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Initial Words Sticking with first Font applied


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Coming out of the tall grasses again....

This problem has become my latest idée fixe.

All these problems with Styles and their various format changes/alterations getting stuck seem to result from Base (which I only recently found out we have to have in order to use Indexing and probably the Tables of Content too) having too few attributes set. We must set Font and Font traits, Size and Leading to something real. We have to have everything else set to zero or off. In essence we can't have anything set to [No Change] or we get bad things happening later on due to cascading null values getting overridden at some point in the work.

At least I think that is what is going on.

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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All this confusion will go away if AfPub displayed the currently set values for the paragraph style instead of 'No change'.

(Keep character style values blank by default. Show only overrides, for reasons stated in the posts above.)

Many (perhaps most) paragraph styles will be based on another paragraph style.

So, when you go to edit one of those styles, which would you rather see...

show-all-style-values.thumb.png.b43beb0374d658d0c0d5f61cb495aa04.png

[ 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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20 minutes ago, Jim_A said:

currently set values for the paragraph style

That is not how this works.

I created two paragraphs, set different fonts, and created two paragraph styles based on those paragraphs.

The paragraphs now have those two different paragraph styles applied to them.

I then created a character style with only one attribute set: the text fill color to red.  Other values set to "[No change]".

 

If I select a portion of each paragraph and choose that character style, the relevant text becomes red - THE FONT DOES NOT CHANGE.

If the character style showed the font name from the paragraph style, that would imply that selecting that character style would change the font.  IT DOES NOT.

 

The whole point is that Affinity Publisher allows a character style to change a subset of the character attributes without changing all of them - the ones marked "[No change]" are not changed from the paragraph style that is in play from the text that the style is applied to, which may be different in different places.

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1 hour ago, fde101 said:

If I select a portion of each paragraph and choose that character style, the relevant text becomes red - THE FONT DOES NOT CHANGE.

If the character style showed the font name from the paragraph style, that would imply that selecting that character style would change the font.  IT DOES NOT.

I agree with you. You've misunderstood my post.

I'm advocating that only paragraph styles should display all values.

Character styles should show all blank fields except for the values you set.

In the example you gave, the character style should show all blank fields except for the red text fill. [No change] is ambiguous, for reasons I described in an earlier post in this thread. 

[ 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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2 minutes ago, Jim_A said:

paragraph styles should display all values

This still has problems if the style inherits from another style.  You would need to be able to determine whether the value came from the parent style or from the child - if it comes from the parent and the parent is modified then the value in the child will change too, so they are not equivalent.

We would also still need the ability to revert a setting to being inherited.

 

4 minutes ago, Jim_A said:

[No change] is ambiguous

Leaving the field blank is also ambiguous.  Leaving the underline type field blank could just as easily be interpreted to mean there is no underline, which might not be true if the value is being inherited.

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26 minutes ago, fde101 said:

This still has problems if the style inherits from another style.  You would need to be able to determine whether the value came from the parent style or from the child - if it comes from the parent and the parent is modified then the value in the child will change too, so they are not equivalent.

So, in the screenshots in my post above you would prefer the 'Show [No change]' example on the left? 

The override information (to determine whether a value is inherited from a parent style) is in the Style settings box at the bottom, should you need it. I think it is much more useful to have the actual values on display. 

 

27 minutes ago, fde101 said:

We would also still need the ability to revert a setting to being inherited.

Yes, add that as an option, though I''m not sure how that would be done with a checkbox. (In practice, is resetting to inherited values used much?)


 

21 minutes ago, fde101 said:

Leaving the field blank is also ambiguous.  Leaving the underline type field blank could just as easily be interpreted to mean there is no underline, which might not be true if the value is being inherited.

There are ways to distinguish between a value not changed and a value not set. Here's how InDesign handles it:


InDesign-character-style.png.c96f24b8424be8e2e6ea6b203213d61e.png

[ 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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5 minutes ago, Jim_A said:

you would prefer the 'Show [No change]' example on the left

Yes, although an alternative for inherited values if they are actually inherited from a fixed parent would be to show the inherited values in a different color.

For example, the font name if set in the child shows as black, but if inherited from the parent shows as blue.

If there is nowhere to inherit the value from (as with a character style based on [No style]) then I would argue that [No change] is preferable.

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10 minutes ago, fde101 said:

For example, the font name if set in the child shows as black, but if inherited from the parent shows as blue.

Best of both worlds. +1 for that!

 

11 minutes ago, fde101 said:

If there is nowhere to inherit the value from (as with a character style based on [No style]) then I would argue that [No change] is preferable.

I can only repeat my case: [No change] is ambiguous (has something been set? or not? if so, what is it?) and resulted in the orginal poster's problem in the first post of this thread.

[ 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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