Problems with chapters and books

[Dennis Merritt]

I use Scrivener to create books, and it does a reasonable job of also exporting print-ready PDFs fit to upload to Amazon KDP. I decided I wanted a little more class and am now trying to use Affinity Publisher to layout my book for uploading to Amazon. I think that's a reasonable market for Affinity. But, I've found that Affinity is very fiddly, and is missing some key features. Like the main style "body" should have an option to not indent the first paragraph after a heading or whatever. Instead I need two different formats and have to go in by hand to change the style of the first paragraphs. (I'm copying and pasting my text from Scrivener into chapters for Publisher.) Two is I found it very difficult to get page numbers and styles and master pages and all that working right. There are many many ways to set the options so that one gets the wrong results. I've generated dozens of incorrect PDF files. Gaps in page numbers, no padding to move to facing pages, etc. etc. And there is lots of wrong advice on the Web, like setting the paragraph style to start on odd numbers gave strange results, and syncing the chapters generated extra master pages which somehow then were added to the document, and then... After spending a day just trying to get a simple three chapter book working right I decided the best way was for me to make sure each chapter had an even number of pages. And then, no padding or merging and it seems to work OK. Anyway, it shouldn't be this hard to make a book for Amazon... But other than all that, I'm pleased with all the product and feel it is worth investing the time to learn it.

[Alfred]

I presume a moderator will move this thread to the Feedback section of the forums. ‘V2 Bugs found on macOS’ is for reporting reproducible bugs so that they can be logged with the developers for investigation.

[walt.farrell]

Some of it sounds more appropriate for the Questions forum, rather than Feedback, @Alfred. But I'm not sure that any of it is appropriate for Bugs.

[Mui]

Like others have said, this sounds more like a Questions post than a Bugs one, but there are a few things here I thought I could address:
 

21 hours ago, Dennis Merritt said:

Like the main style "body" should have an option to not indent the first paragraph after a heading or whatever.

It does. When you import your contents over from Scrivener (or copy-paste them), Publisher will automatically create paragraph and character styles based on the existing styling for the imported text. You can modify these styles to fit your needs.

For example, to have the first paragraph after a heading be without an indent, I'd recommend you create a "First Paragraph" paragraph style based on your "Body" paragraph style, and only change the indent in the styling options for that new style. This means the "First Paragraph" style will inherit all the properties of your "Body" style, except for the indent. You can then apply this new "First Paragraph" style to all relevant paragraphs.

 

21 hours ago, Dennis Merritt said:

I've generated dozens of incorrect PDF files. Gaps in page numbers, no padding to move to facing pages, etc. etc. And there is lots of wrong advice on the Web, like setting the paragraph style to start on odd numbers gave strange results, and syncing the chapters generated extra master pages which somehow then were added to the document, and then...

Based on this, it seems to me like you're structuring your book inside Publisher as a Book document (.afbook) which is made up of multiple .afpub documents corresponding to each chapter. If that's the case, then assuming you're set up your master page correctly, you can very easily correct the page number gaps from within the Book panel. Select the chapter which is not following the correct numbering (it should be highlighted in blue in the Book panel), and click on the hamburger menu at the top right of the Book panel, then select Page Number Options. Choose "Continue from Previous Chapter" in the popup window, then return to the hamburger menu and choose Update Numbers > Page numbers. You can repeat this operation for each of the following chapters.

The extra master pages issue seems to be either a bug, or a badly-designed feature. The workaround I've found is to deselect "Master Pages" from the Synchronize options before I synchronize my chapters, which will not update the master pages across your chapters at all. You can also manually go into each chapter and delete the irrelevant master page copies after you've synchronized your chapters. However, I do think that if you've set up your base document well from the start, you won't have to synchronize often and you're unlikely to run into this issue much.



Hope this helps! Publisher is a tool mainly aimed at designers, so there is a bit of a learning curve associated with it. I really don't think it's lacking features, but it pays to learn to leverage all of those features before you jump into typesetting your book.

Edited May 4 by Mui
Rewording

[Dennis Merritt]

Thanks for the help! and sorry for the wrong section posting, and I've used the help and will now post, what I actually accomplished with notes on how it was done. Thanks again, --Dennis

[Dennis Merritt]

I'll put my Story Framework document up here as well. It's got a chapter in it talking about how to create such a book.

STM 1.pdf