Initial Words question (I think)

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

Okay, so in Indesign I had a text style (used for ability descriptions in a role-playing game rulebook) that worked like this:

The first part of the line (name of the ability) is in one typeface, call it X. Then there is a right indent tab, and the text along the right-hand side (the ability's recovery time) is in a very different typeface, call it Y. X and Y use the same basic font family but nearly everything else (colour, size, italicized-or-not status, and weight) is different.

In Indesign this is an easy-once-you-get-the-hang-of-it use of nested styles. In Affinity Publisher I can't get it to work at all. I assume Initial Words is the way to do it, but that option doesn't seem to do anything in my hands. The typeface does not change.

What I'm doing is this:

1. Create a paragraph style for X, and a character style for Y.
2. On the Initial Words tab of style X: (A) Tick "Enabled". (B) Set Max Word Count to 6 (about the most I can imagine needing). (C) Set a tab as the end character. (D) Set Y as the style.
3. In each affected paragraph, manually add a tab after the ability name but just before the right indent tab. (Could also be a find/replace, but the section I'm currently concerned with has only two of these paragraphs. A later chapter will have hundreds...)
4. Watch in frustration as the typeface does not change at the tab no matter how I try to apply style X.

I guess I have three questions/issues here. In order from most to least serious:

1. Why isn't the typeface changing at the end character? I mean, that's the whole point of the feature. At least in my hands, this feature just flat-out doesn't seem to work.
2. Reading over the help for this feature, I'm worried I may have X and Y reversed. (If so, let the record show that this is incredibly unintuitive, at least in my use case. For me the first few words are the "main body" of the paragraph, the rest an optional addition.) So to clarify: Should the Style on the Initial Words tab be the style to change to after the end character, or the style to change from i.e. the one for the initial words themselves?
3. It doesn't help that a right indent tab is not one of the options given for the end character. This seems to admit of a lot of possible workarounds, though - the tab mentioned in 2C and 3 is mine. Any tips or better workarounds? Or, is there a code to type a right indent tab in that field directly?

[walt.farrell]

9 hours ago, Philosoraptor - Jeff H said:

Create a paragraph style for X, and a character style for Y.

I think you need to create your Paragraph Text Style for Y. It's X (the Initial Words) that gets a Character Text Style, as they are different from the rest of the paragraph.

[MikeTO]

I've done this many times and thought I'd create a quick example document to share with Jeff but I think there may be a bug when doing this with the same font family. @walt.farrell could you please verify this before I report it?

1. Create a character style (for the initial words) set to Arial Regular Black - do not use No Change
2. Create a paragraph style (with character attributes for the text after the right indent tab) set to Arial Bold Italic Red with Initial Words enabled, set to the character style, and with a right indent tab as a terminating character - do not use No Change

The initial words should be Arial Regular Black but for me (see attached doc) they are Arial Bold Italic Black. The character style is really being applied - it's black - but the font style is not overriding as it should.

If I change the one of the styles to a different font family then it works fine, it just doesn't work when it's the same font. I got the same results with other static fonts such as Helvetica and Adobe Caslon but not with variable fonts such as Roboto Flex and Archivo.

@Philosoraptor - Jeff H for now, you may need to use different font families to make this work unless you're using a variable font.

However, I'm just waking up so I might have this all wrong. 🙂 

initial.afpub

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, MikeTO said:

The character style is really being applied - it's black - but the font style is not overriding as it should.

I see the same on Windows (using Publisher 2.5.5), but note that in the Context Toolbar, it appears the Character Text Style is not applied ("No Style", with the cursor within the initial words).

[Old Bruce]

@Philosoraptor - Jeff H,

Before I try and figure out what it is you want could you include a screenshot of what looks right for you. I am thinking that this might be what you are wanting but I don't really know.

 

[MikeTO]

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I see the same on Windows (using Publisher 2.5.5), but note that in the Context Toolbar, it appears the Character Text Style is not applied ("No Style", with the cursor within the initial words).

The character style is not supposed to appear as the applied style in the Context Toolbar or other character style lists when it is automatically applied via Initial Words, Drop Caps, or Bullets and Numbering. You can still apply a character style the normal way, although it won't have any effect.

I'll go ahead and log the bug.

@Philosoraptor - Jeff H Please use the test document I shared as an example of how to accomplish what you want, but either:

• Use a variable font
• Or use a different font family for the paragraph style and the character style

Thanks

Bug report here: 

 

Edited September 13 by MikeTO
added bug report

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

Okay, some good stuff here. Looks like I'll have to redo the style almost from scratch (for one thing, I did indeed have X and Y reversed per my question 2). I'll pop back in if I have further questions. If it's been more than a few hours, no news is most likely good news (especially if I start handing out trophy icons but don't otherwise respond 🙂).

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

Thanks all (Mike particularly).

It took me way longer (like, by almost 24 hours) to get back to this than I hoped but I now have it working exactly the way I want. Basically I created a new character style for how I want the ability names to look, made about seven or eight changes to the paragraph style (including using that character style in the Initial Words tab), and it works actually slightly better than this thread led me to expect.

I say that because, after trying a few different typefaces and not liking any of them, I went back to using the same font family for the initial words and the "main" paragraph style - and it worked! I don't know why it wasn't changing at the end character before, but it is now. So I get to keep the original look I worked out in Indesign after all.

In case it helps anyone's diagnosis efforts, the biggest change I made outside of things directly mentioned in this thread is that I removed a "based on" entry from the paragraph style, opting instead to make it its own thing. This... bears a family resemblance to Mike's point about not using "no change" so it might be relevant.

Something else I notice in the screenshot below is that the style used for some of the stat block entries (Duration, etc) shouldn't be working, but somehow (mostly) is... guess that's the next one I need to work on!