Placed a DOCX file into a text frame and this happened...

[Martyn Folkes]

The text frames are on the Master, but the same happens when I draw Text Frames on the Page. I've tried a number of times and restarted Publisher. It works fine in a one page A4 document, but not in this template.

Any ideas?

[Catshill]

I find it more reliable to paste as unformatted text into a text frame.

[mopperle]

Never had a problem placing a docx file. What version of AFP are you using and which OS?

How did you place the docx?

[thomaso]

It looks like a style issue, for instance "no break" and locally odd leading or indent values, like so:

What if you press the "Revert defaults" button in the Toolbar with the text frame selected with Move Tool? (or menu Edit > Defaults > Revert)

[Martyn Folkes]

Thanks @thomaso. No break was the problem. In the template I had created a "No Break" character style, and this was being selected when I Placed the text, and was applied to everything. I changed the name of the character style (to "NoBreako") and it wasn't selected on Place.

Odd, because there is no style called "No Break" in the DOCX file.

[thomaso]

5 minutes ago, Martyn Folkes said:

Odd, because there is no style called "No Break" in the DOCX file.

Odd … or just unexpected? If I place a docx in Affinity while I have one of my saved character styles selected in the Text Style panel then this character style may get assigned to some placed text.

I assume in a docx file it is possible, like in Affinity, to have a formatting used without creating a named, saved style for it. Also hidden (invisible) 'Special Characters' may influence the text flow. – Generally I would not expect a perfect match when placing such a third party file inside Affinity. Thus it maybe more reliable to style the text in Affinity only without using the external formatting when importing / placing / pasting a text.

[Martyn Folkes]

Yes, it hasn't happened before, but it had me stumped this time. As you say, there may be an unusual bit of formatting in this particular document that is triggering the No Break character style to be applied to the entire document, but it would be interesting to know what? and why?

Unfortunately, I have 130 books to make at the moment, and I would like the process to be as quick as possible. I don't want to go through an unformatted 500 page book and choose text styles for everything. I couldn't be sure that all the necessary styling is spotted, such as italic text, or a paragraph of verse that has lost its formatting in plain text. I do page through and check everything is correct, but without the Styles that I have set in Word during the editing process (which are extremely clean and minimal) I might miss something. I don't need, or expect, a perfect match, but I do need to be able to see the different styling, which I can't with unformatted text.

I will give your method a go. It will mean tagging the hard to spot formatting, like italic text, in Word before importing to Publisher, but that shouldn't be too hard.

[thomaso]

To me an unintentionally assigned Affinity character style seems to be triggered if it's selected when placing the docx. Then the docx style "Normal" appears to get it assigned (… or maybe simply the last style within the docx content gets it assigned ??). – I am not experienced with style handling in docx, there may be more parameters affecting the import, as mentioned, assigned styles without an according saved style in docx may also influence the imported result in an unwanted way. – Below I start with creating a character style in an .afpub with no saved styles, the two default "[No Style]"excepted  …

[lacerto]

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

To me an unintentionally assigned Affinity character style seems to be triggered if it's selected when placing the docx.

It does not need to be a character style, it is enough if no break attribute is active in the position where text is placed within an existing frame, and if it is an attribute last applied on any frame, it will also become an attribute of a new text frame that is created when a Word document is placed on canvas. I am not sure if No break exists as a Word attribute: non-breaking space of course does (and is imported), and probably some other non-breaking glyphs, but they do not cause the same non-wrapping behavior as no break, but just forced word breaks at (probably) random points.

[Martyn Folkes]

Thanks for the help, @lacerto and @thomaso. The issue has now been solved and I have a template that does what I want it to do (I hope). The problem was that even though there was no text at the insertion point (it's the beginning of the first text frame in the flow) it had inadvertently been saved with the No Break character style attached. I believed wrongly that by selecting the End of Story symbol and applying [No Style], it would switch off the No Break character style, just as by selecting the pilcrow in Word allows you to change the style for the paragraph. By entering some text, I was able to select that and switch off the No Break character style, and it stuck.

Probably an edge case, but does this count as a bug? The End of Story symbol can be selected but the style can't be changed.

[Old Bruce]

27 minutes ago, Martyn Folkes said:

Probably an edge case, but does this count as a bug? The End of Story symbol can be selected but the style can't be changed.

I would think that the various paragraphs of the Story can have their styles changed but also that the paragraphs come entirely before the End of Story mark. Even I wrote that, it does sound like a semantic argument.