Text scaling from one frame to another

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

I continue to have text scaling issues similar (but not identical) to those reported here and ostensibly fixed in 2.6. If anything, it seems to be getting worse, not better.

This is extremely frustrating. Every effort to fix it seems to instead make it worse and I'm at my wit's end.

Latest example:

Note the tiny text at the top of the lower left text frame. In this case, it's part of the same paragraph as the last three lines of the upper right frame. Notice also that there's plenty of room for that text (even at normal size, let alone its current size!) in the upper right text frame, but it's not flowing there as expected. (EDIT: For a while I thought the gap at the bottom of the upper left was the same problem, but it turned out to be an unrelated flow options issue.) Why not?

That's why. At the size Publisher seems to think that text should be in that frame, there isn't room! An answer that only raises more questions...

This is the result of selecting the top line of the tiny text in the previous screenshot, and using the "Reapply Text Styles" button, which is both the best and the worst feature of Affinity Publisher when I'm having this issue. At best, it's the quickest, easiest way to fix this problem. Note that even here, it partially did so - if you look in the lower left, most of the formerly-tiny text is now the right size. But obviously, the part that flowed into the upper right frame is not - you can see on the right side that it's 41.7 points, over 4 times the correct size.

At its worst, it creates seemingly random new problems, like introducing scaling to frames that previously had none, screwing up the numbering in numbered lists, or adding insets I don't want to frames that previously had none. I don't have screenshots of these issues, though.

(Another detail you can see here is the hollow blue circle just below and to the right of the upper right frame. That's a control for scaling the frame. If it's hollow like that, supposedly no scaling has been applied and it's still on defaults, while if it's solid, there frame is on something other than default scaling. Since learning of its existence in the thread linked above I have been religious about never touching this, except to double-click on any I discover that are solid, which resets them to default scaling. So no, that's not the problem.)

Let's try that "reapply text styles" button again, with the cursor where you can see it above:

I have redone the zoom level because otherwise it would look like I accidentally posted the same screenshot twice. We are right back where we were before, with the huge gap at the bottom of the upper right and the tiny text at the top of the lower left.

The other reason I redid the zoom is so that you can clearly see the scaling control for the lower left frame, and that it, too, is hollow indicating no unusual scaling should be present. In other words both frames involved should be scaled the same way, namely to the default size. These screenshots don't prove it, but the same is true of the upper left one, and the frames on previous pages that are "connected" to these ones via text flow arrows. (The one in the lower right, incidentally, is not in this category. There's no flow from the lower left to the lower right, nor should there be.)

Some other things I've tried to fix this, and I'm pretty sure this isn't a complete list:

• Deleting the frames, creating new frames that are not and have never been scaled, and flowing everything back into those. This did nothing. The problem persists.
• Cutting out the offending text, pasting it into Notepad, and pasting it back in. At first this seems to fix the problem, but as soon as that text has to flow into another frame, I'm right back where I started.
• It also doesn't make a difference if I manually apply the right formatting, use "Reapply text styles", or manually choose the correct paragraph style with an option like "Apply <style> to paragraphs and clear character styles", except that sometimes seemingly at random, the latter does nothing at all.

It's gotten to the point where almost every time I have to create a new frame, or sometimes just flow existing text a little differently, the scale in one frame or the other is way off. The typical pattern is the one seen here - text that is a normal size such as 10 points becomes huge (40+ points) if it has to flow into a previous frame, or tiny (3 points or less) if it has to flow into the next one. This is true with both newly created and (at least some) pre-existing frames.

To put my question succinctly, what the hell?

Edited March 13 by Philosoraptor - Jeff H
Said "scaling" when I meant "zoom level" a couple times, which is confusing when discussing an issue that really IS to do with scaling.

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

Since posting the above, I've gone through the affected frames and hit "Revert defaults" on each, going back to the page before the first one shown here just for good measure. And after manually re-applying the correct text styles to nearly everything... I still have the problem 😔. When I get to the frames shown here, I still have the same scaling issue even after doing that. It didn't crop back up on any earlier frames, though, which it did in the course of my previous round of troubleshooting.

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

Okay, I have fixed this instance of the problem, but it remains a thorn in my side that recurs nearly every time the text flow in this project changes in any significant way. I would still appreciate any help toward a permanent, pre-emptive solution.

In case it helps someone else (be it someone else having the same problem, or someone working on a permanent solution), what I ended up doing was temporarily making the upper right frame in the above screenshots really huge, so that even with the scaling issue all the text could fit there, re-applying the text styles, and having a bit of luck in that once I could do that all at once rather than a bit at a time, I no longer needed the frame on the lower left to fit it all.

[MikeTO]

Hi Jeff. Check each of the frames. Is the outer bottom-right handle solid blue? If so, you resized the frame using this Content Scaling handle rather than the normal size handle which is the inner one. Double-click the Content Scaling handle to reset scaling to 100%. After you've checked and reset all text frames, you may need to reapply your paragraph styles or clear the font size overrides.

Cheers

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, MikeTO said:

Is the outer bottom-right handle solid blue?

Just so it is 100% clear, this handle is below & to the right of the usual 8 handles surrounding the text.

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

4 hours ago, MikeTO said:

Hi Jeff. Check each of the frames. Is the outer bottom-right handle solid blue? If so, you resized the frame using this Content Scaling handle rather than the normal size handle which is the inner one. Double-click the Content Scaling handle to reset scaling to 100%. After you've checked and reset all text frames, you may need to reapply your paragraph styles or clear the font size overrides.

