MCBPub
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Posts posted by MCBPub
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Having nursed my latest book to the brink of publication using 2.1 beta releases, 2.1.0 crashes every time I try to export to pdf using Books. I have tried rebooting a couple of times to no avail. The book comprises multiple publisher files, each one making a single chapter.
I have noticed that Resource Manager reports that Nottingham Canal map (svg file) has been updated in a couple of chapters where the map is not visible and so far as I am aware has not been placed (and would be inappropriate), such as Appendix A. I am not sure if this is related to my problem. This map should only appear in the Nottingham Canal chapter.
Unfortunately I uninstalled the last beta release, thinking I would no longer need it, so have not been able to try exporting using it (it was working OK) - not sure if that is still available somewhere?
Any suggestions gratefully received! Thanks.
Win 10, desktop computer
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Hello again, Old Bruce, I did not immediately pick up the relevance of your removal of the gradient fills. However, I eventually twigged that doing that might have sorted the issue! I decided to export the image as a jpg instead, so that I could retain the gradient fills, but it got rid of the svg gradient element and lo! Problem sorted for now. I think I have a book ready for final proof reading, that was the final issue. Many thanks for your help!
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I wanted to remove the gridlines in three tables. I either selected the table or drag-selected all the rows of the table. Then I clicked the stroke button that had a black line with a red line through it, indicating no stroke. A few lines have gone (see attached), but most of the lines remain. I am sure this must be a bug, but I have tried looking through Help in case I am doing it wrongly and could not find anything about removing gridlines or anything else that might apply. The tool appears to be acting randomly.
Also, for selecting the gridlines you want, there are all the options for all the different combinations (icons for various horizontal and vertical lines), except "no lines," which seems odd to me.
I have been able to solve this by using the Table panel and the "no line" option there (a little buried), I could not make any progress using the context toolbar though.
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Thanks Old Bruce, I will investigate the errant text frames. Not sure where the first one came from - it looks like it then got copied when I developed the other Masters, based on the first. The pinning was a desperate attempt to sort the problem - it didn't work! As you say, not needed.
Thanks for taking the time!
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Thanks. I have attached a screenshot (to my original post) showing my latest pdf export. The left hand page is missing almost all of its text, only the first line has flowed to the bottom of the page.
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Build 1736.
I have a chapter with an svg image on the final page. This image is grouped with a text frame which provides the caption. There is also some accompanying text on the main frame of the page. At the moment, whenever I save the page, close and then come back to it, most of the text (which flows from the previous page and more or less fills this final page, less the image) disappears. Sometimes completely, but more recently I am left with a couple of sentences at the bottom of the page. If I wiggle the group up and down a bit, the text reappears, appropriately wrapped, but then the image + caption group has to be repositioned. I have tried adding a page, rebuilding the final page and then deleting the old final page, to no avail. Previously when I have tried to produce a pdf export of the whole book, this last page of this chapter is similarly missing most of its text, which is the more serious problem in terms of getting this book finalised and published. I also tried pinning the image and caption to the text, to see if that might help, it did not. I had the same problem with build 1732 and it has not gone away with the new release.
The svg image was produced using the latest customer release of Designer 2 (not the beta).
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Thanks for getting back to me. I have upgraded to build 1732 and after a bit of manual resizing, the problem appears to have settled down for now with images remaining at the scaling I have set for them. However I have attached a file just in case (Derby Canal, svg files used for the map and the Derby Arm diagram). Unfortunately I now have an issue with TOCs (Preamble file). I cannot update or delete the one in my latest book, so for the moment am unable to proceed with them. TOCs were generally working OK (85% ish) before, but seem to have stopped altogether now. App hangs, file save stops. Have tried reloading the file, exiting the app and restarting and rebooting my desktop (Win 10) computer. Thanks. Mark Baker. See your Dropbox for the files.
PS My 2 latest files, 35 ECiC Derby Canal and 40 ECiC Nutbrook Canal are showing as "out of date." Synchronise does nothing to change this and the app hangs then crashes on exit.
PPS The above did seem to sort itself out and eventually all files synchronised. Unfortunately I have another issue. My current book is almost complete and I was working Saturday on an appendix, file ECiC 45 Appendix A.afpub (uploaded). The software will not allow me to edit anything. I have done all the rebooting, etc. Once or twice it looked like it was letting me in, but as soon as I tried to make some changes, it locked me out again - there was an onscreen message about the object I wanted to edit being locked, but I was unable to unlock it and appeared to be frozen out. Very frustrating as I am almost finished! I suspect it is Books that is playing up. Thanks.
