Tiny font when adding pages from another file

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

Hi! When I add pages from another file to a new or existing Affinity Publisher document, sometimes the font size is tiny - like, 3 points or less. Usually just the first page is affected and the rest is normal.

This is not how it was in the original documents and is not how the styles are set up in the new one. If I look under Text Styles on the right while the cursor is in an affected paragraph, it shows the correct style with a font size of say 2.9 points added as though it were a change I had made manually, which it absolutely was not.

It's easy enough to go through and change back manually (it's usually only one page, in a digest size format, that's affected, and my layouts are only just complicated enough to justify using desktop publishing software), but of course, it would be better still if this were not happening in the first place.

Any ideas as to what's going on here and how I can prevent future occurrences?

Affinity Publisher on a desktop machine running Windows 10 and a laptop running Windows 11 (I've observed the problem on both machines). In the latest case the other document the pages were taken from was another .afpub file but this has also happened when importing .idml documents created in Indesign then exported in that format, and in case it matters this .afpub file did start its life that way.

[walt.farrell]

Do the source and target documents have the same DPI?

What release of Publisher are you using?

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

13 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Do the source and target documents have the same DPI?

What release of Publisher are you using?

They use the same DPI setting (300). It would be very strange if they didn't as I have never manually changed that in Indesign or Affinity, but I double-checked just to be certain, it's 300 all the way down the line.

The problem has shown up in various recent 2.x builds, including (in the most recent case) the latest version, 2.5.2.

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

Related question: Is there a way to select multiple paragraphs that don't necessarily use the same paragraph style, and remove their character styles while keeping the same paragraph styles they had before? This would make fixing this issue, if it happens again, a lot less tedious. I know how to do this to one paragraph or several adjacent paragraphs using the same paragraph style, but a way to do it to an arbitrary selection with mixed paragraph styles, while not essential, would definitely be nice to have.

[Old Bruce]

13 hours ago, Philosoraptor - Jeff H said:

... Is there a way to select multiple paragraphs that don't necessarily use the same paragraph style, and remove their character styles while keeping the same paragraph styles they had before? ...

Perhaps.

If you want to remove overrides, which are manually applied Italic or Bold or Colouring to the text, then select the text and use the menu Text > Reapply Text Styles.  If you have applied named Character Styles to text you can use the Find and Replace function in Publisher to find the Character Styles, one by one, and replace them with the [No Style] Character Style.

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

32 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Perhaps.

If you want to remove overrides, which are manually applied Italic or Bold or Colouring to the text, then select the text and use the menu Text > Reapply Text Styles.  If you have applied named Character Styles to text you can use the Find and Replace function in Publisher to find the Character Styles, one by one, and replace them with the [No Style] Character Style.

Hmm. Would a change of font size be considered an override for this purpose? Affinity seems to treat it mostly as though I'd manually changed the font size, give or take some weird things that happen when an affected paragraph spans more than one page.

[Old Bruce]

4 minutes ago, Philosoraptor - Jeff H said:

Hmm. Would a change of font size be considered an override for this purpose?

Yes, and No. Usually I just change the font size.  I have on occasion made and applied a Character Style that changes the font size. So it can be both.

[NathanC]

Hi @Philosoraptor - Jeff H,

Just going back to your original 'Add pages from file' issue there was a bug prior to 2.5.0 where importing an IDML file and re-flowing the text into new frames would result in unexpectedly scaled text, however this was fixed when opening these files directly.

I believe you're encountering a related issue if you're importing IDML files or your Publisher documents started out as .IDMLs. I can confirm i've also re-produced this issue with a separate set of random docs, the initial frame contained massively over-scaled text following the IDML import, and the same happened after I converted the IDML to .afpub and then used the same add pages function.

I'm not yet certain on the correlation between the two documents i've tested that causes this scaling to trigger, as i've tried this with a few different source files and it's not consistently happening when I import the IDML, and it also happens when I match the file DPI prior to import.

I'll get this logged with the developers for further investigation. I'd be grateful if you could also provide a copy of the original document and the file you're importing via 'Add pages from file' which results in this issue, as additional examples may help narrow this down. I've included a private upload link below.

https://www.dropbox.com/request/EozBcjMMCNVF7Zj7bY22

Thanks

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

10 hours ago, NathanC said:

Hi @Philosoraptor - Jeff H,

Just going back to your original 'Add pages from file' issue there was a bug prior to 2.5.0 where importing an IDML file and re-flowing the text into new frames would result in unexpectedly scaled text, however this was fixed when opening these files directly.

I believe you're encountering a related issue if you're importing IDML files or your Publisher documents started out as .IDMLs. I can confirm i've also re-produced this issue with a separate set of random docs, the initial frame contained massively over-scaled text following the IDML import, and the same happened after I converted the IDML to .afpub and then used the same add pages function.

I'm not yet certain on the correlation between the two documents i've tested that causes this scaling to trigger, as i've tried this with a few different source files and it's not consistently happening when I import the IDML, and it also happens when I match the file DPI prior to import.

I'll get this logged with the developers for further investigation. I'd be grateful if you could also provide a copy of the original document and the file you're importing via 'Add pages from file' which results in this issue, as additional examples may help narrow this down. I've included a private upload link below.

https://www.dropbox.com/request/EozBcjMMCNVF7Zj7bY22

Thanks

Good to know. Interesting to know the two problems might be related.