Cheers

None of the potentially relevant handles are solid blue - all are hollow. You can see this in the second and third screenshots for the two most obviously relevant frames - and as I mention in the first post, this is also true for every other text frame connected to those (i.e. all other frames that it would be theoretically possible for this text to flow into if I added or deleted enough of it).

To quote myself (these are direct copy/pastes from the first post except for two typo corrections) so you can see it more clearly instead of having to dig it out of that huge post:

(After the second screenshot)

"(Another detail you can see here is the hollow blue circle just below and to the right of the upper right frame. That's a control for scaling the frame. If it's hollow like that, supposedly no scaling has been applied and it's still on defaults, while if it's solid, that frame is on something other than default scaling. Since learning of its existence in the thread linked above I have been religious about never touching this, except to double-click on any I discover that are solid, which resets them to default scaling. So no, that's not the problem.)"

(After the third screenshot)

"The other reason I redid the zoom level is so that you can clearly see the scaling control for the lower left frame, and that it, too, is hollow indicating no unusual scaling should be present. In other words both frames involved should be scaled the same way, namely to the default size. These screenshots don't prove it, but the same is true of the upper left one, and the frames on previous pages that are "connected" to these ones via text flow arrows. (The one in the lower right, incidentally, is not in this category. There's no flow from the lower left to the lower right, nor should there be.)"

[MikeTO]

Are you able to share a page or two of the document showing the problem?

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

5 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

Are you able to share a page or two of the document showing the problem?

Like, beyond the screenshots shown above? Extract the actual pages in Affinity Publisher format?

[MikeTO]

1 minute ago, Philosoraptor - Jeff H said:

Like, beyond the screenshots shown above? Extract the actual pages in Affinity Publisher format?

Yes please. If you're able to do that I'll take a look and see what I can figure out.

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

Here's the whole chapter. On closer examination I made more use of text flow arrows than I'd previously realized, but it doesn't make a difference to anything I said above. I checked all the main text frames (though not the sidebars because I don't see how they'd matter) and all scaling handles are hollow, not solid.

What I did here was create a new file and go Add Pages from File... and put the entire chapter in plus one extra page which is blank in my current working copy. I hope this was the correct procedure (the "export" option only seems to offer image formats) - if there's a better one, someone let me know!

Then I added a text frame to that blank page, linked it to the rest, and manually reduced the height of the text box on the second-last page (the page numbering says 39 but it's page 25 of this version), making sure NOT to use the scaling handle to do so. Sure enough, the text this forced to flow into the new frame is tiny.

As much as I've been a bit shy about sharing too much of this project in the past, anyone else who wants to take a shot at this, especially the devs, is more than welcome as well!

Book 1 Chapter 2 for Mike.afpub

[MikeTO]

Hi Jeff, this appears to be a bug with text frames that have content scaling applied which are children of Layers.

On the second-last page and most of the preceding pages, the text frame is a child of a Layer. On the last page, the text frame was not placed inside the Layer.

1. Click in the last text frame - the Content Scaling handle shows it has not been scaled
2. Using the Layers panel, drag the text frame layer inside Layer 1 - the Content Scaling handle shows it has been scaled
3. Double-click the Content Scaling handle - the text will now be the correct size
4. The text will now be overset (overflowing) - Shift + click the Text Flow Out control to AutoFlow the story - additional frames will be created on succeeding pages but they won't be inside a Layer (which is likely how you experienced this problem to start with)

This will need to be fixed but it should be easy to work around now that you know where the issue lies.

Good luck!

[MikeTO]

More details on this issue:

1. Create a new document
2. Create a Layer
3. Create a text frame in the Layer - content scaling will be normal
4. Using Document Setup, change the page size and in Scaling select Resize
5. Now text frames created inside the Layer will be scaled by default

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

So let's see if I'm following. At the simplest level, as long as I'm consistent about whether my text frames use that layer, I should be okay? Just avoid mixing pages that have it with pages that don't?

This may be a consequence of removing that layer from my most commonly used master page during a previous bit of troubleshooting you helped with 😄. I imagine that would leave any text frames that already used the layer that way while removing it for new pages added since then. Does that sound right?

 

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, Philosoraptor - Jeff H said:

So let's see if I'm following. At the simplest level, as long as I'm consistent about whether my text frames use that layer, I should be okay? Just avoid mixing pages that have it with pages that don't?

This may be a consequence of removing that layer from my most commonly used master page during a previous bit of troubleshooting you helped with 😄. I imagine that would leave any text frames that already used the layer that way while removing it for new pages added since then. Does that sound right?

 

If your book didn't have so many pages I'd suggest getting rid of those layers - you don't need them and they're the source of the issue. If you really wanted them and again the book was shorter, you could create a new layer on each page and drag the frames from the scaled layer to the unscaled layer.

However, the best long-term solution is to draw your text frames on the master page and not draw them on regular document pages. You wouldn't encounter this issue if your frames were in the master layer.

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

It's not *that* long, we're talking two books that were about 120 pages each (and that at digest-size, not the huge footprint that a lot of other RPGs use) as of the last complete draft, and the current project is a "demo version" that would be somewhat shorter. But even so, it's probably going to be easiest to handle the layer or (preferably, all else being equal) lack thereof on a chapter-by-chapter basis.