about placing text in publisher

[Swami B]

Good Morning.  I am new to affinity publisher. I was trying to place a microsoft word document into Publisher, but did not find .doc or .docx  in the list of applications. Any help will be very much appreciated.

[Hangman]

Hi @Sri Swamiji and welcome to the forums,

Selecting File > Place should allow you to select and place a .docx file from Explorer or the Finder (depending on whether you're on Windows or Mac) but .doc files don't appear to be supported...

[Komatös]

Hello @Sri Swamiji and welcome to the forums.

• Create a new document
• Create a text box with the text frame tool
• Go to the File menu bar and select Place... 
• Now select the Word document (.docx)

[Harrington]

Publisher 2.5.3  Designing book for client. Have followed tutes on YT, have followed advice here, no joy. Word document will not place legibly. Only propagates to 23 pages when the book is around 210 pp. Word file is docx, totally formatted, have deleted text styles in Pub, have triple-checked font loading to conform to Word doc, have created three different Pub docs with Master pages, etc, etc. Won't load on any of them. Word file is not locked, is not Read Only. Downloaded from client's Google Docs account with save as docx file.

On deadline, of course. Nice walk in the park has turned into Nightmare Alley race. Any advice?

[Twolane]

Are you auto-flowing the text?

https://affinity.help/publisher2/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=pages/Text/flowingText.html&title=Flowing text through frames

[Hangman]

Hi @Harrington,

Can you upload the .docx file so we can test to see what is going on…

[Harrington]

Twolane and Hangman:  Wow! Thanks for the quick responses! Here's the blankety-blank file. I've been working with Publisher since inception, but this is the first book I've done with it. Twoland: yes to the autoflow. shift-clicked the red triangle and text should be flowing like water.

Push comes to shove, can I copy/paste page to page? There are tables in the book. I now wonder if they're what's gumming up the works?

Women's Ways of Leading -- Manuscript.docx

[Old Bruce]

The problem is caused by a Table or two and the Pictures. Select them and delete them and I can get the text to flow.

I think the source of the problem is 

2 hours ago, Harrington said:

... Word file is docx, totally formatted, ...

Write the text in Word, format the book in Publisher. No photos, few if any tables would help too.

1 hour ago, Harrington said:

There are tables in the book. I now wonder if they're what's gumming up the works?

In my opinion yes.

[Harrington]

Thanks a bunch Old Bruce. I'm not the author of this book, and the Word file is their creation, so reformatting it will be a bear, but I think you're right. It's almost like creating a clean copy. I'll make copious notes of the text styles as they are in her Word file and replicate those in Publisher. Used to do this kind of thing in InDesign (Pagemaker before that!) and didn't seem to have these problems, but I never tried to preserve Word formatting before.

Really appreciate the expertise and assistance!

[Komatös]

@Harrington

Affinity Publisher does not like it when tables are split into two pages. A manual page break should always be inserted before the table. 

[Swami B]

Hi everyone!

It is the first group that I got involved into. Nice friendly people. The option for placing was not there. The extensions were allowed were .Tiff,  .text . .JPEG etc.  So, finally I Ctrla, Ctrlv.  as I did not have time to play around to see whether settings in both .Pub and word have to be enabled. The whole text, was small text running to 20 pages. But I had to adjust the paragraph by physically adding hyphens, as the words were all long words, some of them having 20 characters. InDesign has a feature Adobe world ready paragraph composer, which does quite a a bit of adjusting. Anyhow thanks a lot for all your inputs. I shall try other ways and shall post in case I am successful. Once again thanks a l.ot for the lovely people out there ready to help others.

[Hangman]

Hi @Swami B,

I'm not entirely sure what you were doing but the process should look like this...

The text styles used in your Word Document will be brought into Publisher when you place the Word file. You can edit these text styles in Publisher to change the hyphenation settings which would then automatically update your document without needing to do so manually...

[R C-R]

6 hours ago, Swami B said:

The option for placing was not there.

In the first reply above @Hangman suggested using the Place item on the File menu.  Are you saying that menu item is not there when you click on the File menu or something else?

[Swami B]

Thank you RC-R and Hangman. The document that I wanted to place was formatted in microsoft word. I created affinity document ready with the text box and all the other requirements in place. I now hit the menu 'place' and the dialogu box popped up saying what file extension needs to be placed. In the list of file extension neither doc or docx files showed up. Neither the indd extensions were available despite all effort. Next time I shall share the screen shots as it would be self revealing.

Once again thank both of you and the others whom I might have missed, for all the inputs.

[dominik]

1 hour ago, Swami B said:

I now hit the menu 'place' and the dialogu box popped up saying what file extension needs to be placed. In the list of file extension neither doc or docx files showed up.

Hello @Swami B,

make sure that you have a text frame selected before you envoke 'place file'.

d.

