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[Implemented] Publisher does not recognize WORD .docx files!


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  • 2 weeks later...

A I have understood, a docx is essentially a zipped package of XML files. It shouldn't be too hard to come up with a pretty convenient import tool for that. But I also understand that as long as you can copy-paste the text from the text processor of your choice, it's not the most urgent feature to build.

iMac 27" Retina 2017, 3,4 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB 2400 MHz DDR4, OS X Mojave | Long-time Adobe veteran (I still remember Aldus Pagemaker, HA!), making the big move after going freelance. Running Publisher Beta along with Designer and Photo desktop versions. Loving what you guys are doing.

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Until Affinity Publisher supports anchored / attached objects in flowing documents docx import is not going to be satisfactory to anyone with more than text in their files. There's an orderly way to develop Affinity Publisher and we are building from the ground up. All in good time.

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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I've had my say, here and elsewhere, about the bizarre lack of an internal wordprocessor, importing Word files etc. Currently, I'm trying to find ways of working with what we have.

So here's a for-instance. I have a 2000 word article that I need to include in my newsletter and a contributor supplies it, late as usual, in Word format. I'm a cheapskate who hates Gates and uses LibreOffice Writer. It's pretty good, so I can load up the Word file and save it as RTF. I check it for the idiot contributor's usual mistakes, mis-spellings and inaccuracies and use Publisher's Place function to put the text into my standard newsletter template. I pipe the content through a few text frames and wait for some other key contributions to arrive.

At the last minute, the resident legal eagle says on no account must unflattering references to a certain celebrity be published while she-who-must-be-obeyed says the article must be cut by 15% and an explainer added.

Now, if AP could export the (already revised) text back into LibreOffice so that I could edit the content as a piece of English, rather than pretty fonts on a nice background, I might not have the oft-threatened heart attack. But can I do that quickly and easily? Maybe twice to get it right?

Answers on a digital postcard, please.

 

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6 hours ago, Paul Martin said:

Now, if AP could export the (already revised) text back into LibreOffice so that I could edit the content as a piece of English, rather than pretty fonts on a nice background, I might not have the oft-threatened heart attack. But can I do that quickly and easily? Maybe twice to get it right?

Personally, I think I could do the edits you hypothesized in Publisher. But if you don't want to, you can grab all the text (with formatting) from a linked set of Text Frames by putting the cursor in a frame, pressing Ctrl+A, and then pasting into a LibreOffice document. How completely the formatting will transfer I can't say, not having done an extensive test. Nor do I know how well it will survive the trip back, but if you feel you must move outside of Publisher to do the editing that capability exists today.

-- Walt
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6 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I think I could do the edits you hypothesized in Publisher.

The idea is to send back the "clean" text to the author, so he can shorten it himself (if he want it… yesterday, in a last minute modification, I needed an author to shorten his article of 1700 characters… he send me a new text shorten of only 1000 characters, and we decided with the publication's director to put back the 1st and shortest version we initially put in the magazine… We hope next time he'll have learnt the lesson!).

For simple article, it's easy to copy-paste a few text frames in another application the authors can use.
But for some yearly publication, it's better to be able to send a whole document's text to the client after the publication, for him to do modification until net time we'll update the design and text next year.

The important point is to be able to send the corrected text, and not have to do again all the corrections, rewriting, etc. that we would have to do if the author send us a modified v1 text. When they do that, I need to use a difference program to search for modifications, and depending of how many differences are in the document, we go back to step 1 (re-reading, rewriting, etc.) or I modify the current article. Depending of the quality of the texts, it can be time consumming.

Being able to export a whole document, or the content of some selected/copied text frames could be usefull.
Options would be to keep text styles and tables, or not (can be a problem with white text or fonts), exporting to black text, justify left in few effects styles (normal + bold + italic only?).

 

PS. I tested it, and now copying-pasting to LibreOffice is fine: it doesn't end up being an image or "texte au kilomètre", an unique line of text without paragraphs!

Edited by Wosven
Added PS
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Thanks for your answer. Although I have the Beta, I'm still working with PagePlus because I edit, design and publish books. I need the certainty of PP and can't risk finding a problem with  APub way into a big project. However, I'm confident that APub will be excellent when it's launched. I guess it is difficult to accommodate every need. I started this thread (I think it was me) to express my hope that APub would, at the minimum, have the facility to handle doc/docx and this has, I believe, been taken up by the design team. There have been many useful comments on difficulties with Word and on workflow, and I've learned a lot.  Maybe we'll need to find our own work-arounds if the first version of APub is not absolutely perfect.

