SOLVED - Publisher - 2.5.3 - TOC - Separator Field - Returns to Defaults?

NiTOXide · August 12, 2024

Solution:

After making the change to the Separator Field, ensure to hit Return (<Enter>)

Thank you @MikeTO

====Original Post Below===

Hi all,

I did my due-diligence and searched for this topic before hand - couldn't find anything.

Issue:

Created a Table of Contents (TOC) in a document.
Made some adjustments to the Separator field.
- Default: <Single Left Tab>
- Changed to: <Em space><Right Tab>
- Text mimics the changed adjustments
Click off the text box/text
- Text reverts to Default
- Check the Separator field
  - Reverted back to: <Single Left Tab>

I repeated the above a few times. The separator field doesn't seem to want to change and keeps reverting back. I also created a new file and found the same issue happening.

Maybe there's something wrong with:

The Text Style for the TOC line?
Something else I should look into?

Attached Files:

Copy of the Publisher File
TOC 1 - Showing the changes to the Separator Field
TOC 2 - Showing the Separator field reverting back.

Any help is appreciated. Thank You.

TOC Issue.afpub

MikeTO · August 12, 2024

1 hour ago, NiTOXide said:

Click off the text box/text

Text reverts to Default

I can't duplicate this problem with your document. What do you mean by "Click off the text box"? Are you pressing Return after changing the separator? You must press Return for the change to take effect. You can tell if the change is taking affect if you keep the History panel open because you'll see Update TOC Style added to it.

NiTOXide · August 12, 2024

@MikeTO- Thank you very much.

I did not hit Return (<Enter>) after making the change.

This solved the problem and I will be marking the topic as Solved.

flopje · October 20, 2024

I just spend 30 minutes fighting this - anyway to report this for improvement? I just assume that with no "save" button or other indication this field requires confirmation, none is needed. Losing the change after refresh drove me nuts.

MikeTO · October 20, 2024

47 minutes ago, flopje said:

I just spend 30 minutes fighting this - anyway to report this for improvement? I just assume that with no "save" button or other indication this field requires confirmation, none is needed. Losing the change after refresh drove me nuts.

There's a widespread issue in Affinity with fields not accepting a change until you press Tab or Return. It may be different on Windows, but for example on macOS:

Choose New to start creating a new document and type 1 into the page width field. Do not press Tab or Return.
Click OK - your input of 1 will have been ignored because you didn't press Tab or Return.
Choose New again - the width field will now be defaulted to 1 - this makes no sense, either the change you made should be accepted or ignored. What's actually happening is that Publisher is doing things out of sequence. It uses the value only when the Width field loses focus but it creates the document with the value from before it loses focus.

This is just a minor annoyance in dialogs but it's more confusing in panels such as the one we're discussing here. Publisher has an amazing live preview feature but users think that if they type a value and see the effects that it's really been changed when in reality nothing is changed until you press Tab or Return. And in some panels, pressing Tab will do the trick and in others it won't, only Return will work. It depends on if there is another text field available to tab to or not.

This is something that needs a bit of a UX review. But it' a big issue that affects a lot of things so it's probably something that will be looked at suite-wide someday and not addressed on a case by case basis.

flopje · October 20, 2024

Thanks for the clarification, and the quick response.

It's unfortunate it is a bigger, widespread issue, this one use case specifically stood out to me, but the one you mention is another annoying one indeed. However, I understand the preference of one big fix in favour of chasing each and every occurrence across the suite, can't wait for this to be addressed though.

Small remark, nit - but any chance this can be mentioned somewhere visible? This is a hard to track down issue on Google - most results refer to using the menu instead of mentioning this issue, and quick search on the forums initially didn't show any results. (Might be I'm to new for this forum and it is somewhere in a "known issues"section, but that also alluded me).

In the meantime I'll keep this in mind when using the software, with this knowledge hopefully I'll no longer be pulling my hair out on why a change won't stick.

Thanks,

MikeTO · October 20, 2024

50 minutes ago, flopje said:

Small remark, nit - but any chance this can be mentioned somewhere visible? This is a hard to track down issue on Google - most results refer to using the menu instead of mentioning this issue, and quick search on the forums initially didn't show any results. (Might be I'm to new for this forum and it is somewhere in a "known issues"section, but that also alluded me).

Here are four bugs logged for it that I'm aware of because I posted to these threads:

Plus this post which has not been logged and I'm unsure which ID it should be: