MikeTO

Instead of saving as package, try embedding all the images (Resource Manager, select all, Embed) and then linking them (just click Make Linked while they're all still selected). Then save.

I trust iCloud because I understand exactly what it's doing and I know it's limitations. You and I are both old timers and we could compare our data loss scars but I really think you should try iCloud even if just for fun. The worst that can happen is that iCloud will stop syncing - today that will happen only because of a super large file but perhaps there will be some new bug in the future. But even if it stops syncing you will still be opening and saving your files locally until you notice and fix the problem because that's the way iCloud works, it saves locally first and then syncs to the cloud. The only ways I can think of to lose your files with iCloud are: Have a sync problem and then you replace your Mac and do a restore from iCloud without realizing that iCloud wasn't fully up to date. But you and I wouldn't do this, we'd always have an external backup and would ensure iCloud was up to date before doing a restore. Have a sync problem and then edit an outdated iCloud file with another device, or directly from the cloud in a browser. I never edit files from a web browser and I rarely edit with a second device. But if I do I always check that the file I'm about to open is the right version. It's different than Microsoft's cloud where the worst that can happen is really as bad as you can imagine - Office 365 can open the cloud version when the local version is newer or it can open the local version when the cloud version is newer, and then you'll lose the previously-saved changes. That won't happen with iCloud. The problem with iCloud is that people rely on it as their backup. It's great that they have it as a backup if they lose their device because hardly anybody backs up their files, but it's not a complete replacement for backing up your data. Using iCloud Drive is quite cool - it's great to be able to open a file on your iPhone when away from your Mac. And setting up a new Mac from iCloud is so much easier than the old fashioned way. IMO the worst thing about iCloud is the other services that sync through it. With iCloud Drive syncing, you can see exactly what has synced and delete it directly from the cloud if you want, you're in control. But with app service synching, the data is in a hidden database. For example, with Safari syncing of open tabs and frequently visited sites, if the data gets corrupted (which it can) there's no way for you to purge it and start over.

That's correct, if I disable my network connection Affinity will be none the wiser, I will still be able to open and save all of my iCloud files. The changes will be synced when my network connection is restored. That's just the way iCloud works. Apps only know the iCloud path and when attempting to open an iCloud file macOS checks for a local copy in the user's Library folder and opens that if it exists. Only if there isn't a local copy does the app actually load the data from the cloud. Every one of my documents and images I have in iCloud is also on my local drive but this isn't true for a default setup. If you buy a new Mac and restore from iCloud your documents and images won't be downloaded to your Library folder until they're needed. I forced a full download to avoid issues with Affinity. I also never modify my Affinity files on another device so they're never outdated. If you modify data on another device then it's possible that the iCloud version will be newer than what's on your Mac. MacOS should sync the new data automatically but I can imagine there could be latency issues if you tried to open a document that used an image that hadn't synced yet. iCloud is far from perfect but this basic part of it works flawlessly. The biggest issue with iCloud is the bug with syncing getting stuck if you create too large of file which happened to me again while fixing the corrupted previews we're talking about. If you delete the big file immediately you'll be fine but if you don't notice it right away iCloud can get stuck and then you'll have to fix it manually. The approach Apple takes is to have you turn off iCloud syncing, delete all of your local files, and then restore from iCloud. This obviously makes me nervous so I backed up all of my local files to an external drive before doing it and after the restore was complete I went through every folder looking for lost files and I found several that hadn't been synced to iCloud after it got stuck. This took several hours so it's better to just delete huge files as quickly as possible.

I should have kept a copy of the file for testing but I can't re-test now. Yes, the document and its images are saved to iCloud and I'm aware of that type of issue but I don't think that's what's going on. The cloud/NAS issue is due to the inherent latency of loading resources from an external location but in my case everything is also stored on the internal SSD and that's where Affinity is loading them from. Affinity can't load them from iCloud if they're stored locally. There are a couple of scenarios were you could run into trouble with iCloud. First, combining a local network with cloud syncing can lead to issues. I've been burned so many times using Office 365 with Microsoft Azure on a corporate network with unreliable wifi. That combination makes it easy to wind up with a newer copy in Azure than you have locally. But another scenario even for a single user without a network is multiple devices. If the images are updated by device A and you open the document on device B, then the images in iCloud might be newer than those stored locally if they haven't synced down yet which could lead to latency in opening the document's images. With iCloud, files are saved locally first and then asynchronously synced to the cloud. It's possible for the sync to iCloud to fail or stall but you'll always have a local copy, at least until you or the OS chooses to offload it. None of my files are offloaded so Affinity is opening the local copy, not the cloud copy.

