Affinity Photo 2: Can Text from Text Objects Be Exported/Copied For Use Elsewhere?

[Ditto Bird]

Hi folks, Happy St Patrick's Day from a Canadian province where it is a stat holiday! 😀🍺

Is the subject possible?  Not a deal breaker for me if not, but I have a number (10) maps in Affinity Photo all with varying numbers of town/city names.  I'd love to be able to take those names and put them into a spreadsheet or database table.  The example in screenshot number 1 has 122.  I've tried highlighting the individual names in Layers and copying them, but that just pasts into MS Word as an image as per screenshot number 2.

Is there a way to accomplish this in Affinity Photo 2 or even Designer (which I don't use or have, but don't mind buying) or some other utility?  Again, not a deal breaker if it's not possible, it'll just be a pain in the bum if I have to do it "handraulically" 🙂

Thanks
--
Tim

Screenshot Number 1, below

Screenshot Number 2, below

 

[thomaso]

7 hours ago, Ditto Bird said:

I'd love to be able to take those names and put them into a spreadsheet or database table.  The example in screenshot number 1 has 122.  I've tried highlighting the individual names in Layers and copying them, but that just pasts into MS Word as an image as per screenshot number 2.

Actually, a special "Clipboard" setting in Affinity appears to indicate that text can be copied as plain text. While plain, unformatted text can't exist in Affinity documents (all text has to be formatted), this option seems to refer to a text conversion during the copy process. – However, I'm unable to copy plain text from Affinity. (Screenshot from APub V1)

A workaround would be to export as PDF -> then copy the text from the PDF -> paste into your text editor app.

Or, e.g. for multiple pages, open the exported PDF with a PDF viewer app that allows text export, such as Acrobat or the free 'Podofyllin.app' on Mac:

[David in Яuislip]

It can be done with Libre Office Calc
Export the Text Layers as an svg

Open in a text editor and copy to clipboard
In Libre Office Calc do Paste Special

You'll see:
?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?        
!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/1.1/DTD/svg11.dtd"        
svg width="100%" height="100%" viewBox="0 0 2147 1538" version="1.1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xml:space="preserve" xmlns:serif="http://www.serif.com/" style="fill-rule:evenodd;clip-rule:evenodd;stroke-linejoin:round;stroke-miterlimit:2;"        
g transform="matrix(0.980305,0.197488,-0.0998143,0.495465,-18.2941,-70.7299)"        
text x="1241.93px" y="1333.23px" style="font-family:'ArialMT', 'Arial', sans-serif;font-size:193.731px;fill:#09ae00;"    Zagreb    /text
/g        
g transform="matrix(-0.111714,-0.367156,0.956695,-0.291093,-3498.25,3016.75)"        
text x="819.371px" y="4574.29px" style="font-family:'ArialMT', 'Arial', sans-serif;font-size:255.137px;fill:#f0f;"    Peckham    /text
/g        
g transform="matrix(0.957723,-0.287692,0.287692,0.957723,-38.6032,-10.0271)"        
text x="611.272px" y="885.506px" style="font-family:'ArialMT', 'Arial', sans-serif;font-size:97.915px;fill:#00f;"    Ruislip    /text
/g        
text x="1314.7px" y="1377.59px" style="font-family:'ArialMT', 'Arial', sans-serif;font-size:97.915px;fill:#00f;"    Bilbao    /text
g transform="matrix(0.901421,0.432943,-0.432943,0.901421,-533.658,-547.54)"        
text x="2051.6px" y="-170.93px" style="font-family:'ArialMT', 'Arial', sans-serif;font-size:164.408px;fill:#ff683c;"    Toronto    /text
/g        
g transform="matrix(3.125,0,0,3.125,0,0)"        
g transform="matrix(-1.13364,-1.62159,0.819581,-0.572964,-169.035,866.043)"        
text x="94.747px" y="452.904px" style="font-family:'ArialMT', 'Arial', sans-serif;font-size:24px;fill:#09ae00;"    T    /text
/g        
g transform="matrix(-0.539486,-1.90359,0.962109,-0.272666,-286.273,698.432)"        
text x="81.156px" y="427.406px" style="font-family:'ArialMT', 'Arial', sans-serif;font-size:24px;fill:#09ae00;"    h    /text

Delete columns other than C and you'll get:
Zagreb

Peckham

Ruislip

Bilbao

Toronto

T

h

Remove duplicates and struggle with the text on path, transpose will help