Word document added to Affinity Publisher disaster!

[Ryan Clarke]

Can someone please tell me if there is a word processor that Affinity is compatible with.

I have spent weeks reformatting a book in Word as Affinity is not compatible with Pages. I have got it looking just right in Word. Now I imported it using place in Word and the results are terrible!

Not a single paragraph style (LATO and PT Sans) have imported properly. My headings are 16 pt in Word. In Publisher they show up as 12. The Lato body font is showing thinner than in word and has changed the spacing completely between paragraphs. All sub-headings have been centered by Publisher despite being placed on the left in Word.

The worst mess are the footnotes. Publisher has made them all bold, and ignored the sequence of numbers. Every page in publisher starts the footnotes from 1 all over again.

Character spacing is all changed, line spacing, returns. It hasn't got a single thing right.

If I cut and paste the text directly from Word into Publisher it is a slight improvement, and gets more things right, but it is treating my Word document as if it is some alien format it has never seen before.

Does anyone here use a Mac and have the evefr successfully imported a Word document into Affinity Publisher?

I expected there to be some errors but not to an extent I would have to reformat the entire 120,000 words from scratch!

[MikeTO]

If you could provide a small test docx test document with the same heading, body, and footnote styles - it doesn't have to be your actual document but a test document based on the actual one - then one of us could try it out and offer suggestions to avoid the issues you're experiencing. Sometimes a small change in the way a style is defined in Word will lead to much better results when placing the text into Publisher.

Just make a copy of your document, delete all the text, type a few paragraphs using the key styles, and share it here for testing.

Good luck

[Old Bruce]

11 hours ago, Ryan Clarke said:

I have spent weeks reformatting a book in Word as Affinity is not compatible with Pages.

I would try using Pages to Export to DOCX file format.

And I would do all the formatting in Publisher, after I had done all the writing in Pages, Text Edit, Word or whatever. I would not bother with any formatting in the word processor.

[walt.farrell]

4 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

I would not bother with any formatting in the word processor.

I typically know what the formatting should be as I'm writing, and if I wrote with no formatting I would have to rediscover everything after transferring it to Publisher.

Perhaps better to at least tag the text in some consistent way while writing, so Find/Replace could be used to do the formatting in Publisher later.

[jmwellborn]

@Ryan Clarke  I am so sorry that you have this ahead of you.  I write books too, and have been using Publisher as my go-to “word processor” since it first arrived.  I just write the whole thing in some easy-to-read font (plenty of Saves along the way), and don’t worry about any formatting.  If the book is a very long one, I sometimes break it up into several files, so that Spell Check and Find and Replace have an easier time of it.  When I am done, I decide on my formatting right there in Publisher.  It is a very smooth process and beats Pages hands down!!!

[Ryan Clarke]

Thank you. I will make a sample document and upload it with a comparison to Word to illustrate the problems I am having.

I have another question but it seemed pertinant to begin another thread.

 

[Ryan Clarke]

Sorry to resurrect this thread but I have tried relentlessly with Affinity Publisher and decided to throw in the towel. If it cannot retain even the most basic of formatting from Word it is useless to me. Just tried the latest update, and the improvements make little difference. It still imports Word like it is dealing with an alien file type.

I’m dealing with a 120,000 word document, compiled in Word that is full of references, bullet points, italics, subscript, subheadings etc. I need these when I am composing the document. It would be impossible to format it all as a simple text file and import it to Affinity, then format all over again. The chance for error is increased massively, let alone the amount of work it would take to restore the original format. I would be then working from two master documents. Any changes made in the original Word document would have to be carefully isolated and manually inserted into the Affinity document, because it could never be imported from scratch all over again. And presumably if it is this bad at importing Word documents, exporting back to Word is an impossibility.

Affinity needs to be able to properly preserve basic formatting. I’m shocked that it cannot handle things so obvious and straightforward as bullet points and footnote references. The concept of renumbering and reformattting 700 footnotes that is has chosen to bold and renumber on every single page is enough to make this software useless to me. Not to mention the index, the table of contents and the page reference numbers, which I would have to reattach one by one.

There is just no benefit here. Even if I did attempt to fix all the countless, arbitrary formatting issues I have no confidence that it won’t start screwing up or breaking apart at some other unknown point down the line.

I’m really disappointed. Affinity Publisher is no use for compiling academic works. I'm sure it's great for magazines and straightforward text files, such as novels. I just wish I’d discovered this sooner. I’m now stuck with publishing straight out of Word or finding typesetting software that will properly preserve basic formatting from Word.

[walt.farrell]

7 minutes ago, Ryan Clarke said:

If it cannot retain even the most basic of formatting from Word

It does do that, when I've tried it. (Well, it does from LibreOffice-created .docx files. I don't have Word.)

Did you ever prepare that sample for us to look at?