From the course: Affinity Publisher Essential Training

Save document history - Publisher Tutorial

From the course: Affinity Publisher Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Save document history

“

- [Instructor] In this movie we'll explore the history panel in Affinity Publisher and how it allows you to have a great deal of flexibility in undoing and redoing your steps as you work on a layout. I'll start by showing the history panel, which by default is grouped with the transform and navigator panels in the bottom right of the studio. If it's closed, you can always get it by choosing view, studio, history. I'll drag the panel out and expand it by dragging the bottom. The panel's blank right now, but if this document had been saved with its history included I would see steps here that I could undo even though I just opened the document, and we'll see how that works in just a minute. First, let's make some changes. I'll take the frame text tool, I'll put my cursor in the text from on the left page after the words "public gardens", and enter in some more words, "with Bob Taylor." I'll drag over those words to select them and go to the text menu and make them all caps by choosing text, capitalization, all caps. Notice that all my steps were captured in the history panel. I can click any step to jump back to it or I can drag the position slider to move between steps, or use the keyboard short cuts, Command + Z or Control + Z, to undo each of the steps. And Command + Shift + Z on the Mac or Control + Shift + Z on Windows to redo. Now I'll select all the text in the text frame and center it with the control in the context tool bar. Now, let's say that I didn't like the text centered, so I'll use the panel slider to undo that. And now instead of working on the text frame, I'll make some changes to the brown frame behind it. I'll select it with the move tool, and notice in the panel my new selection was captured and an icon appeared next to the previous step. This is the cycle history icon and it tells me that there's another branch of my history that Publisher's still keeping track of. I'll do a few more things in this branch of the history, like making all the corners a single radius, lower the corner size to 10%, and making them concave. Now if click the words in the step where my history branch in, I can undo to that point. But if I click the cycle history icon, something a lot more interesting happens. I toggle over to the other branch of the history, and instead of seeing the steps where I changed the corners of the frame I see where I centered the text. And I can use any of the methods I've described already to go forward or backward through this branch. To toggle to the other branch I just click the cycle history icon again. Now I'll change the fill color of the frame. And now if I toggle between the branches I could retrace my steps between three branches of history to where I centered the text, to where I changed the corners, or to where I changed the fill color of the frame. This really gives you an amazing degree of flexibility to experiment where you're designing a layout knowing you can always go back to all these different steps. And you could also save these history steps with the document by going to the file menu and choosing save history with document. You get an alert that anyone who opens the file will have access to your history steps. I'll click "Yes," that's okay, and save my document. I'll close it and reopen it by choosing open recent and picking this document. And there in the history penal are all my branches with their steps in tact and I can jump back to any one of them. Now, it's important to note that saving history in a document does increase the file size and it introduces the possibility of someone else undoing work that you did. So this is a very powerful feature, use it wisely. If you want to remove saved history from a document just go to the file menu and deselect save history with document. Now, if I go back to the beginning of my steps and save and close the document and reopen it the history panel is blank and all those steps are gone. So here we saw how to use the history panel in Affinity Publisher and how it can give you a lot of flexibility to retrace your steps when working with your documents.

Contents