Tearlach

You can actually do this (albeit not very elegantly) in LibreOffice... (https://www.linuxuprising.com/2019/02/how-to-create-fillable-pdf-forms-with.html) So it's not exactly super-secret, super-proprietary Adobe technology. Maybe Affinity ought to see if anyone contributing to LibreOffice would be interested in a little freelance work...

Yes, that's rather disappointing. Many of us have begged and pleaded for this during the life of version 1.0... seems it ought to be pretty high on the list for v.2.0

Is that after the brand new 1.10.3 release? Just curious, as it appears (but I can't swear it) to have cured several of my other major, fairly regular crashing issues. -c

Great to hear but, I will also withhold judgement until I have time to put it through its paces. I was assured by other users that several bugs have been 'fixed', but they still dogged my Windows install. (they have been less feisty on the MacBook, however). Here's hoping.

Thanks for the suggestions. I do have an update, although it may have no bearing on the fix in the pipeline. I just had another 'new' document (created by copying ALL my layers to a new empty document because I was stuck...) which I had saved several times successfully "with history". It finally failed to save with the known error. I used your trick - turn OFF history. Save. (it worked). But then I re-enabled save history with file, to see if it would save the history once I got it rolling. Nope. That's a BIG nope. It refused to save (same error) and when I went to disable "save history", the file closed without warning. No error. No message. It was just gone. All I could see was the other open file (older) and it was rendering incorrectly. There were huge chunks of black screen scattered like mosaic tiles across the image. Zooming out resolved the rendering errors, but the 'new' file was gone. Using "open" to try to re-open that new file I got a "Failed to Open File - File is already open..." error (attached). That's not good. I don't know how to trigger a recovery file event without an app crash? Not yet sure if quitting designer will release the 'already open' file or not. That's the next test.

Hi Sean, Yes to pretty much all of that. I have hundreds of objects in many, many groups - several of which have been promoted to layers over the course of the docuement's life. I did recently enable "Save History" because I was trying to go back to a prevsious state and bring back something from BEFORE a change had been made - and paste it into a newer copy of the document. Sort of a resurrection from an error of foresight. To that end I was both using 'save history' and duplicating the document in the Finder. The only thing in your list that isn't certain is step 3. I don't believe I had recently tried to "Save As..." (before the "promote group to layer") but it's possible. if so, it may have been weeks ago. This is not a new document - it's more of an ongoing project... but it had always behaved perfectly before 1.10.x came out. My attempts to "Save As..." mostly started as part of my recent efforts to consolidate some edits from the history with a new copy of the document... and then after that to figure out how to save the document at all. But overall, I think we are talking about the same bug. thanks charlie

This purely a "I hope this helps someone else save some work." addendum. I discovered (perhaps it's no surprise to others) that if I export the file as an SVG format (which it will still do for me, even when it's refusing to save or save-as a designer document), the file preserves the layers and groups. I knew it was a vector format, but I didn't realise it kept all the metadata. Excellent! You only get your visible layers in the export, as far as I can tell - so turn everything on that you are trying to save! It also converts the document size/scale to pixels... which is a bit of a bore. (so my drawing is now about 100,000 px by 200,000 px) But I was able to save the work I was otherwise about to lose, because it eff-ing did it again, and I'd gotten complacent and not saved things for about 4-5 edits.

I knew it couldn't really be fixed. New error (but only a slight modification on the previous save as problem). This time on regular "Save" (of a different fork of the large file I had opened) it failed, but offered to let me "Save As..." That also failed with the same error, putting it into and endless loop of failing and offering to "Save As..." The only solution I have so far is to save my file after almost any edit - and as soon as it fails to save (of late, it always does) I Quit Designer and reopen the file. It will then be fine for an unpredictable period of time. This is not a large file, but it does have a large number of nested layers and groups - as well as a couple or three 'symbols'. So far only the 'large' (2MB) files I'm working with have had the issue.

Last one. I hope. But an interesting footnote. The hard crash fixed the problem with "Save As..." with that file. I can now save it (and all the others) just as one would expect. That suggests that the problem is not with the file itself (even though it only appeared with the one file), but with something buried in the running application code & data. Have yourselves some fun with that. I'm having a coffee.

