Publisher: option for not printing paragraphs/text styles

[OlafP]

Feature request: Option to prevent a paragraph/text style from being printed (Checkbox in Paragraph menu)

This is necessary when adding a hierarchical level to be displayed in the table of contents, for example to group several chapters written by different authors. It can also be useful to set markers/comments on certain pages that should not be printed.

To achieve this result, I inserted a text box with the author's name before each first chapter written by the author. But this text should not appear on the printed page. It is only used to go to the table of contents.

I am currently using this workaround: Select each of these text boxes and manually disable each of them in the levels menu. But this has the disadvance, that now the text boxes are also not displayed on the screen, which makes it difficult to manage them.

[MikeTO]

+ 1

This is frequently requested but it's usually requested as a non-printing text object and not a non-printing text style. If it was a text style and you had three paragraphs, printing, non-printing, and then printing, there would be a gap where the non-printing paragraph was or else it wouldn't be very wysiwyg.

I'd like both a non-printing toggle for all objects (not just text) as well as a true sticky note feature that was always non-printing. I'd like ways to find these and for Preflight to warn me of ones that I hadn't deleted or marked completed, or something like that.

[walt.farrell]

32 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

as well as a true sticky note feature that was always non-printing. I'd like ways to find these and for Preflight to warn me of ones that I hadn't deleted or marked completed, or something like that.

Something more than the Preflight Comment function provides?

[MikeTO]

Just now, walt.farrell said:

Something more than the Preflight Comment function provides?

Publisher lets us add and clear preflight comments but not retain them if marked complete. The current feature is great for a one-time reminder but doesn't support repeating a checklist each time you need to export the document. I have a Preflight checklist in my notes app. For example, my checklist includes:

• Check doc for ** - I use ** as a reminder of where I was working - I don't want to tag the frame with a preflight comment, I need something in the text itself. I use ** because it's handy to jump to with Find
• Spell check content in MS Word - I copy the content to Word to catch anything that macOS's buggy spell checker missed.
• Check Fields > Title in case it needs to be updated - Publisher's preflight comments aren't useful for this
• Update TOCs - the preflight check isn't useful for me because I have to manually tweak my TOCs after updating them to fix the formatting, so I can't rely on preflight to warn me of an outdated TOC
• Check for bold instead of semibold - when I bold text for emphasis I use semibold but occasionally I'm sloppy. I need a reminder to check for regular bold.

I know I could add a non-printing section at the end of the document and add a checklist to that page. But I'd really rather have something integrated into preflight.

Also, Preflight comments are invisible, I'd like little yellow sticky notes that were integrated into Preflight comments. I'd like to be able to add a sticky note independent of an object (perhaps add a preflight comment to the page itself for simplicity) and have a Show/Hide toggle. Others have also previously requested a way to mark pages as completed or to be able to colour code them.

[walt.farrell]

4 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

I know I could add a non-printing section at the end of the document and add a checklist to that page. But I'd really rather have something integrated into preflight.

Or put it in an otherwise-unused Master Page. 

But yes, integrated in Preflight would be better.

[PaoloT]

There are probably several ways to implement this, but I wonder if Conditional Text could be one of them. If the ID's concept of Conditional Text could be expanded to objects (Conditional Objects?), it would allow marked text or objects to be only shown when the condition is enabled. Condition status would allow to show/hide the marked items, as it happens with layers.

Going further, conditional markers could only be only shown if not working in Preview mode, or even when working in Preview mode or printed. For example, you might want to only see marked elements when not in Preview mode, and exclude them from an exported PDF.

If you want to show conditional text in Preview or into a PDF to be used for team revisions, you could let conditional markers be shown and printed.

This way, you can decide to see highlighted text and text frames used as stickies when not in Preview mode, to keep your notes in the files without printing them, or even print them to work on a PDF or on paper.

Paolo

 

[OlafP]

20 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Something more than the Preflight Comment function provides?

Yes. In my case the text blocks in question are used as a "blind" type of headers, that are referenced in the table of contents, but do not show up on the printed pages.

Nevertheless these text blocks should be visible on screen, to be able to manage them.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, OlafP said:

Yes. In my case the text blocks in question are used as a "blind" type of headers, that are referenced in the table of contents, but do not show up on the printed pages.

Nevertheless these text blocks should be visible on screen, to be able to manage them.

My question was specifically in response to MikeTo, whose comment I quoted.

[PaoloT]

As a workaround, may the text box described in the first message be a regular text frame, whose layer's name starts with something like "Note"? Layer states would allow hiding them all at once.

Paolo