Is it possible to merge different text frames in a single text frame?

[lalod]

Can I do it in either Designer or Publisher? The 1st image is the before and the 2nd one would the after.

Ps. I exported an SVG from Figma and when I open it with Designer, the paragraph structure is not saved, each line break is interpreted as a single art text.

[MikeTO]

With a PDF, there's an option to group lines of text into a text frame which would do exactly what you want but not for SVG. If you export from Figma as PDF you'll have better results opening it in Affinity.

[lalod]

2 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

With a PDF, there's an option to group lines of text into a text frame which would do exactly what you want but not for SVG. If you export from Figma as PDF you'll have better results opening it in Affinity.

When I export a PDF from Figma, when I open it in Designer the editable texts look very strange and the ones that look good are curves. Each text frame has a negative tracking which is what makes it look clumped. By setting it to 0 I realize that the text content is very different from the original as the order of the letters is changed.

[MikeTO]

I can see why you chose SVG instead! Hopefully you can clean this up by scaling the text frames or re-applying a paragraph style. If you could share a small test PDF some of us could take a look at this.

Cheers

[lalod]

On 11/25/2024 at 11:04 AM, MikeTO said:

I can see why you chose SVG instead! Hopefully you can clean this up by scaling the text frames or re-applying a paragraph style. If you could share a small test PDF some of us could take a look at this.

Cheers

Of course, sorry for my delay, this is a PDF exported from Figma.

Diapositiva 68.pdf

[MikeTO]

Wow, Affinity can't deal with these PDFs very well. I also don't like that Figma exports text as both text and paths at the same time, but that's not important.

There's no way to solve this for now - you'll have to select the affected text objects, set tracking to 0 (it's +/-500), add spaces between words, and then delete the paths below. I'm not sure if that's easier or harder than dealing with the SVG.

It appears the issue with Figma's bad PDFs has come up once before. The issue is probably on Figma's side but it would be nice if Affinity could deal with these.

 

[David in Яuislip]

Attempting to fix this in PublisherV1 failed. The image below shows the top left mess, 'ciónaeditcrfíosenlaaaoydestcImpa' has the same letters as 'Impacto y desafíos en la acreditación' but not in the same order and without spaces

It took 5 minutes with Inkscape to delete the words as paths (curves) then the text colour over the black buttons was set to white as it's black so doesn't show
Tedious but doable, I can't see how to automate it

Diapositiva68Ink.pdf

[pbasdf]

In the case of your SVG import, you can merge the text into a single frame (in Publisher) by linking the frames, as follows:

1. Select the (art) text frames that you want to merge.

2. Right click and select "Convert to text frames".

3. Starting with the first frame in the sequence, click on the text-flow triangle on the right hand side of the frame.

4. Click on the next frame in the sequence. There is no apparent change, but the text is now in a single "story", flowing from the first frame to the second.

5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 to join frames 2 and 3, then 3 and 4, etc.

6. The text is now all one story, flowing from each frame to the next.

7. Delete all but the first frame. The text in the story will be intact, in the first frame, but it will overflow.

8. Resize the first frame to accommodate all the text.

9. Adjust leading or before/after spacing to get the lines in the right places.

If you've got a lot of these to do, it might become quite tedious (or you might get into a rhythm...)