Unexpected default text style in new table

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

Tables in Affinity Publisher remain one big bug that finds new ways of making me tear my hair out on a regular basis. I've found two new issues with them tonight alone, one of which I'll detail here. (The other one, I'm going to try hacking away at a little more on my own first, and if necessary give it its own thread here.)

I am creating a new table from scratch and it insists on defaulting to having everything in italics and a specific character style, one that I use a lot but never chose on anything connected to this table. I did not choose these settings, don't want them, and have tried a few obvious ways of telling Publisher this, such as selecting the table or a given column or row and choosing the settings I do want. But every time I type in a previously blank cell, it always always always uses very specific settings I did not choose.

The only way I've found to get it to not use these settings is to type text in and then select that text, or a series of cells that includes it, and manually choose the styles (or relative lack thereof) that I actually want. If I do this to blank cells, Affinity ignores it; there needs to be text there already. And then if I erase that text and type in something new, it reverts back to the unwanted styles and I have to fix it manually again.

What could have caused this, and where are these style settings stored so I can fix it once? I'm particularly baffled because this seems to be a new problem - this worked as expected on all the many tables I've worked with before, even ones that had numerous other bugs. Previously, selecting an empty cell then a text style has resulted in any text I type in being in that style, like you'd expect. That no longer seems to work.

[MikeTO]

This issue is not specific to tables. Affinity uses the document's current defaults when creating new text objects, including tables. For example, try this:

1. Create a new document
2. Create a text frame
3. Choose Italics and type a word
4. Draw a table and type in any cell - it will be italic
5. Select the table with the Move tool
6. Turn off Italics
7. Now when you type into an empty cell it will not be italic

The same is true for character styles but remember that to change it for all cells you should do this with the Move tool.

Text frames, shapes converted to frames, and tables share the same defaults. Art text and path text have a separate set of defaults so choosing Italics in a text frame or table and then creating an art text object will not type in italics. I think this division between types of text objects adds to the confusion because unless you take the time to learn this important difference, you'd think it's somewhat random.