Well the only way to create a current version of my edited document that I could save, as far as I could tell, was to create a new document and copy/paste all the content from the broken one to the new one. That took nearly 2 minutes of spinning beachball to complete the paste (it's only 2MB of data, for crying out loud). But it did copy. Unfortunately my very first attempt to edit an element in this NEW (unsaved) file caused an immediate crash of Designer - taking out the application, all my recent changes (the recovery file was older than the last successful save), and the new file entirely. I'm essentially starting my morning's work over again. I am not pleased. I did not have a single Affinity crash up to 1.9.x. I have essentially been unable to use Photo or Designer 1.10.x in either Windows are MacOS for any practical purpose. The entire fork seems to be in beta. At least I have a crash report for you now. Affinity Designer_2021-09-14-141815_MacBook-Air.crash

Another addendum, this one much more serious. I had not tried saving my file. I cannot save my file at all. So while I can edit it, and export it, I can't save changes or save it as a new file. Essentially the same dialog error (attached). This is not good.

Quick follow up. I am able to "Export" the file as a PDF. It was very slow, and it created a PDF that was awfully slow to open in Preview on MacOS, but it did work. It was able to do this in the same folder that it is UNABLE to "Save As..." in.

New problem here. Designer 1.10.1, MacOS 11.6, M1 MacBook Air 16GB/1TB. Tried to "Save As..." a document I'm working on and got the attached mysterious message: "Failed to save document: DOCUMENT.NAME.afdesign" "Save failed due to an internal error. This should be reported to the development team." (dialog attached) There was no crash, so there is no crash report to upload. 3 Other files (2 Affinity designer files, 1 PDF file) could all be "Saved As" just fine to the exact same location that my MAIN file (below) could not. The files that worked are 92KB to 450KB in size. The main document is just at 2MB. When I try to "Save as..." and it fails, it does create a Zero KB file of the name I requested with extension .afdesign in the folder. Attempting to open that (presumably empty) file gives another odd error, suggesting that: "The file is already open in another application." (dialog attached) I can duplicate the large/failed document in the same folder, so write permissions in the directory is not the problem (or at least not system wide). So that is a work around, but it is not a good one. I see that something similar was reported in Windows Publisher, I believe. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/147767-save-failed-due-to-internal-error/ thanks, Charlie

This is the 3rd such compete wipe-out. It begins with a spinning rainbow wheel of doom, which can last (intermittently with the arrow cursor) for a few seconds to a few minutes before the app quits. Unlike the Windows crashes, this is not a 'hang' (Not Responding). It's a full blown crash that notifies the OS. Sometimes the recovery file is OK. Previous crash, opening the recovery file on re-launch caused another crash (which subsequently lost the recovery file - or perhaps intentionally flushed it to prevent a 3rd crash?). This last one, the recovery file was OK. It stumbled opening it (rainbow beach-ball), but then settled down and has not crashed again. At the time I had been trying to re-map a command-key, but I couldn't find the command. I closed the Preferences pane and was doing nothing specific (scrolling, I think, or typing in the "help" menu) when the hang began... which became a crash. Up to date release version. Up to date MacOS. New M1 MacBook Air. 16GB RAM. 1TB SSD. Crash report attached. (mistakenly posted the 1st Designer Crash at the end of my other thread on a Photo Crash, but I didn't want to double post. Sorry 'bout that. That thread is here: ) I don't have data from the 2nd crash, apologies. Affinity Designer_2021-09-07-104823_MacBook-Air.crash

Sorry - I just realized that my original report was for Photo... and this crash was designer. I flip back and forth so often that I got lost. It should probably go in a different thread. Mea Culpa.

I can open a new thread if needs be, but the topic title here is still correct. The conditions were different. Affinity Designer 1.10.1 "quit unexpectedly" while I was attmempting to paste a style from one rectangle (with gradient fill) to 6 other (identical) rectangles elsewhere in the drawing. It stumbled. Then it hung. Then BANG it was gone. It did manage to open its 'recovery file' this time, but it did not recover all of my work. Same machine as above. Only updated Designer when the last commercial release appeared. Crash log below. Affinity Designer_2021-08-31-094238_MacBook-Air.crash

Sorry, I guess I was fairly concise when I said "in background". What precipitated (or "coincided with" might be more accurate) the event was attempting to open a file that I had been emailed (a black-and-white bitmapped PDF file of a scanned document). I used the old: right-click, "Open with...", "Affinity Photo"... from within the Mail app - directly on the attachment. I did not save the file to a new location first. Affinity Photo was running in background at the time - with a couple of documents (edited but not saved) open. I can't recall the precise sequence of events that followed, but the scanned document never opened and Photo "quit unexpectedly". Then ensued a strange sequence I've never seen. I asked it to reopen (standard system dialog box) and in the process Affinity Photo opened TWO separate terminal windows (in background) in which a series of commands and responses appeared. I'm afraid I did not save those transcripts. One of them said something about clearing scratch space or flushing caches or the like (I paraphrase, but that was the gist) Affinity Photo did attempt to reopen. It asked if I wanted to recover documents. I said "yes", and it crashed hard again (quit unexpectedly). That's the second crash report above, about 1 minute after the first. I don't believe that it opened the terminal again this time, but I did request it to reopen again (from the system dialog that asks), just to see what would happen. The 2nd time it did reopen successfully... unfortunately asking about recovering documents - unsuccessfully. It's actually been running since then (about 15 hours, overnight) without another crash. It hasn't been doing much work. Mostly it's been in background with that B&W file open (and edited). It did edit that document for me successfully. It did NOT manage to recover work from the previously open documents. -charlie