I think I've resolved this problem but it still makes me nervous so I thought I'd post about it. Publisher stores a preview of each linked photo for use in the thumbnails as well as to immediately render a photo before loading the externally linked photo. I've been working on a big book in Publisher for a long time and today the image previews became corrupted and I don't know how to resolve it. The thumbnails appear correctly except for the photos - the four images shown in this Pages panel thumbnail are nothing like the images - it's just garbage data. Notably, my file is usually 7MB when compressed and I'm not impacted by the file bloat problem but it wouldn't go below 17MB with this issue. So there was an extra 10MB of garbage data. When you go to a page, whether by double clicking it in the Pages panel or simply scrolling, Publisher shows the stored preview first and then replaces it with a higher resolution version. This became very noticeable to me because it first showed these garbage data previews in the main window and then replaced them with the actual photos. It's all very quick and it didn't impact printing or exporting but it's disconcerting and made me wonder whether I should abandon my current document and revert to a previous version. I restarted Publisher and restarted my Mac to no avail. Looking at the photos in the Resource Manager showed the same problem. I tried embedding and then relinking all of the photos but that didn't solve the problem. If I deleted a photo and added it back it was fine but given that I have hundreds of photos I was loathe to do that. I finally found a solution - I renamed the folder containing the images and allowed Publisher to relink them when I opened the file. With the photos linked, this resulted in a 2.5GB file due to the file bloat problem. But I embedded and relinked all the photos with the Resource Manager which got it back to 7MB. Anyway, it's fixed now but I was a bit worried about the document. I have a backup from yesterday but I'm glad not to have lost all of today's work. I'm using 1.10.5 with the latest macOS on an M1 Pro.

I'll update the table one last time after somebody posts data from a new M2 MacBook Air or MacBook Pro.

I can't speak to why the 3090 score is low but just an aside from compiling the table - the graphic scores seem to be fairly consistent for reports of the same card. The Vector Multi CPU scores seem to fluctuate more, at least on macOS, presumably because the user has other tasks running or the OS is doing something else. I thought there was enough data for people to make purchase decisions and wasn't going to update the table again but I'll do it one last time once there are reports for the new M2 MacBook Air and base MacBook Pro. I'll add Walt's data at the same time.

Yes, I'm in Toronto. If there's a document or even a page of a document you can share in which the problem can be duplicated, I'll take a look if you upload it. If it's still happening after closing and re-opening the dialog then this might be something stranger. If you save, close, and re-open, does it still happen then? BTW, another bug in the macOS spell checker that could be causing your issue is sometimes Publisher will underline a word to indicate that it's misspelled but the option to Learn the spelling isn't available to you. This is not Publisher's fault, it's a bug in macOS. I've duplicated the problem with Apple's own apps. Why are you using the UK English spelling dictionary? While Preferences > General > Language only allows you to choose English (which is UK) or English US, you can use Character > Language > Spelling to set the language for your copy to "English (Canada)". Just do this for the Base style and everything else will inherit it. Tip for Canadian users: With Preferences > General > Language set to English (which means UK), the other panes in Preferences that are language specific will default to English (UK). So when adding words to the Auto Correct, Abbreviations, Title Exceptions, and Filler Text lists you must ensure that you select English (Canada) for each page. The choice is specific to each pane so you have to choose it for each one, and your choice will be sticky only until you quit Publisher. I've been frustrated several times by adding words to the UK lists by mistake. Also, while English (UK) has lots of useful preset values for Auto Correct, Abbreviations, and Title Exceptions, there are no preset values for English (Canada). I went through the UK presets and manually copied the ones I wanted to English (Canada). It was a very tedious hour but it was worth it.

To make the small text frames move with the text as you edit it, float the small text frame and anchor it before the first character of the word. Draw a text frame and format it as desired. While it's selected with the Move tool, click Float in the Pinning panel. Position it above the word. Drag the anchor (a solid blue circle) before the first character of the word. To make additional text frames, duplicate the first one, Float, position it, and drag the anchor. Now edit the text and the frames will move with their anchors.

