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The file is an Affinity Publisher file as @walt.farrell mentioned and opens fine here too. My AFPub version is the same as that of @steve Frankland so theoretically it should open without issues. @steve Frankland are you perhaps trying to open the file from a network drive (NAS) or cloud storage? If so there could be a connection timeout causing issues. If you are trying to open it from a zipped folder it could be a file access issue. In either case move/extract the file to your local drive and try to open it again to see if that solves your issue. It could also be that your install somehow got corrupted, then you may have issues with other files as well and reinstalling the program may solve the issue.

If you are looking for a DAM, then iMatch (https://www.photools.com/) might be an option to take a look at, it does support Affinity Photo and Designer files if I am correct, not sure about Publisher but you can run a trial to see if it meets your needs. If you want something that is an integral part of the programs then only Affinity will be able to provide that at the moment as I doubt the Affinity software has the functionality to do this with plugins so that others could come up with a solution.

Hello @karlh the setting you found is about setting the performance level of the graphics card (i.e. energy saving low performance/speed vs high performance/speed) or to select the built-in GPU vs a dedicated nVidia/AMD GPU. Your solution may fixe some issues where lag etc. is involved and it may solve some crashes but not the ones related to hardware acceleration. as @Komatös already mentioned, the hardware accelaration is set within the Affinity apps themselves (the same applies to other apps that can use hardware acceleration, control for use/not use is within each respective app).

@Old Bruce is correct imho. Or use software like FrameMaker, but for catalogs a database would probably be used at the backend anyway but FrameMaker has the tools to handle that. However... it also costs an awful lot more than Publisher. If database connectivity is an option Viva Designer might be an option to consider for just catalogs, still more expensive than Publisher but considerably less expensive than FrameMaker or InDesign. I don't want to think about how much time a 600+ page catalog would take to translate into multiple languages in Publisher without at least the option for export/import of tagged text. Just the text reflow that may occur might be enough for causing some (or massive) headaches.

Sorry the reply was meant for @LostInTranslation but the reason I suggested OCR is that it may be able to "repair" paragraphs broken into single lines because it recognizes the paragraph blocks. Some software I use simply generates single line paragraphs and the OCR software reasonably often manages to recognize paragraph blocks and converts it as such. But I agree with you regarding being able to export/import tagged text would be the way to go. Thought I don't really expect that to happen anytime soon. Plain text or formatted (RTF) text support maybe, tagged text would be a bonus surprise I guess.

Unfortunately I get a corrupted file message too when trying to open your file with AfPub or Designer. Hopefully Serif support can open the file for you. Were you saving directly to your NAS? Unless you have a dedicated client-server envorinment that allows for saving directly to a network location it is usually better to save locally first and then sync to the NAS to avoid this to happen. I've seen this issue come up on other forums as well and unless the software can handle saving to a network location well the advice is always to save locally and then copy to NAS. Saving to NAS may work well most of the time but it takes one glitch to cause (a lot of) trouble. Not of much help now but it may help to avoid this happening in the future.

@Alfred just beat me with his answer, that is the OP's and, and mine as well, problem. There is no story editor in Affinity Pubblisher that can export the story as plain or RTF text like PagePlus and InDesign have. Especially when having to share quite a bit of text for sending to others to work on this would be a very welcome function to have, PDF is just not efficient other than for e.g. poster with a few bits and pieces of text. @PaoloT An option you could try is to publish to PDF and then use a good OCR program (e.g Abby Finereader or Omnipage) to convert it to a text/wordprocessor file. It may not be perfect but depending on your text and formatting it might be worth a try because they can recognize text blocks in most cases which avoids multi-line paragraphs breaking up into single line paragraphs.

Unfortunately the files don't open with Affinity Photo or Publisher either, not even with the latest beta version in case they might be able to open it because of some fix for another issue.

We can always try to see if it the backup from last Saturday opens properly. Regarding the possible RAM memory issues, I've had that happen in the past with a RAM module having a defect. The problems were very intermittent and not really repeatable and at some point the system just crashed very badly and couldn't restart nor be repaired properly. Initually tech support said memory was ok, until it crashed badly and they had a more thorough look at the setup, it took the tech support two days of extensive testing to find figure out it were the RAM modules that were causing issues. Even a new set of quality RAM modules had one with a minor defect that caused the problems to happen all over again. The third set was fortunately ok though they did a very thorough test to see if the new set was really ok before returning the pc. This is something you cannot prevent yourself because it is a hardware issue. If you have multiple relatively minor issues coming up over a longer period of time and you can't pinpoint it to something specific it could be RAM or motherboard issue causing corruption issues etc. though not every program my suffer equally. Sometimes it is clear where the problem is and sometimes you just need to have a computer repair service have a very thorough look at your system to find out if hardware is the cause of the problems. Btw, if your files are less than 2 GB total (and the files you sent through Wetransfer are) then you should be able to upload it directly into the forum post.

No succes here either, not by placing in Designer or trying to open it through Publisher. The message is unsupported file or corrupted file. Given the size of the files there might be something you could check, I've had virus scanners and file system operations interfere with file operations, i.e. if they coincide with save or copy operations of files and causing corruption. Another possibility is that there are issues with your RAM memory, which can be infrequent and very hard to detect with common testing, but then you should most likely have corruption issues with other files as well unless you are using Designer most of the time which is then more likeley where it may show up if it happens infrequently. If it only happens with Designer files the problem is probably with Designer somehow.

That is to be expected as that happens with other software as well, but the new folder will contain only the default settings that are used when e.g. installing Designer for the first time. So any custom settings you have made that might cause a problem will be gone, in case the problem is caused by one of those custom settings reverting to default settings my solve it. Did you check if you were not accidentally using an older Designer version to open the files that may have been created with a newer Designer version, then you could get the same error messages. Otherwise deinstalling and reinstalling Designer might we worth trying in case your install of Designer somehow got damaged.

