Pinning in multi-column Frame Text oddities

[wfolta]

I'm really having problems achieving my goals of having illustrations in my text move appropriately with the text, in a two-column Frame Text environment. These illustrations may be screen captures or they may be outlined Frame Text that contains computer programming language code. (I'll refer to both of these specific use cases as "illustrations", to keep things simple.)

I've tried using Inlining With Text pinning the illustrations, which might be most natural, but it seems you lose the drag-in-the-GUI positioning that you can do with Float With Text pinning. It makes your illustration to font sizes, baseline offsets, etc, rather than letting them fit nicely below (or above) your explanatory text. There may be some trick to this that I've missed, of course.

With that in mind, I've taken to using Float With Text pinning, but that has some serious issues when used to pin an illustration to text in a two-column Frame Text. Let me describe: I pin my illustration to the end of the paragraph describing the illustration using Horizontal Inside Center of Column, and Vertical Inside Bottom of Line. I also set the illustration to wrap text, so that if I add another paragraph after the pinned-to paragraph, the text wraps to below the illustration. Does that make sense?

So let's recreate my issue: create a two-column Frame Text and insert into it in a paragraph of text. (Which will thus be at the top of the left column.) To the end of the paragraph, pin an independent Frame Text with a few lines of text (R code, in my case) in it and a line around it. Apply a Float with Text pin and wrap to the illustration as mentioned, above. It all works. Now insert additional paragraphs in front of the original paragraph until the bottom of original paragraph (where the pin is) gets closer to the bottom of the left column than will allow the illustration to fit. (I also have widow and orphan line prevention on.)

At this point, Publisher has a lot of conflicting priorities and it appears to reason through the problem thus: 1) I have to place this illustration in this column, but there's not enough room, so 2) I'll wrap the text at the end of the column to the next column, but 3) this text is the text to which the illustration is pinned, so now 4) I'll move the illustration vertically so that it's the proper distance below the pin point in the paragraph -- not calculating in column-inches, but in inches on the page. So the illustration ends up wrapping its pin point to the next column. If you try to drag it back to the right column, the text wraps back into the left column and it all happens again.

So I think one issue is that the Inside Center of Column horizontal control is to think of the two-column Frame Text as if the right column began immediately after the left column -- as it does when you are reading the text. The second issue is to ignore empty space at the bottom of a column in terms of the distance to the pinned illustration. So in my example, once the bottom paragraph gets so close to the bottom of the left column that the illustration won't fit, the illustration moves to the top of the right column and believes it to be as far below the pin point as it needs to be.

Again, I might be missing something, and if so I appreciate any pointers. This problem has cropped up three or four times so far in my 5-page guide and I've basically inserted fluff text to flow text until it all works. (Which is bad in itself, and will fail if I legitimately have to insert or delete other text that throws pin points back into the danger zone.)

 

[Old Bruce]

Could you attach a screen shot showing the pin's location and the way you want the text and image to be set up?

[wfolta]

I tried to upload screenshots yesterday and had errors. Finally worked.

Below is the screenshot of what happens sometimes: the illustration ends up in the previous column at the bottom. Some settings -- not sure which -- end up placing it in the left column, vertically closer to the pin point. What I would want is for the text to flow in the left column and the illustration to end up at the top of the right column.

That is, treat the two columns as if they were one. Anything pinned directly below some text should appear below that text in reading order, and as close below the text as possible while staying in bounds (if that option is checked)..

 I did a quick-n-dirty edit of the first screenshot to show what I'd like to see happen instead.

[fde101]

If I am understanding your description correctly, you might want to set that as Inline rather than Float.

Otherwise you would likely have this same issue with any similar program, not just with Publisher.  You might need to insert some extra paragraph breaks before that line if you want to keep it set as Float.

[wfolta]

I tried inline, but then you then seemingly lose the ability to drag-n-drop it to position it vertically and horizontally. I end up guessing numbers until I get what I want. In addition, the illustration appears to be treated as a character, so  adjusting parameters of your font or grid will move it in odd ways. I'm also not sure if inline would support the flexibility of horizontal positioning, either. I could be misunderstanding how inline works, though.

[fde101]

47 minutes ago, wfolta said:

the illustration appears to be treated as a character,

Yep, that is exactly what inline does.  If you need the flexibility of the other options, I don't think there is much you can do to have this work "automatically" the way you seem to be hoping for.  I could be mistaken as well and others might chime in with suggestions, but I suspect you will just need to check it after major changes and be prepared for a few manual tweaks when things jump boundaries like that.

[wfolta]

Thanks for clarifying things for me! Sounds like no way to do exactly what I want.

The problem with going back and hand-tweaking floating illustrations when things go wonky is that you really don't have options. You either insert fluff text to push things past the column break, or you pin the float to text other than you intended to pin it to. Which, over time, could lead to confusion of your text at illustrations one-by-one migrate away from where you're actually referring to them. In which case, it's like manually placing things on each page and not using pinning at all.

 

[Patrick Connor]

Sorry.

Thank you for reporting a problem using 1.7.x . It appears that a member of the Affinity QA team didn't get round to fully investigating this specific report posted in the bugs forums. We are very sorry for this oversight. Yours is one of a number of reports that I am posting this apology to, using an automated script.

Now we have released 1.8.3 on all platforms containing many hundreds of bug fixes, and we hope your problem has already been fully addressed. If you still have this problem in the 1.8.3 release build, then the QA team would really appreciate you reporting again it in the relevant Bugs forum.

• Report a Bug in Affinity Designer
• Report a Bug in Affinity Photo
• Report a Bug in Affinity Publisher

Each of those links above contains instructions how best to report a bug to us. If that is what you already did in this thread just copy paste your original report into a new thread. We appreciate all the information that you have including sample files and screen shots to help us replicate your problem.

This thread has now been locked as the QA team are not following the threads to which this automatic reply is made, which is why we would appreciate a new bug report if you are still have this problem in the current 1.8.3 release build.