Copying/Cloning Text Formatting (Peter-N)

[Peter-N]

I am looking to copy the formatting of typesetting from one paragraph to another. It is easy in InDesign using the eyedropper tool, not so easy in Quark. Does anyone have a suggestion please how to do this in Affinity Publisher? I can not find it in the help dropdown. Thank you.

[fde101]

Welcome to the Forum!

I would suggest saving it as a character style in the Text Styles panel then applying that style to the new text.

[Patrick Connor]

@Peter-N

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums

There is no equivalent yet of paste format, but it is one think I hope will come soon as I use it all the time in other apps. As fde101 says you need to use a work around currently

[Peter-N]

Great, thanks for your advice. I am enjoying using this program, very intuitive and easy having used both iD and Quark for 20-odd years.

[walt.farrell]

The following works, though arguably it might be better to use paragraph or character styles:

1. Format your text as you want it. Select/highlight it.
2. In the Styles panel (not Text Styles), click the hamburger menu and Add Style from Selection.
3. Later, for some other text, select/highlight the text and drag the Style onto it.

[ACPhillips]

While creating and saving Styles may be useful and does get the job done, one may not want to add the momentarily-needed formatting to their Styles collection AND it would be far faster to be able to right-click and have a  "clone formatting" or "format painter" (the latter being a Microsoft term for a format cloning function) added to the pop-up box that now only include a few basic actions (cut,copy, paste...).  IMO, this is an easy fix and a big miss for Affinity.

 

[Andrie Ahmad]

On 6/6/2019 at 4:26 AM, ACPhillips said:

"clone formatting" or "format painter"

Starting to miss this.

Anyway, it's time to adjust my workflow and work with what I currently have. I'm still complaining bout it tho. LOL

[etpicci]

I have just started using Publisher and it’s great – I do agree, however, that this would be a very useful feature for quick works, where you wouldn’t usually bother creating text or paragraph styles. I hope they add it in the next upgrade.

[mswift]

On 6/6/2019 at 6:26 AM, ACPhillips said:

While creating and saving Styles may be useful and does get the job done, one may not want to add the momentarily-needed formatting to their Styles collection AND it would be far faster to be able to right-click and have a  "clone formatting" or "format painter" (the latter being a Microsoft term for a format cloning function) added to the pop-up box that now only include a few basic actions (cut,copy, paste...).  IMO, this is an easy fix and a big miss for Affinity.

 

Even faster (on Mac) Shift > Option and drag.

[skadhu]

I would like to add my two cents that this is really, REALLY important. When I do a complex document I do create a set of styles, often a fairly complex set.  BUT there are always typographic fine-tuning adjustments necessary depending on the actual layout and how things come together. If I created styles for each adjustment I would be dealing with a frighteningly long list of styles: "heading 1" and "heading 1 when (a)" and "heading 1 when (b)" and "heading 1 when (c)"... you get the idea. It's just not practical, and I would lose all the time saved by using styles in searching through them for the one tweaked for a particular circumstance. It's much quicker and easier to copy/paste the format. Please add this feature!

[supajiggi]

Thumbs up for a "Format Painter" style cloner.

Great program all the same.

[LarryStew]

Just chiming in to voice extreme desire for this option. In ID, I found it to be the tool/option I use far and away the most out of any other! Hurry!!

[Catshill]

Copy object > Paste style

The closest to format painter

[walt.farrell]

37 minutes ago, Catshill said:

Copy object > Paste style

The closest to format painter

But Paste Style does not work for text.

[eric u]

Definitely a must have. Please add it to the queue. Otherwise really enjoying getting to know this software after 10+ years with adobe. Love that you recently added another absolute must have 'preflight' feature, so a sample and paste (eyedropper whatever) will be a snap. Looking forward to seeing it in a future release.

[Petar Petrenko]

Format painter would be usefull after Affinity will disable applying paragraph styles to destroy local formating. Yes, there are something like "Apply paragraph..." which you can get with right click on a paragraph style, but it is frustrating when you need to use it on every paragraph. Because, let me refresh your memory, there are plenty of other character formatings beside bold, italic... like: tracking, kerning, superscipt, baseline shift...

[Martín Freire]

Just chiming in to say that I use the eyedropper to apply formats to different texts and I find it extremely useful. I think this is one of those thing that will prevent me from moving away from InDesign at the moment, although I love Publisher!

[Defender]

Its mid September 2020 and I just started using the Affinity products.  In general as good or better than the Adobe suite... BUT--- the inability to quickly and easily copy/paste a text style is really annoying.  Such an easy fix.  Make that a priority Affinity!  We're all waiting.

[countbasil]

Support this as well

[Carlos NZ]

I also would like to vote for this feature, it is time saver and very useful.

[MikeA]

Another up-vote for this feature, which could be a huge time-saver fortext-heavy projects .

This isn't a workaround to be thrilled about, but it seems to work and if there's a lot of format-copying and -pasting to be done, I might use it in the future. First, style the text to be copied/pasted as need be (within Publisher). Copy the text needing additional styling changes to the clipboard. Paste it into a Word or Word-like program (I use TextMaker).

Do the copying and pasting of the formatting there. I assigned those editor features to Shift+Control+C and Shift+Control+V so that the operations would be similar to those in other programs I use (Capture One, for example—same keystrokes for copy and paste image adjustments).

Copy the styled text in the editor to the clipboard. Paste it back into the Publisher document.

My test of the idea is only brief for now but it appears to work, and without introducing junk into the Publisher document that I don't want there. The other text styling is preserved and the Publisher text style names aren't altered in any way after the updated text is pasted into the Publisher document.

It certainly isn't as fast as a dedicated command within Publisher would be, no question.

[zhanchik]

Have been patiently waiting for this feature as well.  Can you advise when it is planned to be rolled out?

Thanks!

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, zhanchik said:

Can you advise when it is planned to be rolled out?

Serif generally will not answer that question.

[zhanchik]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

Serif generally will not answer that question.

Is there hope that feature will get introduced?  Does anyone know?

[walt.farrell]

2 hours ago, zhanchik said:

Is there hope that feature will get introduced?  Does anyone know?

We can always hope, but no one but Serif knows if it will ever be implemented, nor when they might decide to do it. They have their plans and priorities and no longer discuss them, after that caused issues in the past.