Gianni Becattini

No, Boston, you are wrong seeing a bad willing from my side. I decided to buy the new release in first moment I sow it. As I said, software development costs.... The biggest point is selling something that does not work correctly. I believe that if you buy a dishwasher that chops your dishes, you were not happy. My company manages electronic payments. If we loose your money, are you going to simply forgive us? The other point is that many of us hoped that the new update could bring features that we were expecting since years. "Hundredths of improvements". A Publisher V2 not able to simply cross-reference pages as it should? Even free packages do that. You must admit that it is a bit disappointing, isn't it? In my absolutely personal opinion that I hope does not offend you or others, it is a mistake, more than a trick, to use the trust of the customers to sell something that was not adequately tested. I should have been more prudent before buying, you are absolutely right. And obviously I will try to be not so dumb in the future.

Each of us has its own attitude toward the life and the work. In my life I had to work much more than hard but I was lucky and I could get some important result. But I needed always to believe: believe in the ethics of the Company, believe in our projects, in our actions, believe in respecting customers. In my opinion, the quality comes from heart, before than brain or accounts. Is that the truth? Anyone can have their opinion. As I said, I was lucky, and in my case it worked.

No my Friend, you are judging bad. I had big discussions with Adobe, for silly problem of mine, and the last thing that I wish is to defend them. Not always who express sincerely its feelings is the enemy. It happens also the opposite.

Among the many others, I had problem exporting books. Sometimes (almost often) the preview remains stuck, with the spinning wheel and you have no other option than to kill A Publisher. Probably the preview process has its own problems. I found a simple solution that in my case worked. use digital pdf low or high quality, setting the resolution as you want set up the preferences with a small and simple book, so that the preview does not mess; they will be reproposed automatically; then you can open your book and export it correctly Not very logic but in my case worked, maybe useful for others.

I have 64G DRAM on the i9, and 16 on the M2, but they behave exactly. The solution seems to be splitting in smaller file using books. I loose the hyperlinks but much better than having a crash every two-three minutes. Thanks however.

It's simply a choice: even if the files are different, you could have a function for saving in the old format, loosing the new features if any (Microsoft tells you in details what you are loosing). Copy and paste: it seems THE MINIMUM!

I am not a graphical designer like most of you, but the founder and managing director of a rather big international industry, operating in IT and electronics. I remained fascinated by the Affinity Forum atmosphere, from so many enthusiasts believing in a nice dream of an alternative to big brands, and from the help that many of you gave me promptly when I needed (we have a graphic team internally, but I create personally most of the many documents of my company). So I decided to force a switch in my company from Ado to Affinity (few licenses, not a big deal for anybody), and was in some way proud of it, giving my microscopic help to a growing and "different" software house. V2 changed deeply my attitude: trusting Serif, I jumped on it immediately, but I had to understand that there were very few improvements, albeit sold as extraordinary, a dramatic drop in stability, few euros to pay, and no way back. It is a little sad: David didn't bring down Goliath, but has learnt something from him... Perhaps the reality is that software development is really expensive, and the Serif formula could not be sustained in long periods, without some tricks like the bigs. I can understand that even too well, and don't blame; many companies are forced to do that growing. Certainly Serif hat dissipated a great deal of trust and empathy.

If I open a V1 file and save it, it will be saved in V2 format. No function is provided to save in V1, as Microsoft and Adobe do. It could seem more a marketing choice, to avoid that after the trial, nobody goes back.

Thanks, friends. @Miriam: I also spent a lot of time on the terrible book export. I can give you some results: with long URL hyperlinks (string length greater than...) the export process crashes in the middle (and obtain a corrupted pdf) or process remains stuck; that is not valid in general, but is triggered by some specific images. Removing them, all returns OK. In my case, the images were APhoto large and complex files. Probably the conversion process has some bug when it converts these document in images to create the pdf. In my case, reducing the complexity of the files (or shortening the hyperlinks) resolved. Would you please explain me how you "created links into other chapters (links to pages)". Something like "see at page 21" ? Thanks

Other useful information: this problem is really triggered by too complex images linked in the document. Removing them the problem disappears. I could not yet discover which is the problem in the images, still investigating.

Is there any way to add an hyperlink from a book chapter to another chapter? Thanks

Sorry, I received a notification for a post from you few minutes ago, but it does not shows in the thread.

Sorry Walt, from here nothing is clear. So thanks twice for your interest and time.

