Text font size keeps changing - How to prevent this?

[Charles Mosteller]

I've spent most of the day playing around with Affinity Publisher. However, I am encountering a problem, and I am continually fighting the program to keep font in text columns the same font size. Everything will be fine, and then a sentence or a few sentences change either up or down in size, in the middle of the article. Truly, it's maddening, since I spend more time going backa nd forth, changing the font size back to the correct size, over and over and over, again. Even copying the text from a text editor doesn't help.

Any ideas?

[walt.farrell]

6 hours ago, Charles Mosteller said:

Any ideas?

If you're using multiple Text Frames, and have been adjusting their sizes, make sure that when you do that you use one of the handles attached to the frame, not the detached handle on the lower right. That detached handle is a scaling handle, not a resizing handle, and it will change the font size as well as changing the frame size.

[thomaso]

In case of linked text frames having used the outer handle can create additional confusion and might give the impression not being able to assign one font size to all containing text.

[Charles Mosteller]

The text frames, themselves, are already set. I'm not trying to use a handle to change the text size with. I've been clicking inside of the text box, and even tried CTRL-A to highlight all text that I want to set the size for, to no avail. Is there no quick and easy way to get all of the text for an article across multiple pages set to the same size, without spending hours fighting it back and forth? I've even tried starting over from scratch, several times. I appreciate any help.

[thomaso]

52 minutes ago, Charles Mosteller said:

The text frames, themselves, are already set. I'm not trying to use a handle to change the text size with.

In my example above, I set the frame sizes with the outer handle before inserting text. This means you may have already created this problem "already set", but this became apparent later.

52 minutes ago, Charles Mosteller said:

I've even tried starting over from scratch, several times.

In case you only entered new text in a frame scaled with outer handles that would not work. Instead you need to create new frames. Unfortunately there is no way to reset an object which got scaled with the outer handle to its initial size; there also is no UI to see whether an object got scaled that way at all.

To determine whats going on in your document or app it might be informative to see a screencast of you creating a text frame, pasting text and getting confusing font size.

[Charles Mosteller]

8 hours ago, thomaso said:

In my example above, I set the frame sizes with the outer handle before inserting text. This means you may have already created this problem "already set", but this became apparent later.

In case you only entered new text in a frame scaled with outer handles that would not work. Instead you need to create new frames. Unfortunately there is no way to reset an object which got scaled with the outer handle to its initial size; there also is no UI to see whether an object got scaled that way at all.

To determine whats going on in your document or app it might be informative to see a screencast of you creating a text frame, pasting text and getting confusing font size.

Yesterday, I actually ended up starting completely over on the entire document. The problem kept on reoccurring. I will try again, this evening, but it certainly isn't very user-friendly, whereas much of the program is. If, as you say, the program doesn't tell you that there's a problem, and if there's no way to reset an object which got scaled wrong, that strikes me as a rather poor design of that particular "feature.""

The core problem, for me, is that it is a deal breaker, on the purchasing end of things. If it does this, it's usefulness plummets dramatically. Of course, with any new product, there will be things that need to be smoothed out. The program certainly has a lot of very nice features. I have found the videos to be helpful. I appreciate being able to draw on the forum as a resource, also. I do, however, need to be able to consistently control the font size in documents created with Affinity Publisher.

[Fixx]

That is weird behaviour that is not happening with other users. I hope you can clear the problem.

Are you using styles to format text? It should recover text size easily.

[thomaso]

On 8/20/2019 at 5:31 AM, Charles Mosteller said:

I am continually fighting the program to keep font in text columns the same font size. Everything will be fine, and then a sentence or a few sentences change either up or down in size, in the middle of the article.

Can you please upload an .afpub which contains such a weird font size change within a text frame?
(at best in a common font face to make us see the same as you.)

[Charles Mosteller]

Here is a screenshot of one such instance. The font was set at 16 point Verdana. The text portion circled in red decided to convert itself to 13 point Verdana. Sometimes, certain portions of the article would increase to 20 point size. Granted, perhaps it is due to something that I've done intermittently and repeatedly over a span of several hours in back-to-back repeats. Yet, that indicates to me that it is capable of repeating itself, whether by myself or others.

I think that I have six more days left in my trial period. Hopefully, I can sort it out by then.

 

[thomaso]

This screenshot does not allow at all to inspect the situation. It does not show any object selected and no panel setting, as for instance text style or frame properties. It just shows text in different sizes. To inspect what's going on it will be necessary to check various settings, either with an .afpub or with a screencast which demonstrates the process when you create such a text frame up to running into the issue.

[Charles Mosteller]

I went ahead, a few days ago, and started over from scratch on a new document, and have been able (thus far, at least) to avoid the problem, by following the advice listed in this thread.

Additionally, I went ahead and purchased Affinity Publisher, even though there's still a lot about the program that I have not yet mastered, nor even attempted to utilize, as of yet. The videos that I watched were helpful and instrumental in my purchase decision, as was this forum and the advice provided by various forum users here. One feature that I would like to see, assuming that I did not just outright overlook it, is an option to add a caption to images and photos that I insert into a document when using Affinity Publisher. Ultimately, I opted to publish the first document that I created using Affinity Publisher while foregoing the use of image captions, but a quick and convenient way to inset image captions is an option that I think that many would find to be useful.

