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Initial Words Sticking with first Font applied


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I have a long document going. I've created a Paragraph Style called "Initial Paragraph" that utilizes the Initial Words feature. That section identifies the first 5 words of the paragraph to take on the formatting of a Character Style that has two simple formats applied: font weight Bold and All Small Caps. 

However, when I apply "Initial Paragraph", the first 5 words are correctly made Bold, correctly take on All Small Caps, but incorrectly changes the font even though "No Change" is selected in the font section of the Character Style. The font it is changing to happens to be a font that was selected when I first created the document.

Restarting does not fix the issue.

The only way to I could get it to work was to specifically select the same Body font of the Paragraph style within the Character style, and then select the desired weight from the "Font Trait" dropdown, as "Font Weight" became greyed out after selecting a Font Family.

I feel like the issue has to do with the confusing fact that a font's weight can be specified in two locations: Font Weight and Font Trait.

When I selected "No Change" in Font Family, I had options under Font Weight (such as Extra Bold) that didn't exist in the body font I was using. But when I selected a Font Family (redundantly, since Font Family was already specified at the Paragraph level), its Weight variants appeared under Font Traits.

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Lord but these styles are a pain sometimes.

Set up your First Paragraph Style. Set up your Character Style (All Small Bold Caps Character Style) by basing it on First Paragraph.

Now the extra fun stuff. If First Paragraph Style is based on [No Style] we're going to have a mess of problems. We need to set a font in either First Paragraph Style or the parent of the one it is based on, if we choose the parent of First Paragraph Style then we have to base All Small Bold Caps Character Style on that one.

Clear? 

I hate this Font Trait / Font Weight mess.

I find it worthwhile to set up a pair of Serif and Sans Group Styles and work from there "Body Text" and "Heading Zero" have basic font and weight and size traits chosen and then I can base from those two and have all the fonts work together no matter what else I do later on. Please try to stay away from based on [No Style] styles, much grief will ensue.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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HI ffca

I can't get this issue. The font is not changing at all just the character traits in the character style are affecting then in ital words in the intended way I set them. If you have a file that demonstrates you issue that might be useful for us to look into

Thanks

Serif Europe Ltd - Check the latest news at www.affinity.serif.com

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@Chris_K

I hope this works for you. I've included a duplicated version of the problematic file, along with the fonts. In case something goes awry, I've made a little screen recording of the behavior so you can see what is happening.

Base font is Baskerville Regular (the Serif font you see in the screen cap)

It's meant to change the initial words to Baskerville Bold, and make them all small caps.

Unexpectedly, it changes the font to URW Dock (the Sans Serif you see in the screen cap)

InitalWords_Testfile.afpub

BaskervilleURW-Bol.otf

BaskervilleURW-Reg.otf

URWDock-Bold.otf

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I think the problem described in the initial post (by ffca) underlines a basic fault in the way character styles are implemented in Publisher. 

A new character style should have no styling at all by default. Any changes made within the character style should override the paragraph style, but otherwise inherit everything from the paragraph style.

By default, a new character style in AfP has the default font applied to it (in my case, Arial). This overrides the font applied in the paragraph style, leading to the problems described in the intial post above.

I've found by trial and error that clicking the 'Reset formatting' button in the character style editor gets around this problem. But a new character style should be reset by default (i.e. no styling applied), otherwise it will lead to all kinds of confusion.
 

[ macos 12.6 Monterey; Memory: 16GB;  Graphics: Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 1536 MB; Processor: 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5 ]

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29 minutes ago, Jim_A said:

A new character style should have no styling at all by default

I would argue that it should represent the difference between the text containing the insertion point and the paragraph style applied to that text.

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9 minutes ago, fde101 said:

I would argue that it should represent the difference between the text containing the insertion point and the paragraph style applied to that text.

If text is selected which has paragraph style overrides, I agree. 

If no text is selected, it should default to no styling. And ideally, all the character style formatting fields should be blank, not 'No change'. (No change from what? The default styling? The applied paragraph style?)