WOW! GREAT !!!!!!!😄 It works!!!!! What you say is absolutely logic and I am a DONKEY not having thought of it before (I have spent more than 25 years of my life writing C++ software as if there were no tomorrow. and, as you say, I should well know that theory is different from practice...). That explains a lot of the problems that I had, not only this. Now its too late to go back and thanks to books I can now however survive. As I go forward, I will correct / replace the most complex situations. Some of them are furthermore really useless: for example, I totally forgot the cover of the document that I sent you, where there are as many as three large images overlaying... No enough words to thank you! If you come to Florence, I owe you a dinner with bistecca and Chianti...

Thank, you are the first person giving me reasonable, concrete and valuable help in these two terrible weeks since the V2 mess started. I try and inform you.

Did you understand that your users deal with real life, real work and real problems created by you early release of an unstable version? Your increased response time is the proof that you did a big mistake releasing a beta as a production version. But, as I said, I used to be a software developer in my previous life, and well know and understand the problems that you currently have. But this makes not easier mine. However, I believe I found a solution that seems to work for me (since yesterday, so I still could get surprises): split the document in many sub-document; use the nice new "book" V2 feature (eliminating the too long URL hyperlink, that in my case seems to be incompatible with the "book" organization). I spent two intense weeks to arrive here. Perhaps, a word from someone could help me to get out of the hell. It was enough "boy, we know we cannot handle currently large documents... try to split and use books...". Few minutes for you, two weeks for me. I strongly believe that in my shoes you would say exactly the same.

I spent hours following this problem and here is absolutely deterministic. I upload two files "Test OK" and "Test KO". The only differences are in the hyperlinks. I add also the corrupted pdf produced. Both work correctly independently, but if inserted in a book (even a single-chapter book), behave as told. I use the export setup indicated in the attachment (72 dpi, digital). Having removed the hyperlinks, until now everything is OK (besides some AP crashes). Before passing to the book structure I had a crash every 2-3 minutes, so now I am rather happy.... Test chapter KO.afpub Test chapter OK.afpub KO.pdf

Because all my chapter are son of a single document, now split, and thus have that unwanted first page.

For the moment, book is enough for me. I hope I am not too hasty, but it seems that hailed my ultra-huge problems with Publisher 2, that probably is unable to manage large documents. Converting my document to book was almost straightforward, but I had an extra problem, because with books there is another bug when you use hyperlinks with too long URL addresses. When you try to export, you have a crash or, more often, you get a corrupted pdf. It took hours to understand this problem. But now I can work almost as normal. When I save, I still have heartbeats, but respect having a crash every two-three minutes is a giant leap forward. I see the limits of Affinity, but I accepted them when I started to use it instead of Adobe (that I still have and pay). What I cannot accept is that they released V2 without a minimum test, practically not valuing the work of their customers. Surely a big strike to their image. Thanks.

Thanks for your time. I found a simple solution, that avoided any "hard" modification. I set the last page of each chapter as fully blank (black in my case), and the first page of the next chapter with a chapter title. The result is as shown in the attachment. Luckily for me, it was exactly what I wished to do...

Long URL addresses in hyperlink (e.g. https://vintagetek.org/7854-mostek-mkb36000-rom-repairs/) produce corrupted pdf in exporting a Book. Short URL strings (e.g. https://vintagetek.org/) have not this problem, that is absolutely repetitive and easy to reproduce. Tested on Mac i9 and M2, with Ventura 13.0.1. The same file, exported as a chapter, has not this bug.

I was forced to pass to the Book/Chapter structure, to avoid continuous crashes with Publisher 2. In this way things appear, until now, be more quiet. But I have a stupid problem that I cannot overcome, hope in some help. All my chapters begin with a right page, then a certain number of fronting pages, then a last left page (see the attachment 1, should not be clear). The question is: how can I remove the first page without making all the other pages to burst in the most complete confusion? In other word, how to transform the document to start on left page? I tried Document setup/Model/start on left page, but again, all the document gets messed up (see attachment 2). Thanks

Dear Friend, I am an IT professional with decades experience. You are absolutely right and I cannot explain to myself how I could be so dumb. Perhaps a great trust in Affinity. Formerly...

I discovered the problem. The hyperlinks are the cause (all of URL type, hard to explain why). Delete the hyperlinks and the export function will work again. Thanks for help, Affinity.

I discovered that there were 3 couple of pages (out of 412) that produced the problem. They seems not to have anything special. I will recreate them from scratch.