 

Affordability and pricing scheme were also other factors that weighed heavily in my purchasing decision.

[Stacey L]

The font size change happened to me today - I tried to link overset text to a new text frame, and the font reduced to 5pt from 11pt. I tried a few things to rectify, but due to lack of time, eventually went with unlinking and creating a new standalone text frame. I'm happy to share a file, if someone wants to analyse it? 

[thomaso]

17 hours ago, Stacey L said:

I tried to link overset text to a new text frame, and the font reduced to 5pt from 11pt.

Seems you have scaled one of the text frames with using the outer handle.

17 hours ago, Stacey L said:

I'm happy to share a file, if someone wants to analyse it? 

Unless you hadn't activated "File" > "Save history" we users can't analyse how frames got scaled, or even if at all. Unfortunately Affinity offers no option yet to check the scaling values for frames or to reset them to 100%.

[Lauren67]

On 8/20/2019 at 3:12 AM, thomaso said:

In case of linked text frames having used the outer handle can create additional confusion and might give the impression not being able to assign one font size to all containing text.

You responded to my comment on another thread - this is the problem I'm having.  I'm hoping I won't have to redo the entire document 😩

[Lauren67]

I recreated the doc.  Problem 'fixed' 😏

[SLP310]

This also happens to me.  If I create the file in publisher I cannot link it to another page without a large font increase.  If I take the file out of publisher and into Word, then import it back into publisher it works fine.

[ErikJon]

Yes, this seems to be a common problem for many users, and the same problem is happening to me, as well.

Of course, we have read all the posts above, and are well aware of the resizing that takes place when using the outer-corner-handle, but this is not what we are experiencing. First of all, the resizing takes place instantly when using that outer handle, and we would be well aware of it immediately. Rather, what is happening to the rest of us is that, through normal text-frame manipulation á la Indesign we sporadically find the text in one paragraph to be of 11.9 points, and the text in another paragraph, 11 points, and so on. No relation to the outer handle, since we are careful not to touch the outer handle anyway.

So, then, aside from redoing the entire text, how do we prevent this mysterious text-resizing from taking place?

[ErikJon]

Perhaps this is a bug that occurs only when reflowing text from one frame to another. This is what others seem to be experiencing.

[ErikJon]

By the way, for whatever it is worth, all of the text in my document was originally composed as an RTF file using the simple word-processor called Jarte (for Windows). When I got the text the way I wanted, I selected all of it within Jarte, copied it to the clipboard, and pasted it into a text frame in Affinity Publisher.

[Hangman]

Hi @ErikJon and welcome to the forums,

You’ve posted this in the ‘Pre V2 Archive’ forum so assume you’re experiencing this in v1.X…

If so this is likely due to a long standing known bug which has been fixed in v2.5.2 though the subtle change between 11 pt and 11.9 pt is slightly unusual…

Could you upload your rtf file or a sample rtf file exhibiting the problem so we can a closer look at what might be going on…

[ErikJon]

Hello, my friend. Thank you for the insight.

To be honest, I went to this thread directly from a Google search, and did not realize that it was a section dedicated to older versions of Publisher. I apologize.

Incidentally, I am using 2.5.0, in which the problem still persists, so, if you are certain that the 2.5.2. has the bug fixed, but that the 2.5.0 does not, I will go through the trouble of updating.

 

[Hangman]

Hi @ErikJon,

I would suggest you create a new post in the appropriate bug forum depending on whether you're seeing the issue on Mac or Windows and ideally upload a sample RTF file so we can take a look and see if we can replicate the issue and its cause...

V2 Mac Bug Forum

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/127-v2-bugs-found-on-macos/

 

V2 Windows Bug Forum

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/128-v2-bugs-found-on-windows/

[ErikJon]

Hey, everyone. I think I've found the solution.

My document had consisted of an imported PDF with automatically-generated text frames. I had been trying to work with that text and those frames. 

HOWEVER, instead of importing PDF text, or copying, pasting, or importing RTF text, and trying to manipulate or apply Publisher styles to that, I finally converted all of my text to simple TXT in an external text editor like Notepad++, then copied the new, clean, simplified text to the Clipboard, deleted my existing text frames from the Publisher document (PDF import), and pasted my Clipboard text into a fresh new text frame. At that point I never had a problem again; styles applied well to that, the sizes never changed again, and frames flowed beautifully. So I managed to retain 80% of my PDF layout, but creating new text columns was a cinch. 

So, my conclusion is that there had been something undesirable embedded in the previous text, that was hindering ordinary formatting efforts, but it was finally cleaned out by doing this little text conversion mentioned above.

(I assume that some similar degree of problems would have happened even by copying RTF text to the Clipboard, but perhaps not. At any rate, fresh simple text with fresh new text frames solved the problem. ) 

Thanks for all the help. I am glad to see that it was not a"bug" per se, but a question of using corrupted text.