I think this a different problem which I haven't seen myself in Affinity but I use search in a different way than you. You're using Text > Spelling > Spelling Options while I'm using Preflight. I bet you can workaround your issue by closing Spelling Options and re-opening it but you could also avoid it by using Preflight. The feature you're using is the macOS spelling dialog. If the cause is what I think it is, the workaround would be to close the dialog and re-open it. Some productivity apps used to have bugs with modeless spell check and modeless find & replace because they built a list of all of the search results or misspelled words and got 'confused' when the user did something else, like editing the text more than is required to correct or replace the word. Then the app's list of results or misspelled words got offset by the number of characters inserted or deleted outside of spelling or replacing. This type of bug was really common years ago but is less common with modern apps. But regardless, the workaround of closing and re-opening the dialog should fix it. The other way to spell check is with Preflight and it definitely doesn't have the bug you're describing so I recommend using it. Just go to Preflight and click any mispelled words in the list and it will always take you to the right one. You can customize Preflight if you're getting lots of other warnings that aren't important. I also rely on Preflight because it's currently the only way to update an index that is in a text frame on a master page layer. Regardless of how you spell check in Affinity, if you're dealing with large amounts of text it's not going to find all the misspelled words due to a bug in macOS. The macOS spell checker simply fails to find everything when it's faced with too much text or too many misspelled words at once. I've spent a few days testing this and duplicated the problem in Apple's own apps. For example, I deleted my custom dictionary, rebooted, and then created a document with Apple's own apps using just the words that had been in the dictionary. Every word should have been flagged as a misspelling but it failed to find all of them. If I restarted and tried again with a different combination of the words, it might find one of the words it has missed the previous time. Spell checking on macOS is just buggy. I swore I'd never install MS Office on my own Mac again but I might break down if Apple doesn't fix this bug. If you have MS Office you might consider proofing the text in Word first since Office uses Microsoft's own spell checker and wouldn't have this bug.

Save As has no impact on the M1 file bloat issue. In my experience, the file bloat doesn't happen every time. Here's how I think it works: You're working with a document that contains 1 or more linked images - in my case TIFF. You can work with it for a long time and it will be fine, the size will increase a bit with the use of Save until it reaches the point that Publisher optimizes the space and it goes back to the minimum size. The same could be achieved by using Save As. When you trigger the issue, a trigger that none of us have figured out yet, the file size will bloat. You can trigger the issue by doing nothing other than inserting a few paragraphs of text into a story. This is only a hunch but I think Publisher is embedding a copy of one or more linked images even though they are still marked as linked. If your images are all 40MB, your 10MB file might now be 50 or 90GB. You can work with this file for a long time and it will be fine, 50MB is the new baseline and it will increase a bit with each Save until it reaches the threshold and recompresses back to 50MB. It will never drop below 50MB until you use the embed/link workaround. Then you trigger the bloat bug again and the file size increases again. This size is your new baseline and it will never drop below this until you use the workaround. This is just a hunch, but I believe as long as you're working in just one area of the document you will be unlikely to see the file size bloat from 10MB to 1GB at once. But if you make edits across the entire document, say you're using find and replace to clean up terminology, you might trigger the bloat issue for many pictures at once and that's when the size explodes to GB in one go. I've done that a couple of times and when I saw that Save was taking longer than normal I checked the file size and saw what was happening. I quickly did the embed/link workaround, Saved As under a new name, and deleted the bloated file which was still in the process of growing. Tip for iCloud users: don't allow files to grow to GB's, you can plug up iCloud file syncing, which is relatively easy to resolve, but break Safari bookmark/frequently visited/open tabs syncing and that's hard to resolve. Apple hasn't fixed this bug yet. We can't really avoid the bug for now but if it works the way I think it might, splitting a long document up into multiple stories may decrease the frequency and severity of the issue. If your file keeps growing and you have a long document with a single story, try making each chapter a separate story. It won't solve the problem - I've done that and still encounter the bug regularly - but it might make it less severe. It also improves editing performance so it's a good practice anyway.

Are you left-handed? I was confused by your comment at first, I can easily type Ctrl+Z without letting go of the mouse but then I realized that is because I'm right-handed. I hadn't realized that the handy ZXCVB shortcuts were more convenient for right-handed people. However, you could assign a different shortcut key to Undo that you could use with your right hand if you choose

Cross references are my #1 feature request.

That video is interesting - I can trigger the issue on demand in Photo by covering up the camera and then clicking around the menu bar. I cannot trigger the issue on demand by doing the same thing in Publisher. That makes me think there's more than one reason for the persistent beachball issue on some M1 systems. So the next time this happens to me in Publisher I'll try what he suggested and turn off Automatically Adjust Brightness in system prefs and see if that makes a different. Thanks.

I don't think auto sections as in MS Word would work well in a page layout program due to the text flow issue. In Word, text only flows forward but in Publisher I can flow text from a frame on page 1 to page 2 to page 3 and then back to a second frame on page 1. If I was able to insert a section break into that story and that break fell on page 1's second frame, what should the page number be on page 2? I think Publisher handles sections the right way for a page layout program but there is more that could be done. Ideally, we should be able to see the sections in the Pages panel - double click a section to see its pages and double click again to collapse it. We should be able to drag a section to change the order. This begs the question of whether you should be able to flow text from a frame in one section to a frame in another section. I think it would solve so many problems if stories could not span sections. The Pages panel should also have the ability to choose between seeing section page numbers or the current absolute page numbers. I'd like to see my front matter with page numbers of I, ii, iii and my body pages starting with 1. An even more robust implementation would allow sub-sections so you could define sub-section page numbering. I'm sure there are other features that could be added but these are a few from my wishlist.