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Locationally linked text frames? Bug or feature?


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I have a simple Publisher document with several pages based on the same master page. On every page I have one text frame filled with different copy text. If I move any of those frames on any page all the frames on the other pages will move accordingly, too. Which is obviously not what I want. No symbols involved and the frames are not part of the master page.

Is this a bug or a „lockstep“-feature I accidentally activated?

Greets,

Matthias

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Oh, I did not know that. Thank you, mac_heibu. So it does not have to sit on the master page and does not have to show up only within the master page layer on the individual pages — and still can behave like it was a master page element?

Maybe you have an idea how to get rid of this master indicator (and its according behaviour)?

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I think, you detached the element and moved it in its vertical layer hierarchy.

Try this:

  • Go to the frame’s inital layer.
  • Rightclick onto it and choose „Edit Detached"
  • Copy the frame and delete it.
  • Finish the „Edit Detached“ mode.
  • Paste the frame into your layout again.
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I tried your approach. When I

a) first move the frame into the master page layer (the master indicator line of the frame looks broken then)

b) switch to „edit detached“ and cut the frame

c) finish the detached mode

d) paste the frame back into the layout again

its master indicator is successfully gone  – BUT – the behavior still stays the same!

Maybe I did create the frame on a master page (I don’t remember) but when I detach it it still keeps this master page property, which it should not. A bug.

 

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This is NOT the bug. Detaching means, that only the modified attributes are detached. All other attributes remain linked. Not so fast with qualifying something as a bug.

Could you reduce your file to only one page and only this „misbehaving“ text element (to simplify investigation) and attach it here?

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Here comes a modified document with filler text.

Probably the mistake is on my side and there is some easy solution I have overlooked. But I surely did not want to “qualify“ anything, just to openly discuss a product that is not yet ready and where bugs are to be expected.

Maybe it is just my lacking imagination but I am not able to make sense of the described behavior. The attribute linking you describe would fit to symbols. But why would I want a linked behavior and not be able to stop it?

Linked Frame behaviour.afpub

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No idea, what you did. But you can fix the behaviour by:

  • Copying the text (not the text frame),
  • Dragging the „misbehaving“ text frame onto the master layer again
  • Applying another master
  • Re-applying the original master
  • Pasting the text again.

The behaviour, you are seeing, probably is a bug. But not the „bug“ you assumed. Detaching an element from a master is related to attributes. That means, if you change the color of a detached element, the position and geometry are still linked to the master. And this makes deep sense (therefore this behaviour was recently changed to react this way as a reaction of user requests): This behaviour allows you to use a master page as a template with placeholders: Place for example images/image frames onto the master and fill them on the layout pages. If you want to change geometry, change it once on the master and it is applied to every page without changing the image content.

The „bug“ seems to be a situation, that page elements remain linked to the master, although the master element doesn’t exist any more.

What do you think, @A_B_C?

Let’s wait, until a team member is landing here …

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Yeah, something is kind of strange here.

The way Publisher handles these master page "group" layers seems to be rather problematic in how permissive it is.  In particular, why can you duplicate that layer within the same page, why can you group it with other layers...   this just seems like a recipe for disaster.

If this is in fact a layer that was dragged out of the master page group layer, and if that action is to be permitted, I would suggest that it should only work in "Edit Detached" mode and that doing so should fully detach the layer from the master, as well as being limited in effect to that one page.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Something like this, as far as I understand the issue, can be produced in the following way:

  • Create a new document with a single layout page, default master page applied
  • Add a text frame to the master page
  • On the layout page, right-click the Master Page Contents Layer in the Layers Panel, and select Edit Linked from the context menu
  • Drag the child of the Master Page Contents Layer (that is, the text frame) out of the parent layer
  • Still in Edit Linked state, duplicate the layout page
  • Click Finish
  • Now the text frames on your layout pages are positionally linked, and the document structure is very similar to the last document of @Matthias.

But I might also misunderstand the issue. From the structure of the example document, I would guess though that something like this happened. Strange. :/

Alex

 

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Yeah.

If it was a per-element chooseable behaviour (maybe called something like “common/unified/linked location“) and a so-tagged element could be copy-pasted to different pages it could be of use – if it were also possibe to decouple the behaviour from the element at any time should you change your mind.

The tagging could even happen just by applying a special "tag-copy” command (like alt-cmd-c) which would paste the element a) with the tagged linking attribute b) at exactly the same location on any given different page.

The difference to a master page element would be that other atributes like text content or colour could change per linked element, just the position is linked. Then, maybe this is kind of a special use case.

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