Importing Text from PDF to Affinity Publisher into Text Frame, not Artistic Text

[Jangchup]

Every time I try to import text into a quite long document, it overrides my selection of text frame and creates the text as artistic text, a tool I dislike for books and academic type publications.  I have tried several different way, such as migrating the text into a word document and removing all formatting, using an html format (which works for online migration of text but not when the original source was a pdf), but the long and short is that this has consistently failed. 

[MikeTO]

Hi @Jangchup and welcome to the forums. I'm not seeing that regardless of whether I place a docx file or copy and paste from a website such as this or another source.

What operating system are you using and what is the source format?

Why not create a text frame before importing? If you're importing into a long document, you would likely want to create text frames on the master page and thus would normally be importing or pasting into one of those frames.

Good luck

[Jangchup]

Thank you, Mike.

I am using a PC, laptop.  I created the original document in Adobe InDesign and exported as a pdf to post on an academic site I host.  I could easily import the pdf into Affinity Publisher but all the text ended up as artistic text.  I tried deleting the the entire artistic text frame, creating a real text frame, copying and pasting in 3-4 different ways:  from the original pdf, from a doc version of the original pdf, from an notepad version, and from an html version.  In all cases, I removed the original formatting.  When copying the text using any of these methods and putting the text into a new text frame, it defaults to artistic text.

As a comparison, I created an Affinity Pub document from an essay I posted online and put the html text into a new text frame and this worked perfectly.  I even tried adding new clean pages to the latest effort but no matter what I do, the text insists on being artistic which I truly do not like for these types of projects.

 

 

[MikeTO]

28 minutes ago, Jangchup said:

I am using a PC, laptop.  I created the original document in Adobe InDesign and exported as a pdf to post on an academic site I host.  I could easily import the pdf into Affinity Publisher but all the text ended up as artistic text.  I tried deleting the the entire artistic text frame, creating a real text frame, copying and pasting in 3-4 different ways:  from the original pdf, from a doc version of the original pdf, from an notepad version, and from an html version.  In all cases, I removed the original formatting.  When copying the text using any of these methods and putting the text into a new text frame, it defaults to artistic text.

As a comparison, I created an Affinity Pub document from an essay I posted online and put the html text into a new text frame and this worked perfectly.  I even tried adding new clean pages to the latest effort but no matter what I do, the text insists on being artistic which I truly do not like for these types of projects.

The best way to convert your InDesign document to Publisher is to export it to IDML format from InDesign and open that document in Publisher. That will retain the text styles and much more.

Failing that, the best way to open the PDF in Publisher is to ensure you select "Favour editable text over fidelity" and "Group lines of text into text frames". The latter option should solve the problem you are experiencing and group each line of text into one big text frame.

Good luck

[Jangchup]

Thank you, Mike.  The files are on a computer that crashed.  I only have access at this time to the pdf.  

Where is the option you suggested?  I see group, but it alone did not change anything.  Where the other option?  I appreciate your effort to help.

[MikeTO]

The two options are shown in this window when you open a PDF file:

[Jangchup]

Mike, thank you so much.  I got it now.  You are a gem and I am truly grateful.