Quickly Place Multi-page PDF

[Goran62]

Pdf's are the essential corner stone of our workflow. We can't recreate all ads we recieve for publications or retype certain articles with complicated graphics, formulas etc. so we have to deal with them as good or bad they are.

[Old Bruce]

11 hours ago, Goran62 said:

Pdf's are the essential corner stone of our workflow. 

They may well be. But they shouldn't be. Too many things go wrong too often. Try and educate your clients, text over PDF, TIFF over PDF etc. It will take time but think of the savings in your time if just one client gets it.

[Goran62]

Frankly, I don't know what are you talking about. We are doing fine with pdf's in our workflow and I am sorry, they are not working for you.

[fde101]

PDFs are perfectly fine if you are using them as an image format that you are placing in order to replicate the content exactly as provided.

If there is any possibility that you will need to change anything about them (modify the text within them, etc.), then they are a very poor choice.

[Goran62]

I am working with pdf's for 30 years, so ...  . Topic of this post is not if pdf's are any good or not, but how to place them quickly if one has to.

[Catshill]

On 3/12/2022 at 7:07 PM, Old Bruce said:

They may well be. But they shouldn't be. Too many things go wrong too often. Try and educate your clients, text over PDF, TIFF over PDF etc. It will take time but think of the savings in your time if just one client gets it.

I don’t think it is as simple as that. The issues you may be having when a client sends you a pdf are likely to be yours rather than theirs. There are lots of good reasons why a pdf rather than a bitmap would be a better option. It depends on the context.

[Krzysztof Petrus]

+1 to this feature.

what architects often do is they place big pdf's, which were created in external software like revit, archicad, autocad etc.; large in terms of file size and format. these drawings are accompanied by photos, renderings, text, vectors and so forth.

then, they create layouts for architectural competitions or building permit applications.   

not only I can't have more than 2 pages in one spread, but handling of such files is poor (not to mention awkward method of placing multi page pdf's).

I dont't care about good display quality if publisher becomes unstable. I know how placed images look (possibility to change display quality would do me perfectly).

if you could impove this, that would be much appreciated. indesign is far better for this kind of job so far. I hope this will change, as I love affinity programs

[k_au]

I've also had to add a multi-page PDF into an existing project. In my case it was only 10 pages, so manually selecting the page was still not too horrible. But I still was looking for something faster and found the "add pages from file" command. The interpretation of the PDF pages may be extremely useful sometimes, but in my case, it produced some visible differences in the formatting. So I can't do that, and have to use the manual place -> change spread routine for now.

Please add something like a "passthrough" option to the "add pages from file" command, or make it possible to place multiple pages from a PDF at once automatically like @okhick is asking for in the original post.

Thanks!

[thomaso]

+1

plus additional options for a click-place position: its upper left corner instead of its centre:

 

[GeirSol]

+1 for me on this feature.

"Add pages from file" seem like an ok workaround though.
But with 50 files and total of 400-500pages, it'd hope for a better solution (music scores here as well)

On 3/11/2022 at 4:52 PM, Old Bruce said:

Well to be honest I do try to discourage people from using PDFs as anything other than an end product, PDFs are not an interchange format. If at all possible deal with Text files not PDFs. Fewer problems and far more control results in a better product.

So, if I have the option to have my source-files as images, you recommend that?

[Old Bruce]

5 minutes ago, GeirSol said:

But with 50 files and total of 400-500pages, it'd hope for a better solution (music scores here as well)

<rhetoric on>

Why has there not been any improvement in Music Score's transferability in the decades since MIDI was created?

<rhetoric off>

8 minutes ago, GeirSol said:

So, if I have the option to have my source-files as images, you recommend that?

Honestly if I had to do this I would output the scores as 1200 DPI greyscale TIFFs. Then I would most likely use the Art Text tool to cover over the "text" in the scores if it bothered me. No client, I would be honest and upfront about why I won't do it. Music scores are tough.

[MikeW]

@Old Bruce, in other software, I use the requested functionality several times a year. 

