Large unwanted font size

[Tony Watson]

When trying to apply a paragraph style, the paragraph that follows immediately changes to a massive font size. When I then apply the paragraph style to this one, the next paragraph changes to the massive font size and so on. This is driving me crazy. Any ideas? 

I'm using an Apple Mac 

[firstdefence]

Which app?

Within the style you are applying there is a part that dictates what style follows after the paragraph, so check the style settings. Alternatively upload the document for us to look at. If you would rather it not be accessed publicly you can ask a mod to give you a dropbox link and they will take a look, bear in mind they generally have the weekend off so you aren't likely to get a response until Monday. 

[Tony Watson]

36 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

Which app?

Within the style you are applying there is a part that dictates what style follows after the paragraph, so check the style settings. Alternatively upload the document for us to look at. If you would rather it not be accessed publicly you can ask a mod to give you a dropbox link and they will take a look, bear in mind they generally have the weekend off so you aren't likely to get a response until Monday. 

Thanks for your reply. Here's the file. It is part of a 48-page document, but I have only included the two relevant pages. I did look at the style and have tried changing the following style to 'No style' or 'same style', but it seems to make no difference. Hope you can help. I have been using In-Design for around 10 years, but the latest Macs won't run my version (CS3) and I don't want to pay out Adobe's extortionate leasing charge.

B&R 343 Words.afpub

Edited August 3, 2019 by Tony Watson

[firstdefence]

Very odd, if you pull the left-hand text frame up so that it pushes the large text into the right-hand column the text resizes correctly.

[firstdefence]

I'm not sure what I've done but I just kept highlighting the large text and applying the Words Body style.

 

B&R 343 Words reworked.afpub

[Wosven]

APub have a bad habit to remember/resize or keep style or character size. If you create a new frame and write, it'll italic.

I suspect APub is applying some older formatting on characters, perhaps from previous test to create an header at the beginning of the document?

To avoid such behavior I usually apply Character styles for bold, italic and bold italic, and apply a body paragraph style at all the text, erasing local formatting. (old local formatting seems to be the problem here).

Next style shouldn't modify the next paragraph when you only apply a style to a paragraph. It's only meant to be applied when you select different paragraphs and choose to apply "style X and next styles", but the result is the other paragraphs are styled, nothing more. Second use is when you enter text: it'll apply the next paragraph style after you hit "enter", and the text you'll write will be correctly formatted.

But it shouldn't work by itself  in other situations.

[Tony Watson]

That does seem to have worked thanks. I'll see how things go.

[Wosven]

Cleaning unwanted local formatting with button "T":

[R C-R]

8 hours ago, Tony Watson said:

Any ideas? 

I know practically nothing about the complexities of Affinity's text style stuff but one thing I noticed is the four text frames appear as individual layers in the OP's test file, yet in text entry mode "Select All" selects the text in all of them.

That doesn't seem right to me, in part because I copied all that selected text to the clipboard, pasted that into a TextEdit document, set it all to 7.5 pt, & copied that back into a new one page APub document. Then I used the shift-flow thing to flow the excess into new pages. After a little fiddling around (because I really don't know diddly about the text style stuff) I ended up with this 3 page Just Text.afpub file, with all the text in a single text frame layerthat flows across the 3 pages.

This somehow might have something to do with the weird large font size behavior ... or maybe I am just overlooking something obvious to those who actually understand text style inheritance?

[walt.farrell]

3 minutes ago, R C-R said:

the four text frames appear as individual layers in the OP's test file, yet in text entry mode "Select All" selects the text in all of them.

Yes, they are individual layers because they are individual objects (text frames). However, the frames are linked, so Ctrl+A selects all the text from that story (set of linked frames).

That becomes more obvious if you enable View > Show Text Flow.

[R C-R]

1 minute ago, walt.farrell said:

Yes, they are individual layers because they are individual objects (text frames). However, the frames are linked, so Ctrl+A selects all the text from that story (set of linked frames).

