Ability to combine multiple text frames.

[Guest]

Finding I occasionally run into situations where upon importing or copy/pasting some artwork from another app (Comic Life, OmniGraffle, Illustrator, Preview/PDF, etc) I run into situations where what was once a continuous flow of text has been broken down into individual text frames. Sometimes this division is based on single lines, other times individual characters. Having the ability to select all of the related text frames and combine them into a new text frame would be really helpful. Of course determining what order the frames go in is a little complicated, I wonder if a 'best guess' based on the reading order of the document (ie: top down, left to right for western languages) would give a 'good enough' result in most circumstances with the ability to quickly copy/paste move text around in the combined frame after allowing users to fix any errors that may have crept in.

[Petar Petrenko]

This feature will be introduced in Affinity Publisher.

[Jan Gaare]

wtf have i bought designer to design my books, and to now know that there is a publisher.... ???? this sucks

[Pšenda]

On 13. 2. 2018 at 2:52 AM, Jan Gaare said:

wtf have i bought designer to design my books, and to now know that there is a publisher.... ???? this sucks

 

That's why a trial version is available to test product before you buy it.

[Julio Alejandro]

On 1/23/2018 at 5:50 AM, Petar Petrenko said:

This feature will be introduced in Affinity Publisher.

Hello

Can I do it in publisher? how?

[konstantnnn]

On 7/30/2020 at 9:09 PM, Julio Alejandro said:

Hello

Can I do it in publisher? how?

serif.com

[Alfred]

 

On 7/30/2020 at 8:09 PM, Julio Alejandro said:

Hello

Can I do it in publisher? how?

 

16 minutes ago, konstantnnn said:

serif.com

Try affinity.help instead!

Affinity Publisher Help: Linking text frames

[Joachim_L]

I think this is not about linking text frames, but combining/grouping like the option (group lines of text into text frames) while opening PDF in APu.

[Julio Alejandro]

7 hours ago, konstantnnn said:

serif.com

??

[Julio Alejandro]

6 hours ago, Alfred said:

this is not what I need. wat I need is to merge separate text frames into a single text frame. linking text frames is the complete opposite, since it is braking a single string of text into multiple frames connected.

 

Try affinity.help instead!

Affinity Publisher Help: Linking text frames

 

[Lauren67]

What they said 👆  Can we merge text frames now? (not 'link', but 'merge')  Thank you.

[Silmaril]

I have the question, how to merge text frames, not linking. Help does not help.

[jimdoria]

Since this seems to be the most recent open thread for this question according to Google, I am wondering as well.

When I paste text frames with multiple lines from Inkscape into Affinity Designer, they come in as individual lines of text, each on it's own text layer.

What I want (and I think what others are asking about as well) is to put these individual text blocks back together into a single block of editable text.

If there were a "merge layers" option on text layers, that would do it. But there isn't

A "combine text blocks" command would work too. Or even "create new text layer from selected"

I get that determining the order in which to combine these could be an issue. If they are all stacked up nicely like they are when they get pasted in from Inkscape, it should be pretty straightforward, but if they are scattered around the page it could be more ambiguous.

Still, I'd prefer to have a single editable text block with all the text in it, even with the words out of order, than to have to manually copy / paste many individual lines of text into a new block. Especially since it'd be fairly easy to undo the combine operation, quickly re-arrange the text layers' positions to get the order right, then re-combine.

I know you can link text frames in Publisher, but this is not linking, it is combining many into one. And anyway, that's Publisher and I'm asking about Designer.

Thanks!

[Petar Petrenko]

13 minutes ago, jimdoria said:

A "combine text blocks" command would work too.

Yes, Xara has this option when importing PDF. You can select multiple text blocks and merge them. Selecting order is important, too.

[Danold]

On 7/26/2021 at 1:57 AM, jimdoria said:

Since this seems to be the most recent open thread for this question according to Google, I am wondering as well.

When I paste text frames with multiple lines from Inkscape into Affinity Designer, they come in as individual lines of text, each on it's own text layer.

What I want (and I think what others are asking about as well) is to put these individual text blocks back together into a single block of editable text.

If there were a "merge layers" option on text layers, that would do it. But there isn't

A "combine text blocks" command would work too. Or even "create new text layer from selected"

I get that determining the order in which to combine these could be an issue. If they are all stacked up nicely like they are when they get pasted in from Inkscape, it should be pretty straightforward, but if they are scattered around the page it could be more ambiguous.

