Navigate to Headings Within Affinity Publisher Text Frame?

[DesignDex]

I have a large one-page document containing a single text frame which holds all my text and inline elements to basically mimic a OneNote or pageless Google Doc document.

Is there a way to quickly navigate to different headings within that text frame?

 

I tried using text anchors and the Anchors studio, which would have been perfect, except that clicking an anchor causes the document to zoom out, making it difficult to locate the anchored heading. As well, the anchors are not listed in the order they appear in the text, which makes navigation confusing. Please see the below video demonstrating this if needed.

https://youtu.be/cLf3jBRkOkM

 

These are other navigation methods I know of, but they also have drawbacks:

• Navigator views can be saved for each heading, but when adding more text later, the views won't shift with the rest of the text.
• Preflight comments can't be used for text within text frames, unless I'm mistaken.
• Hyperlinks only work for exported PDFs.
• Using multiple pages with the Pages studio requires tweaking related information and annotations to fit on the same page. And since I don't intend to ever print my document, I would like to avoid this extra work. 
• Using Find and Replace requires knowing the heading names in advance, which is not ideal when collaborating with others.

 

Thank you for any other suggestions you have for navigating text! 

[MikeTO]

No, but you can use Find and Replace. Instead of searching for specific text leave the Find field blank and search for the paragraph style. Click the Gear and select the paragraph style from the popup menu.

[DesignDex]

Thank you! That worked great on Desktop. On my iPad, replace formatting appears to be bugged, unless there's something I'm missing. (EDIT: it does work, but it only has advance forward and backward buttons instead of having a list of headings to choose from.) 

I got another navigation workaround for anyone who's interested:

If you pin invisible objects to the headings, you can then use preflight comments to navigate to them without zooming out. Works for both Desktop and iPad. Though the downsides are that you cannot create new comments on iPad, and you'll likely want to disable all other types of warnings that can appear in the preflight studio. 

[thomaso]

On 3/12/2025 at 10:13 PM, DDesignDude said:

Is there a way to quickly navigate to different headings within that text frame?

I tried using text anchors and the Anchors studio, which would have been perfect, except that clicking an anchor causes the document to zoom out, making it difficult to locate the anchored heading.

If you want to work with anchors you could use a workaround to avoid zooming: Affinity zooms to the text frame size, not the page size. Therefore you could reduce the text frame height and place multiple copies seamlessly and linked across the text flow. Then focusing on / jumping to a specific anchor in the Anchors Panel won't cause this unwanted zoom out.

[DesignDex]

Thank you for the suggestion @thomaso and for sharing that video!

I was getting different results because my canvas area was an artboard instead of a spread. After converting it, the zooming behaviour went away. And I did not need to add extra text frames. The below video demonstrates this. 

Affinity Publisher on Desktop Findings

• The go to anchor button zooms in/out for the artboard, but doesn't zoom after being converted into a spread.

Unfotunatley, this doesn't function the same way on iOS. The navigation still zooms in/out to the middle of the spread or artboard instead of scrolling to the anchored heading. Using multiple smaller text frames did not seem to make a difference.

Affinity Publisher on iPad Findings

• Go to anchor button zooms in/out to center of page regardless of whether it's an artboard or spread.
• Seems to ignore separate text frames and again zooms in/out to the center of the artboard/spread instead.  

 

I work with others who occasionally use Affinity Publisher on iPad, so I'm trying my best to find a quick navigation method that will work for all of us.

If I cannot get anchors to work as desired on iOS, I believe using preflight comments on invisible pinned objects will be my best option.

[thomaso]

9 hours ago, DDesignDude said:

I was getting different results because my canvas area was an artboard instead of a spread. After converting it, the zooming behaviour went away. And I did not need to add extra text frames. The below video demonstrates this. 

Thanks, it's good to know. – In my example I used APub only (i.e. page, not artboard), apparently there is a different auto-scaling behaviour between V1 and V2 when an anchor gets focused. In my test APub auto-scaled to the frame size, which made me try the workaround with multiple but linked text frames.

[Oufti]

@DDesignDude I don't have yet an idea how (or if) you could use it, and I've to go out now, but for myself, I use TOC to navigate through long documents. 

On the Master page, I place outside of the page a temporary text frame (with solid background so it's well visible) and I insert a general TOC inside, so I can use the hyperlinks with a right-click on any line of the TOC

[DesignDex]

Great idea, I didn't know about the right click to navigate feature.  I'll add it to my list of options.

And in case it helps someone out later, below is a table on all the methods I've tested out so far.