smk

Hello @dominik, I just got back to this. I can open your converted file but it still caused publisher to hang when I selected a chunk of it. It's interesting to see how differently the file seems to behave on different systems. I can open the file (original) in about 4 seconds and see it just fine. The converted file takes about 6 seconds. In any of the pdf's I can select a "bunch" of items from the Layers panel, then copy and paste into another document works fine (but if I select too many it hangs). As others have pointed out, publisher is not supposed to be a pdf editor, but being lazy, it's nice to be able to open pdf's (or other formats) and grab the pieces I need to composite in my "final" documents without a lot of switching back and forth. Affinity generally works pretty well for this and maybe the file I happen to borrowing from is just messed up. The lock-up behavior I would still consider to be a bug, so hopefully that may get taken care of in future releases. In the meantime, thanks to all for suggested work-arounds and comments

When I try to open a "large" (it's actually only 689K) pdf file and select object (there are 62605 objects according to publisher) the program hangs and never returns. I end up closing publisher by force after it fails to respond. Example file attached. I've had no problem manipulating pdf's with smaller numbers of object and using these in publisher layouts. anchor-bolting-bracing-foundation-drawing.pdf