[Hangman]

6 hours ago, Swami B said:

Thank you RC-R and Hangman. The document that I wanted to place was formatted in microsoft word. I created affinity document ready with the text box and all the other requirements in place. I now hit the menu 'place' and the dialogu box popped up saying what file extension needs to be placed. In the list of file extension neither doc or docx files showed up. Neither the indd extensions were available despite all effort. Next time I shall share the screen shots as it would be self revealing.

Hi @Swami B,

Indeed, .docx doesn't appear in the list of file formats but if you select All Documents (*.afpub) from the bottom of the list that will allow you to see and select your .docx files from the relevant folder...

Note that .indd files are not supported but .idml files are listed under Document Files (*.pdf;*.idml;*.ai;*.psd;*.psd;*.svg;*eps;*.ps;*.fh11;*.fh10;*.dwg;*.dxf;*.dxb)

Admittedly, I think one of these two options should be updated to include .docx files, e.g., All Documents (*.afpub;*.docx)

[Swami B]

Hi, Hangman, I have not been successful in placing tghe file. The doc file much less any idml file shows up. So, instead of placing the text, I am copying  and pasting the text into Publisher.

I have another problem which is with the Sanskrit characters. I do not know whether I can insert a screenshot to explain myself. The fonts no doubt are Sanskrit fonts but they are not easy for grasping. In indesign they have a paragraph style  called adobe world ready paragraph composer. I do not know whether affinity has plans for incorporating that feature. 

 

thanking you for the help that you have rendered and also thanking you in advance for your help that will be coming!!

for affinity publisher2.docx

[Hangman]

Hi @Swami B,

The Paragraph Text Style should be imported into Publisher when you open the IDML file, can you check in the Text Styles Panel to see if it is and let us know...

[Swami B]

Dear Hangman,

I do appreciate your patience. I wanted to try your suggestions but got stuck up and struck at the very beginning itself

Thanking you,

Swamiji

for afinity Publisher placing options.docx for Infinity Publisher placing after clearing dial box.docx

[Hangman]

Hi @Swami B,

That's no problem at all, happy to help if I can...

Are your .docx file actually located on your Desktop in a folder called Affinity Pub files which is the location you are showing in your screengrab?

If not, then you need to navigate in Windows Explorer to the folder where the .docx files are located...

Then with All Documents (.afpub...) selected you should see and be able to select the .docx files using File > Place in Publisher...

[Swami B]

Dear Hangman,

As suggested by you, I placed the document in the affinity publisher files and was able to finish that task. The old question continues and I have another problem being raised. The adobe world paragraph that makes for good paragraph alignment. There is a problem with Glyphs and I am also providing screenshots of some document having sanskrit language fonts. You can see how when a converted document is pasted in word and the same word document when pasted in affinity. The characters are different, which when carefully observed would highlight the difference. What suggestion would you advance to set right the mistakes. . 

For affinity document pasted in affinity from word.docx for affinity screen shot from microsoft word.docx

[Hangman]

Hi @Swami B,

58 minutes ago, Swami B said:

There is a problem with Glyphs and I am also providing screenshots of some document having sanskrit language fonts. You can see how when a converted document is pasted in word and the same word document when pasted in affinity. The characters are different, which when carefully observed would highlight the difference. What suggestion would you advance to set right the mistakes. .

That is a question @kenmcd is probably better placed to answer... I'm slightly unsure how the Affinity apps handle the glyphs in Sanskrit language fonts... @kenmcd should be able to provide a much more meaningful answer than I can to your question... Hopefully, he will pick up this thread and post his thoughts on this for you...

[kenmcd]

2 hours ago, Swami B said:

The characters are different, which when carefully observed would highlight the difference. What suggestion would you advance to set right the mistakes. . 

Affinity applications do not currently support the Indic script/Devanagari.
It is not supported in the text shaping engine.
So certain OpenType features required to "shape" the text are not supported.
Which is why you see differences in the text.

There are many requests for this, but no timeline on possible support.

[Harrington]

Swami B!

If you would like to experiment a little, here is something to try in order to get the original sanskrit characters in your Publisher file. This may or may not work. If you can convert the sanskrit phrases/words that are showing up well in your other document into curves or artistic type (easily done in Designer or other graphics program), you can then place them in line with text type in Publisher files by copying the new formatted type from the graphics program and pasting it with your text cursor into the text line where you want it to be, just as though you were placing type into the line. It is not editable as type now, but you can control how well it fits with the rest of the text using baseline values. This will work for glyphs also. It will take some experimenting to adjust the new "type" to the size you want if it looks too large or too small initially. By pasting it with the text cursor, you have made it a "member" of that text line and it will stay with that line even if you add or subtract copy and move the line.

Hope this works for you!