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Preparing Text (a novel) for placing into Affinity Publisher?


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Preparing Text (a novel) for placing into Affinity Publisher?

I have the latest version of Affinity Publisher and I’m struggling with placing text into it via File/Place…

When it places the text and automatically creates and streams the text through to as many pages as required the formatting is all over the place and, on top of that, hundreds of random numbers get thrown into the mix also.

I suspect the issue here is my text document that I’m attempting to ‘place’ into Affinity Publisher.

Here is the back story.

It is a novel, about 100,000 words long. But, I have lost the original docx (Word) document and now I only have the fully formatted PDF document that was used to send to the printers for this novel. I need to do a re-write and to re-publish it as I now have the rights to this book back from the publisher.

So I did this, I copied all the text from the PDF document and pasted it into an Apple Pages document on my iMac. Here, the formatting looks just as it did in the original PDF. I’ve re-written the first four chapters (out of 34) and figured before I get too far into it I’d see how it looks once ‘placed’ into a novel format book in Affinity Publisher and that’s when I discovered it looks awful with dodgy styles and formatting and loads of random numbers and bullet points just stuck in all over the place like the computer and programmes between them have just messed everything up.

So I figured before I continue with a few weeks hard work of re-writing I need to sort out the formatting and get it clean and basic in Apple’s Pages before continuing so I can clean up the formatting and lose the text styles etc to get it nice and clean so I can ‘place’ it into Affinity Publisher with no issues.

I don’t want to have to clear all formatting with my existing Pages document then have to go through a 100,000 word novel and put in all the paragraph carriage returns, indents, italics, bold etc etc as that would take almost as long as it took me to write the novel to start with.

Does anybody know a quick fix for this?

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@Creative-Writer did you use the Microsoft Word (.docx) file format when placing text in APub (Affinity Publisher)?

Can you provide a screenshot of that dodgy text with messed up styles and random numbers all over the place? This would give a better idea what could be wrong. 

 

 

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FYI you can also open the original PDF directly in Affinity Publisher and it will take care of line and paragraph breaks for you. Just ensure you choose the "Favour editable text over fidelity" checkbox in the PDF Options window.

I realize you might want to edit the text in Pages but you can copy the text over to Pages and reformat and rewrite it there, but it's a lot easier to deal with text from a PDF by opening it in Publisher than it would be to scrape the content out of it and paste it into Pages.

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MikeTO, thanks for tip. I opened the PDF in AP, which is 326 pages long, but the trouble with that is each page has different text boxes for the main text, the page number, the chapter name at the top of the page etc. So I can't format all the text in one go as there are no 'flow' lines between the text boxes so I can't just hit Command A to select all the book as it only selects the one text box and I'd also have to go through it one page at a time to delete page numbers and headers etc. Also, when I come to doing the typesetting by removing widow and orphans etc and making sure new chapters start on a new page all the text won't get pushed down the entire book due to no flow lines from box to box.

brother, I don't have Microsoft Word, I only have Apple Pages, but I saved it as a Word docx file from Pages as AP won't recognise a .pages document.

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20 minutes ago, Creative-Writer said:

I don't have Microsoft Word, I only have Apple Pages, but I saved it as a Word docx file from Pages as AP won't recognise a .pages document.

Me either. I use open source LibreWriter and export as MicrosoftWord 2007-365 format. And i don't have any problems when placing in APub.

Without access to the source file that is causing the problem, it is difficult to advise.

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bbrother, yes, I downloaded LibreOffice today and tried the same thing. But I think my problem is the original PDF file that I have is full of text styles and formatting so when I open that in either Pages or LibreOffice the original PDF formatting is all there and it's the same if I cut/paste the text from the PDF into Libre or Pages, the original PDF formatting and text styles are all still there so I think I need to figure out how to either cut/paste the text from the PDF into either Pages, Libre or directly into Affinity Publisher in such a way that it does not bring in all the text styles and formatting,  just the basic stuff like indents in paragraphs, spaces between paragraphs and italics and bold for instance.

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7 hours ago, Creative-Writer said:

I think I need to figure out how to either cut/paste the text from the PDF into either Pages, Libre or directly into Affinity Publisher in such a way that it does not bring in all the text styles and formatting,  just the basic stuff like indents in paragraphs, spaces between paragraphs and italics and bold for instance.

You're right. Your main problem is that when you copy text from a PDF you also catch bad formatting which, even though you don't see it when editing in word like processors it's still passed over to newly exported docx and then into APub.

When it comes to APub another problem is that it doesn't have the ability or advanced import options to include only some of the formatting while discard others that in your specific case may cause problems.APub includes all formatting that it can parse when you place an docx.
You cannot include indents and spacing between paragraphs, italics and bold excluding problematic formatting.

If you can't get rid that bad formatting while using Apple Pages or LibreWriter as a bridge between PDF and APub I think you will have no other solution than:

  1. create a new fresh (clean) docx file
  2. try copying the text from the PDF file using copy/paste without formatting or in the worst case, re-writing it to prevent ongoing formatting problems
  3. do thhe hard work again and indent, italicize and bold your text.

Can you upload part of the docx file from the novel where you copied the text from the source PDF file?
I'm not asking for the whole thing. I understand that this is copyrighted material that you do not wish to share publicly.

 

27 minutes ago, Catshill said:

In my experience you will waste so much time trying to import the foreign formatting, it won’t be worth the hassle. I would export the text as unformatted and create new styles in APu.

This is the default thing that i do in most cases.Being more specific writing simple text in LibreWriter, RTF editor or Word, export to RTF or docx and do the style and layout inside APub.

But on the other hand, I understand that people write and format text (text styles, indents, bold, italic) in Word or Apple Page.
They are exporting to a docx file and want to place it in APub, expecting the formatting to be preserved to make working in APub easier and more time-saving.
Word or Apple Page allow you to focus more on text formatting than on the layout itself, as is the case with APub.
They are also much weaker in terms of options compared to DTP wchich makes themeasier to use for people who do not feel confident with desktop publishing programs.

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I cut and paste the text from he PDF into Apple's TextEdit programme and converted it to 'Plain Text' and then cut and paste that into LibreOffice and saved as docx and then 'placed' that into APub and all is good, but I will now have to go through the entire novel and put in italics, bold, paragraph returns etc where required. But I figured I'd do all this as well as the re-write etc inside APub to be on the safe side.

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