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I use quite a lot of svg images in my books, mainly maps and other diagrams. I used to find that when I re-opened a Publisher file, these could appear giant-sized and always required re-scaling. Since I upgraded to Beta 1730 they now appear greatly reduced in size. In addition, text wrapping settings have often been lost and cannot always be edited successfully, requiring pages to be completely rebuilt - usually by deleting the existing page and inserting a new one, which in itself can cause horrific reformatting issues. Impact can be anywhere from a simple image resize to a full page rebuild from scratch, sometimes with impacts to other nearby pages. Text can disappear and be difficult to find, too...
With one diagram I always lose the text on that page on opening the file. If I then move the diagram around the text often, but not always, magically comes back. The image then requires careful repositioning to balance the page.
Windows 10, desktop. I use a book file, comprising multiple chapter files.
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Hello Mike, many thanks for taking the trouble to respond. In so much as it means it is not just me, I am pleased to hear what you say! As a known "issue," at least it stands a good chance of being fixed. Roll on 2.1...
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I was delighted to see the Books feature included in v2 and have been using it to create my latest canal book. It was probably my main reason for upgrading to A2. It takes me back to how computing used to be - madly saving files after every change, every insertion of a photo, just in case the software crashes again and you lose all your latest edits. There have been different circumstances where the software just stops doing anything mid-flow and I usually have to use Task Manager to close it down and start over. However, lately it keeps asking me if I want to save the Books file as I exit the software, even though I have been saving as I go along. Then when I click YES just to be sure, it hangs until Windows offers me the option of shutting down the app. Fortunately my earlier saves appear to be working and when I reload the software and my book files, I do not appear to have lost anything. Incredibly frustrating, but this is a feature I really want to use. I should say, I am using Windows 10, not Mac OS, I appear to have posted here because of my search to see if anyone else was suffering similar.
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Hello @Dazmondo77 thanks for the suggestion, I will try playing around with layers and see if it has the desired effect!
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Hello @Callum, thanks, happy to provide a copy of the file, could you let me have the DropBox link please?
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I have been converting books from 8.5" by 11" (softcover) to 8.25" by 11" (hardcover) as this is the closest size offered by Amazon KDP when it recently introduced a hardcover option.
With books less than 150 pages I have been able to get away with just uploading the same interior file and everything works out, but anything with more pages needs a larger gutter margin, which requires some reformatting.
I have one book where there is one page that fails to convert. On the first page of the Preface there is some text plus a map in svg format (I have also tried using jpg) and the map title as artistic text. There are also standard page elements, a header, footer (page number) and a horizontal line.
The book appears to produce an appropriate pdf with all pages OK. However, when this is uploaded to KDP the Preface text does not always show in the online Previewer and the one time I had a copy printed, it did not print the text, just the map.
KDP support has told me that the text has been produced as "clipping paths," which does not mean much to me, but I assume it means the text has been produced as graphics. It appears this is only happening on one page. Clipping paths, I am told, are not printed. The same manuscript file worked fine as a softcover, although I might have introduced something when reformatting to fit the new size.
I am using standard MS-supplied Verdana in a text frame on the page and the pdf Properties/Fonts for the book pdf file show all font variants to be present, listed as (Embedded) or (Embedded Subset), TrueType(CID), Encoding: Identity-H. I have not found anywhere in Affinity where there are any font embedding options or text as text / text as graphics controls. I assume these are implied somewhere, but does anyone know where?
In case the problem was being caused by some interaction between objects, I cleared the Master on that one page and rebuilt it from scratch, making sure that there was no overlap between objects.
I have tried a couple of pdf formats, but mostly X-1a which KDP list as their preferred format. I have tried all 3 Rasterize settings when exporting (all, none and unsupported properties) to no avail.
Does this mean anything to anyone? Any suggestions as to what I can try next? Any help very gratefully received! The book is ready to be published as a hardcover, apart from this one page...Thank you in advance!
Mark -
Thank you rufus and MikeTO, it was good to hear of your experiences, with books even bigger and with more images than mine (140-180 pages and around 360 linked images)! It at least confirms that book assembly is not offered currently - I hope Serif look at this in the future, as it offers definite advantages. BookPlus allowed smarter, more efficient working in my opinion, particularly when making relatively minor edits/corrections and creating new versions, rather than new editions.
I have had to go for large, single files too, as I could see no alternative. On the whole, it has worked OK, just the odd crash, but then again it is always good practice to save regularly anyway. In fact, recent versions do seem more stable than some of the earlier ones, as might be expected and they respond more quickly too (on an i7, 16 GB system, albeit quite a few years old!). I recently upgraded my desktop to boot from an SSD drive rather than the original hard drive and that has boosted performance somewhat. I could go back to using PagePlus, which is tempting in some ways, however as it is no longer supported, it seems worth persisting with Affinity and hope that improved book construction comes in time.
