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.
Hello again Mike, thanks for pointing me towards the beta copy of Publisher. I decided to try it and so far it is behaving better, the routine crashes seem to have stopped. A few svg diagrams lost their scaling and were huge on page, that is the only annoyance so far.
Agreed. My book is similar to yours but I started it as a single file from the beginning. I have not experienced performance issues.
I can't speak to an 8GB system, but with 16GB, I think Publisher should be able to handle books of any complexity as long as images are linked instead of embedded. I also try to keep performance speedy by only using flat images and dividing chapters into separate stories/articles so that less of the book has to be repaginated when I make edits.
Publisher does not have the facilities to construct a book in separate chapters, in the style of PagePlus. I just completed a book that contains over 500 pages and over 1000 images. Being a little nervous about running into capacity limits, I originally constructed it as 25 separate files, one per chapter. The original intent was to assemble the whole thing into a single file using Add Pages From File at the last minute, and generate the TOC and index. If that failed, I intended to generate TOC and index by hand, export each chapter to individual PDFs, and then combine the PDFs with Acrobat.
It turned out that combining the chapter files using Add Pages From File worked fine, except for a bug that rendered some cells of some tables empty after their files were added. The resulting single file was quite manageable, to the extent that if I were to start another similarly-sized book project I would not bother using separate files. General performance of the software was very responsive, not at all sluggish. The only real issue with dealing with a file that big is that the scroll bars are too tiny to offer fine control. Just for the record as far as software performance goes, my book contained all linked images, and my machine is a PC with i5 quad processor and 16G of RAM.
Overall I was very pleased with the software. It performed very well for this project. If the software had facilities to efficiently deal with a multi-file project I would definitely use them, but I did not find dealing with a single file to be much of an issue at all.