So why is there just one text frame in my 'just text' file? It is linked across 3 pages.

Or maybe more to the point, if there already is a set of linked text frames, is there any simple way to convert them to a single text frame like in my file?

[thomaso]

Such an unwanted change of text size in a (linked) text frame also does occur if that frame got scaled by using its outer handle in the bottom right corner. Then, even if re-scaled but with the inner handle, its text size can be very confusing.

In that situation assigning a common font size for all frames or selected text does not solve the issue.
Even to reset the style with "remove unwanted formatting" as in Wosvens useful hint does not work then.

I wonder if there is at all a way to undo such a mistaken resizing at a later moment. In way of resetting the frame scaling to its original 100%. –  ??

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Such an unwanted change of text size in a (linked) text frame also does occur if that frame got scaled by using its outer handle in the bottom right corner.

But in the OP's example file, wouldn't that apply to everything in the frame?

[thomaso]

It would affect all text within that frame but not all text (not the flowing text in other frames, which makes it so hard to get).
Sorry, I haven't checked OP's file because he announced it 5 hours ago to be solved already.

I mentioned it anyway because it does fit to the topics title and description (so, could have been the reason for the OP).
And, of cause, because I really would want to know how to reset an object to its initial 100% size.

[Wosven]

2 minutes ago, thomaso said:

In way of resetting the frame scaling to its original 100%.

I aalready posted aboutthis annoying behavior, and the fact that there's no visual infos about this scaling problem, and to easily input back 100%. Ithink that's the same problem when we use styles in AD and end up with strokes larger or thinier than expected.

A single sclae input that we can reverse to 100% would be the easier solution, instead of those blind modifications.

That's another problem that make APub difficult to use since changes can be small enough that you won't notice them unless you check values here and there. It would be a nighmare debugging files… I can imagine sending magazine templates to co-worker or extra help, and having to debug or correct the resulting file so the magazine layout would be respected (same problems with people using "pipette" in ID instead of applying correctly styles: the result is slighty different).

 

8 minutes ago, R C-R said:

wouldn't that apply to everything in the frame?

Perhaps not: the applied text style use a smaller font, and it's possible the local formatting was only applied to excess text out of the frame, or occured to eccess text only for unknown reasons.

[Old Bruce]

9 hours ago, Tony Watson said:

When trying to apply a paragraph style, the paragraph that follows immediately changes to a massive font size. When I then apply the paragraph style to this one, the next paragraph changes to the massive font size and so on. This is driving me crazy. Any ideas? 

I think what has happened is that the OP had a text frame which was resized by using the far bottom right resize handle. the text size was then enlarged, a new frame was made and text flowed through that and the accidentally resized text frame was deleted. This is some sort of bug, having the resized text continue to 'pollute' the existing and or new frames. I deleted the third frame, re-applied the style and made a new frame to flow the text through and all appeared fine.

B&R 343 Words fixed perhaps.afpub

[thomaso]

16 minutes ago, Wosven said:

That's another problem that make APub difficult to use since changes can be small enough that you won't notice them unless you check values here and there.

Indeed. That becomes more tricky – and so to say quite unprofessional – that probably all panel fields do show 1 certain value even for more than 1 selected simply as 1 true value, instead of making it obvious (e.g. by kind of grayed-out, brackets, or whatever) that in reality there is more than 1 value in the selection.

A very nasty UI feature "by Design".

[thomaso]

14 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

I think what has happened is that the OP had a text frame which was resized by using the far bottom right resize handle.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/94625-large-unwanted-font-size/&do=findComment&comment=504110  

So the issue wasn't solved yet? (as I had understood the OP's  3rd post 6 hours above: "That does seem to have worked thanks." )

[Tony Watson]

Thanks all for their help. I'm still checking through the various solutions. I have produced these documents in In-Design for several year now without encountering issues of this sort. Please bear with me while I try to get to grips with Publisher's intrincasies.