[ macos 12.6 Monterey; Memory: 16GB;  Graphics: Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 1536 MB; Processor: 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5 ]

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21 minutes ago, Jim_A said:

If text is selected which has paragraph style overrides, I agree. 

If no text is selected, it should default to no styling.

I could live with that - it is at least a well-defined behavior.

 

22 minutes ago, Jim_A said:

And ideally, all the character style formatting fields should be blank, not 'No change'.

Here I need to disagree.  It is no change from whatever it was before you applied the style, and that to me seems much more clear than leaving the fields blank (I am not asking it to give me a blank font or to give me a font with no size).

For reference, QuarkXPress has a fairly loyal following (particularly considering the price tag), and it does not seem to support that option at all for character styles (all of the various attributes of the style are always applied).  InDesign offers this, and I prefer having the flexibility for these, but it is clearly not critical.

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11 minutes ago, fde101 said:

For reference, QuarkXPress has a fairly loyal following (particularly considering the price tag), and it does not seem to support that option at all for character styles (all of the various attributes of the style are always applied).  InDesign offers this, and I prefer having the flexibility for these, but it is clearly not critical.

Yes, in Q a new character style is always based upon the Normal character style if nothing is selected/highlighted. In ID, with nothing selected, a new character style may show as everything blanked, but it is still using the [Basic Paragraph] style as its starting point. So while ID has blanks for the various entries, they really are not until such time as they are changed.

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With a Character Style applied to selected text there are times I wish to change only the weight to Bold or Italic or both. Other times I want to apply a specific font with size and leading offset etc. also baked in. I make and then choose the appropriate Character Style.

Consider this overly simple example; A conceptual problem arises when I apply my italic Character Style to text which is bold, do I want the text to be Italic only or do I want the text to be italicized and bold. 

Before I make a Style I spend some time thinking about what I am going to call it, the name should reflect its application (Photoshop was called that and not Utility_437 for a reason). I am having some difficulty wrapping my head around the new conventions that Affinity have introduced and am trying to come up with best practises. We may have to abandon some old work habits and I won't say that that is good or bad, it just is.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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InDesign has a [Basic Paragraph] style with default settings. The default character style is [None], which means 'don't make any changes to the paragraph style', which is implied by the blank fields.

If the character style dialogue showed all the text attribute values, how would you know which were overrides to the paragraph style?

If instead of blank fields it said 'No Change', how would you know if a default character styling was being applied (which is what AfP does at the moment, at least regarding the main font selection, unless you click the 'Reset formatting' button.)
 

[ macos 12.6 Monterey; Memory: 16GB;  Graphics: Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 1536 MB; Processor: 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5 ]

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22 minutes ago, fde101 said:

If I create a character style in InDesign and leave the font size blank, then select text and set it to some obscure size, selecting that character style for the text does not change its size.

If the new character style has been applied to text, changing anything about that new character style is reflected wherever the new character style has been applied.

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1 hour ago, fde101 said:

If I create a character style in InDesign and leave the font size blank, then select text and set it to some obscure size, selecting that character style for the text does not change its size.

Yes, this is the value of blank fields.

The blank field for font size means, 'Leave the font size at whatever the paragraph style has set.'

If the field said '8pt', it would mean, 'Whatever the paragraph style has set for font size, make it 8pt.'

[ macos 12.6 Monterey; Memory: 16GB;  Graphics: Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 1536 MB; Processor: 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5 ]

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I don't mind the No Change label. It makes it clear.

But there are other things in APub that bug the crap out of me. The fact No Change cannot be attained again but presents a zero. And such as character variants being able to go into the negative numbers (and always therefore represent character set 01). I could go on...

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47 minutes ago, MikeW said:

The fact No Change cannot be attained again but presents a zero

I think if you alter a field that is initially set to [No Change], you can bring it back by highlighting the content and hitting Delete

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2 minutes ago, ffca said:

I think if you alter a field that is initially set to [No Change], you can bring it back by highlighting the content and hitting Delete

Should that be the normal way? Should negative numbers be possible? 

