philipt18

@Dan C, thanks. Just wanted to say that to me this is even worse than a crashing bug, as it's forcing me to have incorrect layouts all over the book I'm working on. When it is finally fixed I need to go back and re-check every page in the book and fix them. I am also dependent on this getting fixed, or switching applications, as it's impossible for me to publish the book with the problems this bug is causing. I'm basically continuing my work praying it will be fixed before I finish, but it will be a huge problem if I finish the 650+ pages and this is still not working.

I just had another crash. This time thankfully I was offered to recover the file. I have the crash log. Is there someplace I should send it?

Unfortunatwely @DWright for whatever reason, I was not offered that option, and nothing was recovered. This is why Affinity should offer Auto-Save. This would both help save data, but would also make the files visible to backup software like Time Machine to back up versions as well.

Okay, I've tried that, but it's a bit of a hack. I wish there was a way to automate this. Any idea why Chapter 3 is repeating, and the last section shows up as a Chapter at the end? I assume it's the same reason. toctest2.zip

Which brings me back to the beginning, since some of my chapters are linked. I figured out that shouldn't be the case later in the book, but I need to split those frames between chapters if I want to make it work with Stories. By the way, where do I specify the beginning and end of Stories?

Interesting. Of course that removes my footnotes. Not important for testing this, but it means that for creating a test file with footnotes, this wouldn't work. Odd that some of the filler text is all caps, and some is not. I had to fill more than once because some of the chapters were connected, and some not (I didn't figure out to consistently not connect them until later). I had already deleted the text field from the header, so it fixed the empty ToC entry, but I'd still like to figure out how to remove that section altogether. toctest.zip

How do you replace the text with Filler? Is there an automatic way to do that?

I can't upload the whole document publically (I can upload it to Serif if they want), but here's a screenshot. A few things to note. The Chapter title (Chapter 1, etc.) and the sections are all drawn from the Section Titles. When I start a new chapter, I add a Section named 'Chapter x' and then at various points in the chapter I add named sections. The title for the Chapter is pulled from the section name, as are the headers on subsequent pages. The text fields for the Chapter Title and the Header are all in the Master Pages, so there shouldn't be any variation in styles between pages. In the image note that the first empty entry is there because I added a section to the ToC page, but can't delete it. So I made it blank, but it still shows up in the ToC. This is because it's a blank text field in the header, but I can fix that by changing the master page to one without a header. It would be useful to be able to specify the exact range of pages for the ToC. Next note there should be two sections in Chapter 1, but they're both repeated four times. I get why it's happening, but would appreciate a way to stop that. Lastly, note that Chapter 3 is repeated. That doesn't make any sense as it's only there once in the document. On a mildly related note, is there documentation or a video showing how to style the ToC? Is it just changing the paragraph style? Is there a way to add the old-style ... between entries and the page number? Thanks.

It seems odd, but the ToC is adding an entry for the page the ToC is on. Is there a way to set which page the ToC starts on? Also, in a related problem, why can the first Section not be deleted? I draw my ToC entries from the Section titles in the Headers, but I added one to the page the ToC was on, but then realized this display problem, but when I tried to delete that section, the garbage can icon was greyed out.

When creating a Table of Contents, depending on how it's generated, there can be duplicate entries for the same item. For example, if you display Section names in your page headers, and draw the section names from the headers, then each time it shows up, even though it's the same Section, it will show up as many times as there are pages with that section name in the header. I imagine there are other situations where this can occur. As a solution to this, can you add a checkbox in the ToC dialog that simply removes sequential duplicates? i.e. if sequential ToC entries are identical, then only display the first one. It might make sense to also restrict this to items in the same level.

Please add the ability to split the flow between two text frames in Publisher. For example, when you have text flowing from Text Frame 1 to Text Frame 2, and each frame shows a paragraph. Right now deleting the flow line between the two frames would leave the second frame empty, and the first frame overflowing. What I'm asking for is the ability to delete the flow line, leaving everything in place. In this case both frames would show exactly the same text they showed before, they just wouldn't be connected (and nothing would be overflowing).

