Export Text Only

[UkeyD]

Hi,

I wondered if there was a way to export just the text from Affinity Publisher? Or if this is something that could be added to the programme? It would be good if I could send on my designs to web designers with a seperate file for the text from the document. 

Thanks for your help

UkeyD

[nina_paley]

I would also like to export text, as I have made many changes and corrections to the text within Publisher.

[Seb Romeo]

This would be so good!
For my need I just have both web and print projects that share the same text. I always need to copy/paste one by one my 40+ paragraphs, copy in a text editor, reformat them (I don't know why copy pasting text remove all line breaks characters for me).

[jjk]

I presume that you know that : if your text is in one article, Ctrl-A selects the whole text through all text frames.

So, why are your 40+ paragraphs in several articles ? You have surely a good reason.

But, yes, here also, all line breaks are removed and replaces by an other separator, that I have to search/replace in my text editor.

Il would be useful to have that feature of text export in AfPub. And of course in other rich formats as rtf or so.

[Old Bruce]

Welcome to the forums,

15 hours ago, Seb Romeo said:

(I don't know why copy pasting text remove all line breaks characters for me).

They are not removed but are replaced, Publisher uses a Unicode (2029) for some reason. Bugs me no end. If your editor supports it you can copy the "empty space" and paste that into a find and replace using a regular line break for the replace. I have a BBEdit text factory for this purpose.

[Seb Romeo]

15 hours ago, jjk said:

I presume that you know that : if your text is in one article, Ctrl-A selects the whole text through all text frames.

Oh sorry, I didn't express well, I meant 40+ articles with some paragraphs each. Yes, ctrl + A didn't help me much unfortunately...

[Helmar]

+1

[DMullerDesign]

+2 – it's features like this that transform a great application into an exceptional one.

[4dimage]

Yes, this would be a big timesaver !!!

Like Seb Romeo, I also have to do a lot of webdesign. After approval of the page design layout i always have to "program" the real content pages in html/css. It's always a lot of wasted time, to manually remove the unusual linebreak or paragraph chars and rebuild the original text structure when it comes to this final stage.

So please: at least a simple text file export of selected text/pages would do it. Better some richtext format, to preserve paragraphs over multiple newlines. Or an additional menu item. Like the reverse of "paste without format" -> "copy without format (with standard richtext)"...

Save as "simple" HTML would be great At least automatic conversion of headings to <h1> and paragraphs to <p>...

 

Meanwhile here is some workaround:

1) In  publisher: mark the text on your page and do Export -> PDF (digital, no transparency reduction, text must be preserved as text). Optional with "region: selection with/without background". Or you export your whole publisher document to PDF.

2) Open the PDF in Acrobat Pro and do: Save as -> Advanced Options -> RTF (Rich Text Format)

3) Open .rtf File in WORD or another simple Texteditor, that supports RTF. Copy the text to cliboard.

4) Paste the clipboard content to your code editor - e.g. VS Code.

wow - "only" 4 steps for some simple copy and paste action 😐

 

1)

 

2)

 

3)

 

4)

 

[garrettm30]

I am sure this is not a priority feature, but I too would be interested in the ability to export a story as a HTML. I never would expect a document to itself export with any kind of layout in tact (and I would never want to use it even if it could), but usually articles that we publish also need to go separately online, and basic HTML export of a story would help greatly with that. Ideally, we would be able to control how each of the text styles would export as HTML.

[Jesse Covner]

Shit. I keep coming up on some things that inDesign can do, which seem like minor things until they are missing.

Exporting text- and preferably to Rich Text - is CRITICAL. If client has too many edits after layout is done, I need to be able to hand back the text to edit, including changes done in Publisher, which includes headings, and paragraph style changes. If I do writing directly in Publisher so that I can see how it works with layout, I need to send this out for editing. Exporting as rich text is pretty necessary for this top of work flow.

[Sephen]

Any progress on this missing feature?

[GarryP]

If it’s not currently in the commercial release then you can try the beta.
If it’s not in the beta then only Serif will know if it will be coming and they no longer, for various good and understandable reasons, tell us what is coming in later versions.
If you want to know when new functions become available then you can subscribe to (follow) the relevant beta forum(s).

[Jesse Covner]

To add to this,  I really REALLY hope that if they implement this feature, they make a Rich Text File export option.  Already if you copy text it will also copy text styles. It seems that implementing a script that will copy all the text from a "story" (I forgot what Publisher calls this... "article"?) would be pretty easy.  Linking multiple stories may be really difficult but that should be on the user to piece together.

 

 

[ptmg]

Found a seemingly working solution:

1) Ctrl-A in Publisher & copy text to clipboard

2) Open new document on https://paper.dropbox.com

3) Paste the hole shabang & voila: works even with formatting!

[Old Bruce]

On 4/17/2020 at 12:02 AM, Seb Romeo said:

...(I don't know why copy pasting text remove all line breaks characters for me).

There is a new preference in General called Preserve Unicode breaks.... You do not want that, it will use a Unicode character instead of New Line or Paragraph.

[garrettm30]

On 6/5/2021 at 2:08 PM, Old Bruce said:

There is a new preference in General called Preserve Unicode breaks.... You do not want that, it will use a Unicode character instead of New Line or Paragraph.

I have wondered about that preference: what is the consequence of unchecking it? Put another way, why might I want to preserve the "unicode breaks"? (All of these breaks are in unicode, which is probably why in the latest beta the option is now called "Normalize breaks on copy plain text.")

And further, I am not sure the preference is doing anything. I get the same results whether or not the option is checked: carriage return copies as U+000A and new line as U+2028 regardless of whether I have the option checked. Am I missing something?

[garrettm30]

20 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

And further, I am not sure the preference is doing anything.

I did some further testing, and here is what I found using Unicode Checker:

The above is a comparison of two strings. Everything after the “Unchecked:” or “Checked:” part was the same selection from Publisher. I copied once with the option unchecked and once unchecked.

• With “Normalize breaks on copy plain text” turned off, both new paragraph and new line are copied as U+000A (line feed).
• With “Normalize breaks on copy plain text” turned on, new paragraph is copied as U+2029 (paragraph separator) and new line as U+2028 (line separator).

So it looks like the distinction between line break and new paragraph is lost with the option unchecked.

I wonder if any of our forum regulars who are more knowledgeable about Unicode might want to look into this. I may have misunderstood. But to me, it seems the option is still named in a confusing way. For example, wouldn’t “normalize breaks” imply that they would be the same, whereas here they are the same only if normalize is not turned on.

Edit to add one further detail: when in Publisher I turn on Text->Toggle Unicode, the code matches what gets copied with "Normalize breaks on copy plain text" checked.

[MikeTO]

This is where making an app scriptable is useful to fill gaps. Export Text is a niche feature. It's not hard to implement in a page layout app but it's not something most users will need so it's naturally low on a priority list. However, if the app was scriptable, it would be trivial for somebody to create and share a script to do this.