Still, I'd prefer to have a single editable text block with all the text in it, even with the words out of order, than to have to manually copy / paste many individual lines of text into a new block. Especially since it'd be fairly easy to undo the combine operation, quickly re-arrange the text layers' positions to get the order right, then re-combine.

I know you can link text frames in Publisher, but this is not linking, it is combining many into one. And anyway, that's Publisher and I'm asking about Designer.

Thanks!

Well said and I can plus 1 this comment. Any news if there might be a solution or update coming?

[JeffreyK]

I have to agree that this would be helpful for compatibility. I think that some software thinks (in the clipboard) in SVG, which for some very strange reason doesn't support paragraph text (as if this is a some fancy new concept). Ah well, could we get the combine text fields (paragraph and artistic) into a text field and break lines into separate lines, as feature requests? The break apart is nice if you grab a list of items and after you paste them in, break apart and place each one in it's own space. There are work-around's so these would be work-a-bit-faster features.

[MikeTO]

I can see why you'd want this, we've all had to deal with PDFs that would import like this, but it's a messy feature because the results won't be perfect.

To me, this would be an ideal scenario for a free script. Select all the text frames you want to combine and the script would do it the best it could. It wouldn't be perfect but at least then all the text would be in a single frame which you could reformat. Serif has stated they're working on scripting support so when that's released someday we can write a script to do this.

[Petar Petrenko]

On 7/25/2021 at 7:57 PM, jimdoria said:

When I paste text frames with multiple lines from Inkscape into Affinity Designer, they come in as individual lines of text, each on it's own text layer.

What I want (and I think what others are asking about as well) is to put these individual text blocks back together into a single block of editable text.

If there were a "merge layers" option on text layers, that would do it. But there isn't

As I can recall my memory, Xara offers an option to select text frames and merge it by keeping the order of selection.

[CarrotNL]

This wood indeed be very helpfull

 

[CarrotNL]

On 1/23/2018 at 11:50 AM, NNN said:

This feature will be introduced in Affinity Publisher.

Can you elaborate on that, please?

[lockjaf1]

I have got Publisher 2 as a replacement for Page Plus which I have used for many years. I was dismayed to find there is no file conversion facility.  I followed instructions to convert my docs into PDFs but when I open them in Publisher each line of text is in a separate frame. It seems that there is no way to merge frames into one with continuous text. Please advise if there is a way to do this that I have missed.  If there isn't then the failure of the designers to care for past Serif users and help them to transition is a ridiculous error!!

Edited November 24, 2022 by lockjaf1
mis-spelling

[Leo1]

I spent a lot of time searching for a merge function for frame text. I cannot find it to my surprise (even notepad on windows can do it). For instance I have a lot of trouble with importing pdf's because of this. 

If such a feature does not exist, it would be elegant if one of the moderators could confirm that. Saves a lot of frustration and I can stop searching.

I love affinity, but sometimes ...

[walt.farrell]

45 minutes ago, Leo1 said:

. I cannot find it to my surprise (even notepad on windows can do it)

Notepad doesn't have anything like frame text, so I'm not sure what you mean, there. 

[Leo1]

Walt, thanks for your reply, always helping, much appreciated! Explanation on point 4.

Wauw, wauw, wauw issue solved. If I am not mistaken, pdf import (2.03 see 1.) solved the not grouped lines of text issue (2.03 see 2; solution see 3), cut and past of ungrouped text via clipboard is now also solved (2.03) and a blocking issue for not installing the 2.03 upgrade (has been solved in 2.04). Thanks affinity team, I am impressed and very much helped.

If I saw it wrong, then mea culpa. Background info:

1. ?New? tick boxes

2. Not gouped text from 2.0:

3. Grouped text from 2.04

4. Explanation for Walt

If you have not grouped text like in point two, it can be solved via copy and past in Notepad: select and copy the ungrouped lines and past them in notepad. This morning I tested this with affinity and it worked. Maybe I did something wrong, but the issue is solved. Thanks for asking.

[Petar Petrenko]

1 hour ago, Leo1 said:

it can be solved via copy and past in Notepad:

This way you can lost all local formating (bold, italic...).