Also, it should be impossible for these random sections to show up as Chapters. The styles are set in the master pages, so there should be no difference between any sections. And when I check those section titles they indeed have the correct styles, not including the style used for chapter titles, so they shouldn't be showing up. This seems like a bug.

Please add an Auto-Save feature that will save the document at a set interval of time. This is not the same as the current Restore feature where if an unsaved document is found when starting up, it offers to restore it. There are two main differences. The first, is that Restore doesn't always work - I just lost several days of work when Publisher crashed, and I was not offered to restore it. The second difference is that saving the document with changes allows backup software like Time Machine to back up the saved files. Right now if you have a file open for a week and forget to save the document, and there is a crash, Time Machine would never have backed it up (because in the file system it never changed), and if the restore feature doesn't kick in you're out of luck. Sure, in an ideal world everyone would remember to Save often, but frankly I think it's absurd that software intended for professionals even has a possibility of losing data. Please add Auto-Save.

As I'm recovering from a crash that lost several days of work, my concern is that Chapters don't get saved and I lost data. I would really prefer some kind of auto-save feature to make sure my work is saved (and backed up by Time Machine).

Part of the reason I'm looking to move to the Book format is I want the footnotes to automatically re-number for each chapter. There's no way to do this in a single document, especially since I use Sections within each Chapter. Therefore it seems to me the only way to automatically renumber footnotes for each chapter is to move to the Book format, and renumber per Document. Actually, I'm not even sure that would work. Are Chapter documents considered documents in that context? Of course I could manually re-number the footnotes for each chapter, but I have 50+ chapters and would rather it do so automatically so I don't have to worry if I make changes.

I don't understand why the sections are being repeated if they show up on multiple pages. A table of contents shows where sections start, not every page they're on. This seems like a bug to me. If there's a good reason for this, there should at least be an option to remove repeated entries.

If you are working on a book which has multiple documents as Chapters, and you Save, do changes to all the Chapters get saved?

Hmmm. I copied the text from the last chapter, and pasted it into a new document. It did retain the footnotes, which is good, but the images in that chapter were not transferred. I guess there isn't a simple way to keep the images in place when moving the text over? As a feature suggestion, I'd love to be able to select pages in the Pages dialog, right-click and select 'Create new document with selected pages' or something like that. I'd also like it to split page flow if necessary to keep the pages exactly as they are when moving them to the new document. This would preserve layout, images, and sections. If there's another way to do this now, I'd love to find out.

Did you receive the document?

I guess I will work my way back from the last chapter to the first, copying out one chapter at a time. It would be nice if there was a way to copy specific pages into a new document, but I guess not. Some flexibility on moving documents into the Book format would be nice.

I would kill for a version only an hour before the crash. In any case, I've been working to restore what was lost, so that's not my main concern now. What I want to make sure is that this doesn't happen again. Auto-save would be nice. If there isn't such an option, then suggestions (other than save often) on how to make sure this doesn't happen would be great.

Is there a way to break the flow between two text frames, but to keep the text as is? i.e. whatever is currently in the text frames stays in the frames they are in?

I've been considering moving my book into the new Book format, where I separate each chapter into it's own document, and enclose them in a Book document. Now I'm wondering if this is a good idea. Would each chapter document need to be saved separately? There are over 50 chapters in this book. Without some kind of autosave this seems problematic.

I've been trying to see if I can find backups in my Time Machine backups, but they're not there. Since ™ backs up every five minutes, that means that Publisher doesn't change a file you're working on until you save it? Otherwise I would think ™ would have copied it.

I had Publisher 2.1.0 crash, and I lost several days of work. I have two questions. 1) Is there a way to recover what was lost? Right now my document is missing everything I added in the last couple of days. 2) Is there no auto-save in Publisher? If there is, how does one turn it on?