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1 hour ago, Tom Blyth said:

I think it was me

The history is there for the entire thread.  You didn't start this one.

 

1 hour ago, Tom Blyth said:

if the first version of APub is not absolutely perfect.

No program from any developer will ever be 100% perfect for everyone.

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  • 1 month later...

I'm new to APu and working on a new project. So far so good – very encouraging actually. I'm finding copying and pasting from MS Work works pretty well, with styles in Word coming across, which is a nice surprise. On the down side, if a style in my Word document (e.g. 'Body') already exists in APu, Publisher creates a new style (e.g. Body1) rather than applying the existing Body style to that text. It would be nice if APu simply applied the matching style (or had the option to do so).

As a workaround, it would also be nice to be able to select all text of a given style and apply a new style to that text (as you can in Word) – or alternatively copy one style's parameters and overwrite them on to another existing style (e.g. to quickly make Body1 the same as Body). I don't think you can do either of those things yet?

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14 hours ago, djb21au said:

... It would be nice if APu simply applied the matching style (or had the option to do so).

As a workaround, it would also be nice to be able to select all text of a given style and apply a new style to that text (as you can in Word) – or alternatively copy one style's parameters and overwrite them on to another existing style (e.g. to quickly make Body1 the same as Body). ...

This, a million times this. To be able to redefine a style using another, existing style would be a big help. But for APub to redefine the styles coming from Word/RTF/whatever because those styles are already defined in APub would be magnificent.

My workflow goes like this: I receive manuscripts in a random word processor format and clean them up in Microsoft Word. And by "clean up" I mean assigning purpose-built character and paragraph styles throughout. So far so good.

So when using InDesign (I'm stuck on CS5, woe is me, and I fervently desire a modern DTP application with a perpetual license that is not hideously expensive), I import the Word document and the styles map to the identically-named styles in the template document I've created ahead of time in InDesign. The Word document doesn't even have to remotely resemble the InDesign file (fonts, sizes, what APub calls "Decorations," etc.) as long as the styles work. (In fact it doesn't; I use different fonts in Word at larger sizes 'cause I can.)

I really hope that APub can have this same functionality. APub is handling some things much better than InDesign CS5 did -- boxes and colored backgrounds for multiple paragraphs of arbitrary length makes a world of difference to me, thank you for that -- so I'm hoping the styles functionality can be upgraded, uprated, and made just as cool as the things I'm finding in the rest of the application. I'd simply rather assign the styles in Word and be done with it because I know when I'm finished in Word the document is already nice and clean. I want to use APub for the task of setting aside sidebars and adding images -- DTP stuff -- instead of wrangling text.

Thanks for Listening,
SlateGrey

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On 4/10/2019 at 11:11 PM, djb21au said:

it would also be nice to be able to select all text of a given style and apply a new style to that text

I believe this is supposed to be possible using Find and Replace but last I checked I think that functionality might have been broken...  I don't have it in front of me to verify right now.

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@SlateGrey

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums :) 

Thank you for your useful contributions to the forums (so far).

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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On 4/12/2019 at 6:16 AM, fde101 said:

I believe this is supposed to be possible using Find and Replace but last I checked I think that functionality might have been broken...  I don't have it in front of me to verify right now.

I don't want to throw the thread off topic again, but I was finally able to do this, I think, after a session of playing around with Regular Expression searches. The Find term that finally appeared to work as I wanted was (.+) (that is, left paren, period, plus, right paren) -- remembering to specify the style to be replaced. The Replace term was \1 (backslash, numeral one) -- similarly, remembering to specify the intended style.

Edited by SlateGrey
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21 hours ago, SlateGrey said:

I don't want to throw the thread off topic again, but I was finally able to do this, I think, after a session of playing around with Regular Expression searches. The Find term that finally appeared to work as I wanted was (.+) (that is, left paren, period, plus, right paren) -- remembering to specify the style to be replaced. The Replace term was \1 (backslash, numeral one) -- similarly, remembering to specify the intended style.

@SlateGrey This looks promising. Would you be able to provide an example of the appropriate expression please? I'm not very familiar with regular expressions (though I know they're very useful). What would the expression look like to replace, say, Body1 with Body (in my case Body1 is the style created when I import Word text, Body is the existing style I want to use).

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@djb21au Here is what worked for me (see screenshot below). There appears to be a bug regarding which paragraph styles you can actually choose, though (see the thread below) so it may or may not work for you right now depending on which styles you're "allowed" to choose from. 

 

 

regexp.jpg

Edited by SlateGrey
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