So having struggled for days with terrible crashes on my Windows installation (and happy that my Mac version was still working), today Photo 1.10 (official release) quit unexpectedly in background. It offered to recover open files, but failed. Then it crashed again the same way. It's now running, but I have two crash reports to post from the Console crash log. This is a new M1 MacBook Air 16GB RAM 1TB SSD storage. OS data is in the crash logs. Affinity Photo_2021-08-18-171834_MacBook-Air.crash Affinity Photo_2021-08-18-171900_MacBook-Air.crash

So purely as a point of interest. Today the 1.10 version of Photo on Mac had a spasm of quitting spontaneously and unexpectedly. I wasn't even using it, it was just running in background. I haven't seen a Mac program do that in years. It did at least leave traces in the crash log console, which I will probably go post on the Mac crash report section... but the problems are not exclusive to the Windows side.

Trying that now (DISM.exe Restorehealth followed by sfc/). The logfile (cbs.log) indicates a few random directories that are 'owned twice or have security set twice', mostly they seem to be directories in the StartMenu tree. They are all marked "arch amd64", which is a little peculiar given it's an Intel platform... but I suppose that could just be a weird windows thing. While it seems to think they are all fixed, the fixes appear to have replaced the owner of the directory with the exact same owner. Example from CBS.log: Probably half a dozen entires like that. Anyway - they seem like unlikely candidates to cause issues like this, but we'll see.

I should follow up as well to say that I did a clean remove-and-install of the public beta version on my Windows 10 machine at the office. I also turned OFF hardware acceleration. The application was snappier and more stable for a little while. I couldn't reproduce the crashes from a formula of commands another user posted here at all, so I thought it was fixed. However, after about a day's work, it went back to the seemingly random crashes (really they are 'hangs' in the sense that the app is running, but not responding - window 'greyed' out in Windows, must force quit the app.) in my version of Photo. Trouble is, like the poster above, I don't get a .dmp file created when it crashes that way that I can submit. They usually happen when I'm working quickly (lots of strings of mouse actions - sometimes it feels like it's lagging behind before it hangs). They don't always happen from a specific task (selecting, dragging a selection), or on a specific action (mouse_up, mouse_down, right click, left click). Any of those things - or sometimes none of those things seem to cause it. Rarely it happens in background (I return to the app from working elsewhere and find it has hung up). I have not rolled back to 1.9.2 yet, but I think that's my current best option. I have not yet seen the same behviour on my Mac (an M1 processor MacBook Air with v1.10 running under MacOS 11 - current release). -charlie

I will add, purely to clarify - since I didn't say before, the test I ran using the current beta release was also on a clean install of that beta. That is to say I did remove the commercial release (using Windows' built in remove program tool) before I installed the beta. That also reset all my user preferences, and I have not gone to look at the default GPU acceleration settings or any of that yet. (and I'm not in the office right now) -charlie

I can report that the current beta (1.10.0.1127) is not crashing using the above recipe - at least on my system. Purely a data point.

I actually got it to crash between steps 5 and 6, but I was switching back to the instructions you gave to read the next step in the recipe... and I came back to it frozen. I'm also not getting .dmp files in my %AppData%\Affinity\Photo\1.0\CrashReports\reports folder. But I do get a log.txt file during this particular crash. (attached) Log.txt

Unfortunately my log.txt file appears to be empty as well. It's there, just blank. I suspect the problem is that I am not fully crashing, but hanging indefinitely with the dreaded hourglass. The only way out is to 'close window' and then allow Windows to force it to quit. That seems to leave no trace in those folders. The hardware is a pretty new Lenovo i5-10400 @ 2.9GHz with 24GB RAM running Windows 10 Pro (current). The GPU is the built-in Intel integrated UHD Graphics 360 with whatever shared RAM the system is assigning it. I may go ahead and uninstall and roll back to 1.9.2. It was working fine, honestly. thanks