Paragraph style changes out of control

[Ove Steen]

I have put a rather large amount of text (more than 6.000 words) copied from a Word document into Affinity Publisher.

I select “All” and set the text Paragraph Style “Normal”.

The first page will show up correctly as defined by me: Arial 12

The follow pages shows Arial 1,3.

I go to page 2. Select all. Choose “Normal”.

Now I have Arial 12 in the whole document. But at page 1 some of the text has been changed to Arial 100. If I change that back to “Normal”, the rest of the pages will go back to Arial 1,3.

I know from earlier experience that such strange things will happen again and again when I go on working with the text, changing the page flow placing some pictures.

What is going on? How can I get back in control?

[walt.farrell]

How did you create the initial Text Frame you Pasted the content into, and how did you create the next Text Frame?

The symptom you have described is most easily caused by using the detached lower-right (scaling) handle when sizing/resizing a Text Frame rather than than using the handles attached to the bounding box. Doing that will resize the Frame, but in a mode where it adjusts the scaling of the Frame and its contents.

If you're on a current release of Publisher 2, when you have done that the scaling handle will be shown as a solid blue filled circle, rather than an empty circle. Double-clicking it will reset the scaling factor, and may resolve your problem, but it can be complex depending on exactly how you created the Frames and flowed the text between them. Sometimes it's easiest to delete the frames and reflow the text again, or even to delete the frames and re-paste the text.

[Ove Steen]

The document is a diary I always create after a long holiday. I create the new diary by making a "Save as" from an earlier similar document with the purpose to use the same characteristics so as the paragraph styles and charactar styles.

I delete the old text and put the new text into the existing frames. If I need more frames for the new text I create more frames the usual way.

I am not talking about scaling of the text frames. I am talking about the strange behaviour of the text size, which comes up before I eventually create more frames.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Ove Steen said:

I am not talking about scaling of the text frames. I am talking about the strange behaviour of the text size, which comes up before I eventually create more frames.

That is usually an effect of the way the text frames were created. 

If you have a document that is currently exhibiting this problem, it would help to have screenshots showing the first text frame and the second one, so we can see what you're seeing. Please include the complete application window in each screenshot, and make sure we can see the complete text frame and the text cursor.

[Ove Steen]

But all these unexpected and unwanted effects should not happen. They have no purpose. It is in my oppiniom an irritating bug in the application.

[walt.farrell]

4 hours ago, Ove Steen said:

But all these unexpected and unwanted effects should not happen.

If you showed us screenshots we could tell if what I've suggested is what's happening in your case.

Scaling Text Frames has several purposes. It may be unwise to scale one frame differently from others when frames are linked, but I can see obscure and rare reasons even for doing that, so it is possibly useful to some users some of the time. But now one can at least see it has happened, if it was unintentional, and reset the scaling. 

[Ove Steen]

Here you are.

I got some text from Wikipedia, which I converted into plain text with TextEdit.

I took my diary and emptied it for my own text. I copied the Wikipedia text into the empty frames, where Normal already was selected as paragraph style (Arial 11).

Thats all. Please explain the result.

A don't try to scale frames. I leave them alone.

 

Document trial.afpub

[walt.farrell]

4 hours ago, Ove Steen said:

Please explain the result.

A don't try to scale frames. I leave them alone.

Thanks for the sample document. I can confirm/agree that you didn't scale the frames in that document.

The text in the document you provided does not have the Text Style "Normal". It is shown as Normal+, with overrides to spacing an font size. It's impossible to be sure at this point how you did that originally. However, using your document I can reproduce what you show in it by this sequence:

1. Select and delete all the text.
2. Copy from Wikipedia, paste into BBEdit to make it plain text.
3. Copy from BBEdit and paste into the first Text Frame.

What I didn't do was explicitly change the Frame to Normal (from Normal+) using the Context Toolbar, before  performed the paste in step 3. This could have been done at any time before the paste (that is, after step 1, or after step 2. 

But I cannot explain how you got Normal+ in the first place. We would need to go back to the beginning, with creating a completely new document, and saving that for comparison. Then doing whatever was done to add the text, and saving that for a comparison (with History). Possibly with a screen recording of the complete application window while this is happening.

Sorry.