Make master item unique on page

[furtonb]

Hi,

OK, I give up.

I've created various master layouts and added placeholder items to them (e.g. on the master page "Section title" there is a textbox formatted with the preferred text style, and the text itself says #SECTION TITLE – which I would like to change to the real title). Right now I would like to click into that box and make it unique – how do I do that?

(InDesign handles this with Cmd+Shift+Click into the text frame.)

I hope I made myself clear.

Many thanks for the help!

 

[mac_heibu]

Simple answer: You can’t. For the time being, a master contains these elements, which have not to be modified on layout page.

The simplest solution: If you have elements, which have to change page-wise, you have to copy the page/the element and change it as you like.

[furtonb]

Sad. Thanks!

[ffca]

This is a must-have feature. Has it been requested?

[Aammppaa]

1 hour ago, ffca said:

Has it been requested?

Yes. Dozens of times.

I made a post about the subject last week pointing out that it is in fact possible to promote items from a Master to be editable at local level, but that it is buggy and poorly implemented at present.

A tepid response from the forum in general, and Affinity seemed to play it down as an incomplete feature. As such I've not talked about it again and the thread has disappear into the depths of the forum.

And yet every day there are new threads asking for the exact same functionality!

[Alfred]

10 minutes ago, Aammppaa said:

the thread has disappear[ed] into the depths of the forum

 

[ffca]

Well I re-requested it here: 

In case you guys want to jump on and +1 it into the light

[ffca]

6 minutes ago, αℓƒяє∂ said:

 

Oh I see, it looks like they are leveraging the "Symbols" functionality to get the Master Page to work. So if you want to localize a Master Page item on a Child Page, you basically have to temporarily disable Sync. Right?

This seems like a workaround rather than a feature. But at least there is a workaround at this point.

[Aammppaa]

Given that that is the entire system on which Master pages are built, I don't see it as a work around.

What I do see is that it needs a huge upgrade to the functionality and the UI.

Something along the lines of…

Promoting an item via a keypress, icon on a toolbar, or icon on the bounding box (akin to the Text Flow triangle) would temporarily disable sync until the user selected a different object. At which point sync would auto-re-enable.

An upgraded symbols panel that clearly showed which attributes had been de-synced (a tool-tip in the layers panel is not sufficient).

The ability to see detailed info for each attribute about the symbol vs the local copy (eg Symbol: Comic Sans, Local: Helvetica).

The panel should have all the niceties of reordering, searching, renaming etc and also tell you how many times the symbol has been used. It would be great to allow you to highlight all instances on the canvas, or just modified instances.

The ability to revert changed attributes is also a must. Not just as a whole, but individually.

The ability to swap one symbol for another.

But most of all Symbols need debugging!

If you've ever seriously tried to use symbols, and specifically nested symbols, you will find that they are incredibly unstable. Elements frequently vanish, or change stacking order, or jump to a wildly different location. Dragged objects in the layers panel that pass over a symbol, pick up the symbol flag. Assets that are symbols leave hundreds of copies snail-trailed out behind them when dragged onto the canvas. Copy-pasting symbols between documents is unreliable. And various other issues that are reported over the past year.

When I saw that Master Pages were just symbols I thought: Oh, clever idea. Serif must have fixed the Symbol system if they are basing such a central feature of Publisher on symbol technology.

Sadly not - though several forum posts have said that an overhaul of Symbols is coming at some point.

Still - I love my Affinity apps, and use them daily despite the flaws.

 

[wyenphoto]

Don't know if this is the right answer for you but you can try this work around.

In the "Slave" page where you want to make an item unique find "(Standard)" layer from the Layer Tab. Expand  it to see the item you want to make unique to that page. CMD + J on the item and drag it out of the "(Standard)" group. Now this item is "de-sync" from the "Master" and is essentially unique. Then mask the linked "Master" item outside of the "(Standard)" group.

I hope this work around helps.

Best

[worlok]

I think this is what I was trying to express in my own post and this sounds like an essential feature that is most definitely not working correctly.  Local non master pages, when changed in some way, are making the change across ALL pages and this simply won't work.  It's silly as implemented.

 

 

 

[MickRose]

This works fine for me. I thought I was the first to discover it but obviously not. Useful for adding text frames to different pages at the same position.

[MickRose]

Another way to change master page items on a page seems to be to select the item using the layers tab and then from the symbols panel click the detach button. I'm not sure how stable this is. I tried it out with a text frame and at some point I had dozens of similar text frames on pages. Can't reproduce that.

[Move Along People]

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