Does compressing the file to a ZIP file make the size small enough for uploading on this forum? You could create a link to a Dropbox/Onedrive/Google Drive etc. file for downloading. Or you cloud use a service like Wetransfer https://wetransfer.com/ and share the download link here.

This would definitely be useful as Ghostscript seems to be able to handle (E)PS features that not every software program seems to be capable of handling/interpreting by itself, Affinity apparently being one of those programs.

Odd, in CorelDRAW it shows as a registered trademark symbol for the missing fi when opening the eps file 🙂 Though the font was substituted with Arial. Changing it to Helvetica Now did not correct this seems to me more like it is a font substitution/character mapping issue rather than a software (Affinity, Corel or otherwise) issue.

I agree with this, if the document units are pixels then it should autoposition on whole (integer) pixel values to avoid this issue though it seems that 1.10.4 is doing exactly that if artboards are inserted when documents units are set to pixels. Force pixel alignment is turned off but move by whole pixels is on and it automatically aligns to whole pixel values when inserting a new artboard. It may not happen if document units are changed to pixels later depending on force alignment/move by whole pixel settings being on or off. However... artboards are not rounded to integer pixel values and that is what should happen, either automatically as an option to round up/down to the nearest integer value or by having an option that will ask you if you want to round the artboard size to whole/integer pixel values and whether you want to round up or down. E.g. using an A4 document size in pixels will by default generate pixels with decimal values which doesn't make sense from a practical ViewPoint.

I tried to reproduce the second example in the video but here it is working as it should. Do you have the latest commercial version (1.10.4.1198) installed? You didn't mention which subversion of 1.10 you have installed, so just checking.

This issue happens with both the commercial version and the beta release, at least on Windows it does.

This seems to be an issue with Affinity Designer because e.g. Photoline and CorelDraw have no issues opeing/importing and displaying the vectors properly.

This file opens in Inkscape without issues. Inkscape is free so you may try to use it to open the file and then resave it for Affinity to open it. The PDF causes the non-beta to crash but the svg opens without issues (except for font substitution in case Arial was not used) BN02-0174-C06D_Detailed (Inkscape resave).svg BN02-0174-C06D_Detailed (Inkscape resave).pdf

The reason is that the password protection only applies to editing the document, not to opening the document, printing, copying or filling out the form. When I try to edit it in Adobe Acrobat it asks for a password, the same applies to Affinity apps, CorelDraw, Bluebeam and other programs that try to open it for editing or as editable content because they can also generate PDF forms I guess. Because it does not prevent printing/copying it is possible to reprint it to a new PDF and then open that PDF if that gets rid of the password protection. Whether the fillable form fields remain intact is something else, most likely not. Inkscape opens it as a PDF document for viewing, at least it seems that way, and after ungrouping you can change the text content but the form fields etc. are lost so the document is not the same as the original PDF. Meaning the password protection does do what it is supposed to do to some extent, though it can be cracked because PDF password protection is not really bulletproof to put it nicely.

When they are going to fix this, it might be nice to have a separate paste in place command when copying from one document to another so that it retains the absolute coordinate position relative to the origin.Especially for more technical oriented drawings this would be useful to have. The regular paste command for pasting objects could then use a mouse click to position the location of the pasted object in case there is no positional match between documents.

Metropolis is also the name of a movie from Fritz Lang (Germany), mid to late 1920's. Probably well before the US Batman comics were created (late 1930's or early 1940's? if I am correct). So I doubt the IP laywers would be able to uphold any copyright claim about the Metropolis name. Not to mention it is an old Greek (and Latin) word as well which makes it even more difficult to patent/copyright "Metropolis" imho. For a font named Gotham that might be different. Oth, all an IP lawyer may need to do is threaten to file a case in court to make the other party give in because they can't afford the costs of a lawsuit.

If the PDF was generated with Adobe Illustrator with AI compatibility set to on then Adobe Illustrator writes the AI document info after the EPS info, other applications will ignore this information as it does not belong to the EPS specification. Adobe Illustrator however does read it back in when opening the EPS file so that is why you will get differences when opening the EPS in another application. Long story short, Adobe Illustrator is "cheating" with the EPS (and PDF) by putting all its info in the EPS (or PDF) that is basically only read(able) by AI and maybe also other Adobe software like PS and ID.

You may want to check if your internet security software's firewall is blocking WWAhost.exe. If it is, then allow network/internet access for WWAhost.exe and try again. It is similar to the svchost.exe and safe to run as it is part of the Windows system and there are no known threats for it to date. If WWAhost.exe is blocked by your firewall then trying to create an account or sign in to an existing account will fail and depending on your system it will only crash the login procedure or the entire application before you get notified it failed. This not only applies to Designer but also to Photo and Publisher, once WWAhost.exe has been allowed access then you should be able to register/login into your account in those as well.

Did you try restarting the computer then then install again? This usually works on Windows to get the software installed after a failed install. It may work on a Mac as well. What also works on Windows and might also work on Mac is instead of restarting is logging off/signing out of your computer account and then log on/sign in again, this is often a bit faster than a full restart. Then install the software again. I never had this issue for quite a while when others did have the issue and then out of the blue it started on my computer as well. My guess is that something (from Affinity or the OS) is running in the background and locking access to some items in the Affinity install folders as I noticed it happening after running an Affinity app and then running the downloaded updater when the app notified about an update. Installing several hours after downloading often works without issues but not always. Even though it is a relatively mild inconvenience in most cases, the Affinity apps are the only ones where this is consistently happening.