumbnails left side.
• Unmodified layers have instead a plain line. 

Here, I have added text to the two linked text frames "Entrées…", whereas both layers at the bottom only contain fields already set on the Master page. 

 

[walt.farrell]

11 hours ago, Oufti said:

You could use the mouse like this:

1. Double click on the middle handle on right side of the frame to adjust width to the tightest
2. Double click (in this order) on the middle handle on bottom side of the frame to adjust height to the tightest
3. Resize the frame using the outer handle (unattached) [#2] at the right bottom of the frame.

 

That doesn't do what the OP asked for, though. They wanted a fixed-size frame, to which the text size would adjust so the frame is filled.

Also, using the rescaling handle will cause confusion, and is very bad if the frame will ever be Linked to another frame (though of course, for the OP's case that's not an issue because they asked about Artistic Text, not Frame Text). Once you've rescaled a Text Frame you can no longer set the font size of its text to a known value, and the size will alter unpredictably if you link the frame to another one and the text flows between them.

[Wolf-z]

Oufti,

many thanks for the detailed explanation of the Master page and text box sizing. While your method would get me to the same result after manipulating the frame size, it is not quite what I had in mind, as Walt mentioned.

I wanted a fixed size text frame (artistic preferred, but regular text also works) containing a data field which is populated from the external source. The frame is bracketed between other items on the page and should not change size, while changing font size is ok.

Wolfgang

[thomaso]

A thread that mixes around 10 different subjects may get confusing quite soon. As the forum guidelines say it is useful + preferred to post separate topics in separate threads.

Possibly your text "bracketed between other items" is meant to be pinned as floating object with a certain text frame, or as one frame within a text flow of several frames ? – Your description details still appear ambiguous. Probably a screenshot would help. And a separate thread. There are threads already about auto-sizing text depending on the text amount per line in artistic or frame text frames with multiple lines or paragraphs. Such an option/ feature doesn't exist in Affinity yet.

[Wolf-z]

Thomaso,

it is a frame positioned between image frames and other text frames. No text flow, just the field's value will be in this frame.

I'll look for auto-size in the forum and if I need more help, I'll post a separate thread.

Wolfgang

[Old Bruce]

@Wolf-z, Is this the sort of thing you are looking to achieve?

If so then I do not think it is possible at present.

[Wolf-z]

Bruce,

yes, that's what I had in mind, thank-you for depicting it.

[Pšenda]

26 minutes ago, Wolf-z said:

No text flow, just the field's value will be in this frame.

Artistic Text, write the text, adjust position + size frame (use snapping) => text/font automatically adjust to frame.

[Oufti]

6 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

That doesn't do what the OP asked for, though. They wanted a fixed-size frame, to which the text size would adjust so the frame is filled.

I understood well what he wanted 😉 but I didn't see how it could be done in Affinity Publisher, since there doesn't seem to be any horizontal auto-resize function in Affinity. I should have mentioned that what I suggested was not exactly what was asked for.

 

6 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Also, using the rescaling handle will cause confusion, and is very bad if the frame will ever be Linked to another frame (though of course, for the OP's case that's not an issue because they asked about Artistic Text, not Frame Text). Once you've rescaled a Text Frame you can no longer set the font size of its text to a known value, and the size will alter unpredictably if you link the frame to another one and the text flows between them.

Thank you @walt.farrell for this important warning.
However, as you noticed, it matters only for linked Text frames, not Artistic Text frame. 

So, best solution I then see is to have both an Artistic text frame – or a Text frame, as long as it remains unlinked – containing the <Running header> field, and an invisible Rectangle (e.g. no fill no stroke) under it as size reference/placeholder. Then to manually resize the Artistic text frame, snapping to the rectangle — like what @Pšenda suggested.

[Wolf-z]

Thanks again for the discussion - I understand, was just hoping to avoid resizing after the data merge

[Pšenda]

21 minutes ago, Wolf-z said:

was just hoping to avoid resizing after the data merge

If I understand it correctly, you would need to fill the frames with external data, and adapt the font (its size and width) of these texts to the frames so that they completely fill the height and width of the frame? Just out of curiosity, what would you use it for if each box is filled with a completely different font size and width? Looks like it's going to be a nice disarrangement.

[Wolf-z]

we do a catalog of several hundred pieces of equipment. The text frame in question contains manufacturer and model information. Yes, as Bruce showed, extremes could show up which may need to be tweaked after the merge - I wanted the largest possible font size in one line. Two sample records:

 

[Pšenda]

1 hour ago, Wolf-z said:

we do a catalog

In the case of a catalog - an official document, I would expect some "visual culture", i.e. that the texts have some uniform style and format, as you have with Rec/Idx/Rev items. If each text is a different size and a different width, it doesn't look very "professional". Anyway, it's a bit weird :-), and personally I'd prefer a uniform style for all items.

[R C-R]

18 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

If each text is a different size and a different width, it doesn't look very "professional". Anyway, it's a bit weird :-), and personally I'd prefer a uniform style for all items.

I'm not sure about how weird or unprofessional that might be -- I think that is at least in part  subjective -- but I personally would find the lack of consistency somewhat confusing, as if it was meant to distinguish one product type or model from others in some non-obvious way.

[Pšenda]

1 minute ago, R C-R said:

I'm not sure about how weird or unprofessional that might be

Personally/subjectively, I would expect a similar style for e.g. chapter titles in a collection of poems by the nonsense poet Christian Morgenstern, where a certain form of visual inconsistency and artistic creativity is expected and even desirable to express/support the content of the book. But for a "technically" oriented document, I would expect and prefer a certain technical austerity, curtness and precision - just like in the GUI of an application, it is not very welcome if the texts/descriptions are not aligned and are not in the same and same size font 🙂

[thomaso]

6 hours ago, Pšenda said:

some "visual culture", (…) If each text is a different size and a different width, it doesn't look very "professional".

Since you mention Christian Morgenstern: David Carson created magazines with bearly readable typography … people might say he founded a new era in text design.

I can imagine a useful case with “smart” product names where the length corresponds to a certain hierarchy. For example:

Nevertheless, this doesn't seem to be the case with this catalog: Apparently the two product examples are historical equipment.

@Wolf-z, apart from a sense of your goal (I didn't like Carson's design because of the reduced text information … whereas you seem to like a kind of chaotic layout) and the already mentioned note that there is no such auto-scale feature in Affinity, there might be workarounds:

• Perhaps it could be achieved with a Constraint Group + an artistic text frame, auto-sized depending on the text length to the width of a parent object. I must admit, I am not sure if this is possible at all.

• It will work well and reliable with Picture Frames: If you create an image file for each product name (in its according pixel width) then you could use that images with data merge and get them auto-filling a Picture Frame of a certain size.