And even if MS et al produced images of that resolution as grayscale, Affinity applications would convert them to rgb as well as being problematic to place 50 or hundreds of those images. 

If one doesn't see the point of a request, why argue with posters that would use such functionality?

[ashf]

This is useful feature for people who use a language that Affinity doesn't support properly - such as RTL or East Asian.
They can place text as PDF created in an app that support those languages properly.

[Peter M Dodge]

I would not find rasterising the file to be the solution here.  First of all, any pantone spot colours will be lost when they are rasterized.  Secondly, converting from vector text and images, to raster text and images, removes any ability to losslessly resize the document to a larger size.

I wouldnt call the current method particularly egregious, but I will say its frustrating to have Illustrator do this so effortlessly when Affinity makes it trouble some in a pain.  In Illustrator, a certain key combination when placing them will fill the document with placed pages of the source PDF, and create additional pages where neccesary.  Meanwhile as it presently is in Affinity, I must copy the paste frame and manually change the page number - unless there was something I missed?

[Fenyman]

So, is it still not possible to place multiple pages of a PDF at once without Affinity (V2) trying to interpret? 

I don't really understand why "passthrough" would not be an option with "open" or "add from file", since it is already implemented via "place".

Sadly V2 won't have any good use for me, since this is a normal part of my workflow that would now cost hours of my time just clicking through the pages for each place. 

[Murfee]

19 minutes ago, Fenyman said:

Sadly V2 won't have any good use for me, since this is a normal part of my workflow that would now cost hours of my time just clicking through the pages for each place

Hi Fenyman, have you seen this tutorial ? Placing multipage PDFs starts at about 03:10

 

[Fenyman]

1 hour ago, Murfee said:

Hi Fenyman, have you seen this tutorial ? Placing multipage PDFs starts at about 03:10

 

Ha, so it was me being dumb! That did the trick, thanks for the help! 

Do you happen to know if it is possible to place the content always below the Master templates (when looking at the layer panel)?

[Murfee]

6 minutes ago, Fenyman said:

Ha, so it was me being dumb! That did the trick, thanks for the help! 

Do you happen to know if it is possible to place the content always below the Master templates (when looking at the layer panel)?

Glad it helped 

Not sure what you mean by placing content below master pages, maybe drag the content layer below the master layer. I don't know of any automatic way to do this. Maybe set up a file the way you want then export as a template to always use the same layout.

[Fenyman]

19 hours ago, Murfee said:

Glad it helped 

Not sure what you mean by placing content below master pages, maybe drag the content layer below the master layer. I don't know of any automatic way to do this. Maybe set up a file the way you want then export as a template to always use the same layout.

I was referring to layers inside a master page being always arranged on top. I now resolved this by creating a picture frame inside the master page, below other content of the master - that way the multi-page PDFs can placed inside the frame and are always below the content of the master page. 

By the way, since you seem to have experience - I created facing A4 pages and placed all multipage PDF files the way you recommended with the video. I need to delete single PDF pages throughout the whole document now. I select a single face (page) in the Page viewer but Publisher only seems to be able to delete 2 pages/faces, starting from my selected face. Is this normal / is there a workaround?

[Murfee]

2 hours ago, Fenyman said:

By the way, since you seem to have experience - I created facing A4 pages and placed all multipage PDF files the way you recommended with the video. I need to delete single PDF pages throughout the whole document now. I select a single face (page) in the Page viewer but Publisher only seems to be able to delete 2 pages/faces, starting from my selected face. Is this normal / is there a workaround?

You can delete single pages, make sure that you just have the page you want to delete selected, right click and delete that page. Your layout will move and take on the the properties of the original master page, in the sample below I deleted page 2, page 3 then became page 2 and took on the properties from the master page. The content from the page itself (the shape) remains as it was

As far as I know you can't delete a single page from the master page itself.

           

If this doesn't suit your needs then maybe Smart Master Pages will help, you can add master pages to master pages, have a look at the tutorial in the Advanced section