Multicolumn Text Boxes are a Mess in AP 1.7.1

[andy-in-mke]

I have a large volume of text I wish to format into 4 columns over a two-page spread. I copied the text out of Swift Publisher, and pasted it into a single column text box in Affinity Publisher, thinking this would be a routine operation. Instead it has turned into an ordeal. As you can see from the movie I’ve attached, when I select the text box and click on the little column adjustment tool, the text does not reflow in anything remotely resembling a logical way. I thought maybe the text block had picked up some weird invisible characters/artifacts in Swift Publisher, so I dropped it into a TextEdit document first and converted it to plain text, THEN copied it into AP. This had no effect whatsoever on the problem. I feel like I’m going to have to retype it from scratch to get what I want, and what I want does not strike me as anything fancy, or complicated, or unreasonable. This looks like a bug to me. Is there a fix? Thank you for your help.

Edited July 14, 2019 by andy-in-mke

[andy-in-mke]

I’ve tried clicking on the video attachment and it doesn’t even show up, much less play. I have no idea why this is happening.

[Wosven]

Can you try with another video format like mp4 or avi ?

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, andy-in-mke said:

when I select the text box and click on the little column adjustment tool,

Or give us a screenshot, perhaps. I'm not sure what the "little column adjustment tool" is. There's a number of columns setting in the Context Toolbar, but I'm not sure if that's what you mean:

[andy-in-mke]

Hi Walt...

First, yes, the little screen grab you made is indeed what I was talking about. 

Second, since I made this post I’ve been able to finish the work I was doing – a highly-formatted multi-page index – without having to type everything in from scratch. What I’ve learned is that if I work meticulously and carefully set up my text styles, I can get my work done in Affinity Publisher. What I’m still puzzled by is why AP acted the way it did when I first tried to change the number of columns in my text box.

I converted my movie to an mp4 by the way, if you’re still curious about it. What it shows is the new text box with text already pasted into it from another program (Swift Publisher). You can see the I-bar cursor at the very end of the fifth line of text. First I move the mouse arrow in a circle around the I-bar, just to show you where the I-bar is. Then I move the mouse down and to the right, to change the number of columns, from “1” to “2”. What happens to the text next absolutely confounds me. What I expected would happen was that with each click in the number of columns the text would be evenly divided into an increasing number of columns. Instead it looks like in response to my click, AP automatically inserted a column break right below the top line of text. Why on earth would it do that?

In any case, thanks for your interest/response.

Andy

[Pauls]

If you can send us a document with the text styles and that text pasted in we could look into it