I made sure to save the .afpub document from just before I had my most recent crash issue with importing pages. I'll send the relevant documents along but probably not until quite late tonight (in North America, very early in the morning if you're in the UK).

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

On 6/11/2024 at 12:10 PM, Old Bruce said:

Yes, and No. Usually I just change the font size.  I have on occasion made and applied a Character Style that changes the font size. So it can be both.

I may have misspoken before, it's mostly overrides that seem to be relevant here, not character styles. That said the option "Apply "$ParagraphStyle" and Clear Character Styles" (when I right-click the relevant style under Text Styles while the cursor is in an affected paragraph) does seem to fix the problem at least 90% of the time. So, roughly the same situation as you.

(The other <10%, typically one paragraph near the bottom, this option does nothing or causes other scaling issues, and instead I have to go in and put in a new manual "override", even though it's to the default size for that style and thus should not need overriding. Moreover, in at least the most recent such case, nothing happened if I tried to do this to the entire paragraph at once, but it worked when I did this in about 3 stages, 80 or so characters at a time.)

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

On 6/12/2024 at 5:50 AM, NathanC said:

Hi @Philosoraptor - Jeff H,

 

I'll get this logged with the developers for further investigation. I'd be grateful if you could also provide a copy of the original document and the file you're importing via 'Add pages from file' which results in this issue, as additional examples may help narrow this down. I've included a private upload link below.

Hey, I finally just uploaded a few example files along with an explanatory .txt file to the DropBox you linked me to. Sorry for the delay.

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "Add pages from file- Importing IDML files can result in text scaling issues on the first page" (REF: AF-3452) has been fixed by the developers in the latest beta build (2.6.0.2805). The fix is planned for inclusion in the next customer release.
Customer beta builds are announced here and you can participate by following these instructions.
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Affinity Info Bot to notify us.

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

This is NOT FIXED in the beta!

Or at least not all of it is. I notice the bug says "can result in text scaling issues on the first page" (emphasis mine), and as my report from back in June mentioned, the issue isn't always confined to the first page of a file.

I recently made some minor changes that affected the pagination of an existing file, and guess what - I'm having the worst instance of this issue I've experienced yet at the point where I had to add a new text frame. Text that spills into the new frame is huge (e.g. headings that should be in a 13 point font are instead in 53.8). If I fix the problem on those pages in such a way that text flows back onto the previous page, the portion on that page is tiny (e.g. those same headings are in 3.1 point). The affected spread is pages 16 and 17 of what is currently an 85 page file; it's not the first page of anything.

Unlike the situation in the OP of this thread, this is not easily fixed - I seem to be stuck in an endless loop where a change I make in one place creates a problem in another with no obvious way to "break out" and fix everything at once. I'll have to try manually resizing it as per my second June 12 post (if anything particularly interesting happens as a result I'll mention it here - on that front, no news is good news). My hope when I read that this bug was fixed was that I'd never have to do that again, even in files that previously experienced this bug.

This is true in both the latest production version and the latest beta. I signed up for the beta program this week specifically to try and fix this issue and it's not happening.

Note that this text, while it did start life in Adobe Indesign and get imported via IDML, has been in Affinity for a long time and has been moved from one Affinity file to another at least once. This was not directly or recently imported from IDML and had seemed to work fine in Affinity for a fairly long time.

I can send some relevant files via Dropbox if needed.

@Affinity Info Bot

[Pauls]

Please upload the problem files here and we'll investigate

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

Done. Thanks for the prompt attention!

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

UPDATE - I tried fixing the problem by manually changing the font size of the affected paragraphs, but the scaling problem survives even that. The font size only stays fixed as long as the affected text remains in the same text frame. If the change causes it to move forward into the next frame, it's huge; if it causes it to move back into the previous one, it's tiny. In other words, I get the same result changing it manually as I do changing it by applying the correct style with overrides removed. It's been a while so I'm not 100% sure but I think this is unlike previous instances of this scaling issue that I've encountered.

FURTHER UPDATE - Adding a manual page break just before the affected text worked, not so much fixing as working around the problem. That way everything stays on the same page through whatever changes I make, within reason. At first there were weird spacing issues, with paragraphs starting too far to the right and spaced as though they still had the huge font sizes, but I was able to apply the proper styles and have them actually apply only those styles, without making additional changes I didn't ask for or want.

[Oufti]

2 hours ago, Philosoraptor - Jeff H said:

The font size only stays fixed as long as the affected text remains in the same text frame. If the change causes it to move forward into the next frame, it's huge; if it causes it to move back into the previous one, it's tiny.

This could result from a text frame that has been resized with the outer right bottom rescale handle:

 

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

45 minutes ago, Oufti said:

This could result from a text frame that has been resized with the outer right bottom rescale handle:

That wouldn't explain the tiny font in the previous frame.

[Pauls]

Looking into the file it looks like there is some scaling mismatches in the text frames starting from Page 11. You'll probably need to rework the frames from there to work around the problem (Pages 11-17). Preflight has a specific check for text frame mismatching now and that flags the issue from page 11. I'm going to have a go at this ( it may take me some time)

[Pauls]

OK - so replacing that section with new unscaled frames, pasting the text in and finally re-applying the text styles to any manually scaled text looks to be working to my eye