In this Affinity Publisher tutorial we’re going to look at how you can create text flow. Text flow is when you have a text box and there is more text than can fit into that text box you can set it so it will automatically flow into the next text box.

Let’s see how this works:

I am going to start on a Master page. Right now I just have one page in my document and one master page.

With the frame text tool, I will draw out a text box on the left side of my Master A page.

When I do that, you’ll see there’s a little triangle that pops up off to the side of the text box.

When I get close, my cursor changes to a black arrow with a little kind of barbell appearance. I think it’s meant to be a chain link.

I’m going to click on this triangle. You can see my cursor changed again to having a little red X.

Next, I’m going to go to the place where I want my next text box. I’m holding onto my mouse button as I drag out another text box and you can see the little line connecting the two text boxes.

Now I can let go of the mouse button.

Now when I change to the Move tool and I click on either of these triangles in either of these text boxes I can see the link between them.

Connecting Spreads in Your Document

Now, when I go over here into my actual document I can add some pages. Let’s add four of Master A.

To test this, I’m going to go to page number two and I have loaded up on my clipboard some lorem ipsum text.

I am going to paste that. I have about a thousand words here and when it got to the bottom of the first text box, the remaining text automatically moved on to the next page.

Now let’s go ahead and select this text. I’m just going to CMD A (CTRL A on PC) to select it all and we’ll make the font bigger and see what happens.

What will happen is now i’m getting the overset text warning on my second text box. This means that there’s too much text to fit in these two frames now that I’ve increased the font size.

Now, why didn’t it move on to the next page? So here’s the little kind of finicky part. I need to link each two page spread to the next one.

If you have a large document this could be a bit of a pain but what I would probably do is set this
up once on a document and then every time you have a new book that you’re trying to lay out, you could go back to this blank document that’s already all linked. Use it like a template.

To link the pages what I need to do now is click on this little red arrow at then end of my spread and then as I hover over this next text box on the following spread you’ll see it turns blue . I can just click
when I see the blue and now my text is moving on to the next page as well.

So to recap, you can link text in your Master pages but when you actually get into your document you are going to have to connect your page 3 to your page 4, your page 5 to your page 6, etc. in order to get a continuous flow through an entire book.

Watch the video above for a demonstration of all of this.

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