Thank you both for taking the time to post.
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Hello, and thanks for taking the time to reply. I have thought about using this, but it is a rather messy solution for what I want. What I liked about ppb files was that you saw the list of which files had been used to compile each section and it was easy to swap sections in and out. The filenames could be version numbered allowing tight version control. Using Add Pages from File would require the old section to be manually deleted, a new section manually set up and the pages inserted. At which point you have lost the information about which files have been used and you have to keep whole book files to have any sort of version history. It is the one part of the software (based on what I use) that feels like a fairly big step backwards. It took me a while to get used to ppb files, but once I did, I thought they were great - simple but effective!
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I previously used PagePlus and grew to love the book assembly software that allowed individual chapters and section files to be sequenced and only assembled into a final book at the end of the process. This had the big advantage that each chapter could be maintained as a separate, small file. If I needed a new version of say, the preamble section, I only had to create a small new file and a new ppb book file (also small). The software performed faster and more reliably when working with the small component files.
I have not been able to find anything similar with Affinity Publisher, so once my first version of a book has been assembled, I have to use this very large file for all subsequent maintenance/corrections/changes and save multiple versions of these large files to keep the version history.
Are there any plans for introducing a similar book assembly feature for Affinity or is there a way that I can use existing features of the software to achieve the same?
Thanks.



Publisher crashing when attempting to build a book pdf.
in V2 Bugs found on Windows
Posted
UPDATE:
Checked the book files. ECiC book 1-00.afbook which was the last one to successfully build a pdf was 640 KB. My first attempt at building version 1.01 yielded a book file of just 2 KB.
Thinking that the book file was being corrupted somewhere, I took ECiC book 1-00.afbook as a starting point and again used Replace Chapter to swap old versions for new for eight chapters. Changes were relatively minor - usually tweaks to wording, removing unnecessary spaces, one or two diagrams were updated and changed, about 4 photographs were edited outside the app and new versions swapped in. The overall number of pages remained the same, as did the document pagination. I saved this as ECiC book 1-01 OLD.afbook, the size was reported as 2 KB.
I then decided to try again, not using Replace Chapter, but working as I had with PagePlus, using Add Chapter and then moving each one to the correct position in the chapter list before removing the old version. Part way through doing this I noticed that there were errors in the page numbers (screenshot 2023 05 24 Pagination error, book file not building.png). After using Synchronise there were still errors, but the total number of pages was correctly reported as being 156. Saving the book as ECiC book 1-00 SAVE TEST 02.afbook yielded a 640 KB file.
I continued replacing chapters as mentioned above, until finished. Synchronise prompted the Update Numbers window to appear three times, but by the end, there were still page number errors. Saving the book file again as ECiC book 1-00 SAVE TEST 03.afbook gave a file of 217 KB.
Interim conclusion: Swapping new chapters in and old versions out appears to be corrupting the afbook file.
I closed Publisher and re-opened it. I started a new book and added the book chapters in order, using the add chapter button at the bottom of the Books panel. I ran Synchronise Settings, but the first section, Preamble still started on p5, with the Preface and Introduction both starting on p9 according to the Books panel. The book ended on p156 which is correct. I tried using Update Numbers but nothing seemed to happen and the page numbers reported in the Books panel did not change. Looking at the first section, ECiC 04 Preamble 1-01 in the Pages panel, it listed the four pages as:
Page 1 (5)
Pages 2,3 (6,7)
Page 4 (8)
Saving the book file as ECiC book 1-01 Build from scratch.afbook also yielded a 217 KB file.
Finally I used this book file to attempt to build a pdf. This time it did not shut Publisher down after a short intermission but went on to build the pdf. The page numbering of the first 3 sections was incorrect as shown in the Books panel. The rest of the book, on a quick inspection, looks to be OK.
I tried to sort out the page numbering using Section Manager. I managed to get what I have called the Preamble section to go from p1-4 as it should. However it had been incorrectly given the section name Preface, when this should be blank.
Moving to Preface, the option to continue numbering was greyed out and I was unable to reset the page numbering correctly, until I discovered Page Number Options. I had to set this section to start on p5 manually, I could not use Continue Page Numbering.
ECiC book 1-01 Build from scratch 4.afbook was 217 KB and I was finally able to build the version 1.01 pdf, albeit with some manual page number fiddling. Clearly there are still one or more issues with Books, investigating insertion and deletion of chapters looks like the place to start.