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3 minutes ago, MikeW said:

Should that be the normal way? Should negative numbers be possible? 

Personally I prefer the way InDesign handles this part of things, but that's probably because that's what I'm used to. I find the [No Change] indicators somewhat confusing as Jim_A described. I was just saying there is a way to get back to the No Change setting. Maybe I misunderstood that part of your response

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1 hour ago, MikeW said:

I don't mind the No Change label. It makes it clear.

Again, the problem described in the orginal post was caused by 'No Change' meaning 'No change from the default paragraph style' instead of 'No change from the NEW paragraph style'.

'No Change' is therefore ambiguous, and depends on whether you clicked the 'Reset formatting' button when setting up the style. And there's no easy way to determine that.


A blank field says, 'Nothing will be changed or set.'

[ macos 12.6 Monterey; Memory: 16GB;  Graphics: Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 1536 MB; Processor: 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5 ]

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Maybe [No Change] should be [Inherited].

And I would love to be able to hover or right-click to see what the setting is in the Based On Style, but that may be unattainable for the foreseeable future. There are other more important things needed.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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Wow, we sure have wandered out into the tall grass here....

On 10/24/2018 at 12:03 PM, ffca said:

I hope this works for you. I've included a duplicated version of the problematic file,

After my last post I realized that I never got around to addressing the original poster's problem, I think it is that the Bold Small Caps Character Style was Based On Base Paragraph Style which has [No Change] for a font, as to why the san serif font was plucked out of thin air I don't know, perhaps it was used some place and got stuck in his preferences. This would perhaps be a bug or at least something to be chased for a while, but I digress, again...

Change the Based On in Bold Small Caps' property to Body (which has a font) from Base and then you'll have to set Bold Small Caps' Font to [No Change] and then set and reset (to make it 'stick') the Font weight to bold.
Now when you change the Font in Body it will propagate to Initial Paragraph and Bold Small Caps.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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15 hours ago, MikeW said:

I don't mind the No Change label. It makes it clear.

But there are other things in APub that bug the crap out of me. The fact No Change cannot be attained again but presents a zero. And such as character variants being able to go into the negative numbers (and always therefore represent character set 01). I could go on...

Those sound like bugs. I don't recall them being reported before.

On Mac, I can get back to [No change] by entering the text "[No change]" into the control. Actually anything not recognised as a number will do, so you can just hit delete and leave a blank field as ffca says, but typing "no change" to get no change should also work. Also on Mac, I can't get negative numbers for Character Variants. That sounds like a Windows-specific bug. (These can creep in because I mostly work on Mac myself.)

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16 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Maybe [No Change] should be [Inherited].

And I would love to be able to hover or right-click to see what the setting is in the Based On Style, but that may be unattainable for the foreseeable future. There are other more important things needed.

A lot of this information is in the Style settings area at the bottom of the Edit Text Style panel. If the style is based on another style, that other style will be mentioned first, eg "Strong + Font: Arial". If you click the Reset formatting button it will say "Strong + [No changes]". If the style is not based on another style, it will just say "[No changes]" without the "Stylename +".

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2 hours ago, Dave Harris said:

Those sound like bugs. I don't recall them being reported before.

On Mac, I can get back to [No change] by entering the text "[No change]" into the control. Actually anything not recognised as a number will do, so you can just hit delete and leave a blank field as ffca says, but typing "no change" to get no change should also work. Also on Mac, I can't get negative numbers for Character Variants. That sounds like a Windows-specific bug. (These can creep in because I mostly work on Mac myself.)

Hello, Dave.

I would suggest that if the label [No Changes] is to be used, it be used consistently throughout and that nothing special need to be done to get back to the label other than scrolling back to the top of the list. It just should be present in the list.

But I'll never type it in...

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On Mac it is present in the list, for controls that have a list. Can you point me to anywhere we've missed?

A lot of controls don't have a list. If they are numeric input they may just have up/down arrows. For those you can delete the entry and it will revert to [No change], or just type a [ or whatever.

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