Page border

[SamiSeif]

Hi all,

Just a preface that I'm a musician and I don't know a lot about affinity products. I currently use MS Word to prepare front matter for my music, and I'd like to eliminate Word from my life if possible (because it's not very good).

Please see the attached file for reference. It gives an idea of what my usual needs for front matter looks like. 

My question is, I like the border I have on the title page and I'd like to keep it. Is there any way to reproduce it in publisher? Or any of the other affinity apps?

Also, I know that affinity has an issue with right-to-left text, hope that will get addressed but that's the least of my concerns at the moment. There are workarounds for that

Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions.

[GarryP]

If the border exists within your Word document, you should (under most circumstances) be able to copy it from the Word document and then paste it into your Publisher document. Some manual modification may be necessary after that but we won't know what until you try.

If, for some reason, you cannot do that (and please tell us why not), do you want to reproduce the border exactly or do you just want to have something that looks similar? If just something similar, how similar should it be, and what parts of it need to be similar?

[firstdefence]

Affinity doesn't have an automated border feature like word and a few Desktop Publishing (DTP) apps do so you will have to create/build the borders manually or import ready made borders that you can resize to fit the music paper sizes you use.

As an example I made replica tiles in Affinity Designer shown in the screenshot and used the Pattern 1 Edge PNG tile to make a vector  brush. To use the vector brush...

1. Create a rectangle shape using the rectangle tool and convert it to curves from the context menu.
2. Make sure the rectangle curve is selected (check in the layers panel that the rectangle curve layer is highlighted)
3. Apply the brush by selecting the brush in the brushes panel.
4. The Corner tile can simply be duplicated and placed over the corners.

   

Custom Pattern Brushes.afbrushes

[thomaso]

Alternatively to copy/paste you could export the border from Word as PDF + paste that in APub.

Also it is possible to re-create the border in APub. A curve + a few rectangles and some circles for the corner element will be sufficient to create the border with multiple copies of single elements (e.g. via Power Duplicate, Cmd-J). For the overlapping of the basic curve element you divide one into two separate curve layers + copy + mirror + rearrange the result in the layers panel. Finally you clip all curves and the two rectangles above/below as child layers within a black parent rectangle that has a black border applied.