thetasig

Thanks for your inspirations on what is going on.  One thing I noted after reading your notes is that my Pages color was set to 8-bit and AFPUB was set to 16-bit with the same color profile. I had read that certain differences could occur due to fractional differences (more detail in 16-bit). I'll check it out further to see if some good change will happen. I do have a display color measuring device and will see if there are still differences in the measured color.

I also need e-book export for fixed page books. I have photo books to publish and each page must remain separate and not "flow" as a text-only e-book does. Sure I can publish a printed photo book from a PDF, but it is currently not feasible to take the Affinity Publisher output and turn it into an e-book.

And thanks, too, to Walt and Tomaso!
Just a follow-up. I made the changes to the master pages. And all of the document pages "cleared up" and showed mostly the correct way. However, I noticed that the heading and page number text items on the master pages were not going into the bleed as they are designed to do. It wasn't until I manually "applied" the masters again to the appropriate pages that the text items entered into the bleed as designed. I suppose I would have assumed that those changes to the master pages would automatically be applied to the document pages too.  Anyway all is good now!  Thanks again for great help!

Hi @Ciordia9,
Welcome to the Affinity forums!
There are various file formats called "eBook" , as for instance compared in this Wikipedia article.
Currently Affinity doesn't offer the export as literally eBook but PDF only. There exists a feature request for the .EPUB format which you might want to read or just add your vote:
 

I did learn, after carefully searching, that the actual index (text frame) was nowhere to be found after I had deleted it earlier. The s/w seemed to think there was another index somewhere else. Alas, not to be found. I had to delete the index from the Studio/Index panel. Then I recreated it all over again. I still think that ("cannot insert more than one index..." message) was a bug since I had been careful to add the index text frame only to the very last (new) page (and I deleted that one).

Thanks so much for all of your answers - very helpful. Just so you know, I have a couple of ways of using the separate frames - the colorful one sits behind the text but is offset to one side and up higher. So the frames overlap but are not aligned - a graphic representation. Of course, the other way is what you described so well where the frames are aligned and I use that also. I had forgotten (or was it that I had not yet learned) about the text frames having those native features. That last bit was a surprise - to "change it back to a rectangle you can select Convert to Curves" - very non-intuitive to me as I'm not sure how curves enter into the circumstance. But if it works, why not? And, very helpful to learn about locking layers - I'll work on that.

I've been playing around with a text box and a rectangle that sits "behind" the box to frame the text with a colored background. Initially, creating the rectangle was straightforward. Drag it out to the desired size, then go to the top options and choose a Fill color. Fine. Then, while adding text to the text box (and careful to do so only in the text box) and resizing both the text box and the rectangle, suddenly the rectangle changes to a text frame ). In the Layers, this shows up as a "(Shape Text)"
The transition point happens when the Frame Text Tool (that was being used on the Text Frame to edit the wording and resize the Text Frame) touches inside the Rectangle.  This can happen while using the Frame Text Tool cursor to expand or shrink the Rectangle by dragging the frame. If you happen to accidentally click inside the Rectangle, it changes to a Text Frame. But I cannot find a way to reverse that to change it back to a rectangle.
This may not be considered a bug (a design feature enabling changing the rectangle to a text frame with a single click), but is certainly unexpected behaviour. And, I'd like to know how to change it back to a rectangle if that is possible.

Fortunately, I have versioning in my blood, so I do have some "good" document versions of the project I'm working on. I started with a good one yesterday.
1st document - older - stable-ish, also versioned. This is a completed 12" x 12" document.
2nd document - the newer one that is crashing after being edited awhile. This is an 8" x 10" format.
I am copying page-by-page from the 1st to the 2nd document. In order to do that I do the following things to the 2nd document.
a. add pages a spread at a time, usually, or maybe 6 pages.
b. Copy (always copying from the 1st document) the background image in a picture frame (full page or full spread) then paste to the 2nd document. Arrange it "Send to Back". I noted that even though the source picture frame is arranged "to back" the copy is NOT arranged to back - so that must be done manually just after pasting it.
c. Copy all elements on a page (text boxes, picture frames, usually) then paste to the 2nd document.
d. rearrange the elements just pasted (as a group) grab lower right inner drag handle while holding the Shift key down. Drag the group to fit (smaller) into the page. Then center the group on the page. Then click outside page to remove selections.
e. work with each item. Text boxes shrink, font sizes do not. So text boxes need to be resized and re-centered as captions for images. In some cases, I select all the text in each or a group of text boxes and make the font smaller. Also checking the Paragraph Leading to be sure it's value matches the font size. Adjust the text boxes to fit the text and place as a picture caption.
f. Work with each image. Some are not set to "Max fit" in the 1st document so they tend to slide away from the picture frame and are not made smaller by the group of elements that are shrunk down. Center the picture frame where it needs to be, align to other frames if called for. This means clicking some other frames just so you can get a line-guide to show up with the picture frame  I'm moving. May have to use "frame fit to picture" and followed by "Max Fit" and then grab corner with Shift key and shrink/fit the picture frame to the area it needs to go into. In some cases I have to double-click the image handle (center of image) so that it will fit into the frame properly.
g. Select all elements on that page - center them vertically (guide lines) and horizontally.
h. Move on to next page and repeat process.
Here are some other possibilities. I noted that the text styles that are brought over from the 1st document (while copying them) are added to the Styles list with new, sequential numbers. I missed this little detail when I started the project. I have hundreds of duplicate styles because of this. An example is a "box" based on the default box that comes with the styles. I made one new one in the 1st document - Box Blue 1. Now there are maybe 40 of those (duplicated) with sequential numbers. This is also happening with other text styles. One of the "clean-up" efforts I was doing is to select a group of text/box and change them from the sequential box styles to Box Blue 1 or another standard Style I was using. This changes the text size (my new Box Blue 1 in the 2nd document has a smaller font and Leading size). It may be coincidence, but it was after these changes that the "good" document started acting up and crashing. But it could have been any number of steps listed above where I'm copy/pasting and re-editing a lot.
Another difference between the documents is - just around the same area where the document is "good" and then it goes "bad" again. I have been changing how text flows between text boxes. The 1st document does not use this feature - just two to four boxes with fixed text representing one transcription of a written letter. In the 2nd document, I have been linking the text boxes and then copy/paste the actual text into the new boxes - where it all flows. This is a new difference that I have been using. I have about 12 letters that are transcribed. The good document (2nd one that does not crash) has just the two text boxes on one page. What I've been doing is to continue to add pages and text boxes (with links to flow the text) and saving test versions as I go. I use the Text Frame panel to set the background colors (12 different colors for the 12 letters) and use a Style "Letters Home" and make sure that is applied to the text. There are also the text frames that are styled as "boxes" and making that Style change to the standard (non-sequential) box Style I now use. I got to about the 10th letter home when the document started acting up and it would just crash when I tried to continue the process. That's about 10-12 spreads added to the "good" version.
Do keep in mind the earlier "fix" you did for me - apparently something to do with the Indexing/Index marks, and "See Also" types of references. Those index marks are also coming into the 2nd document from the 1st document as I paste the text in. One probability is that an earlier index mark (in the sequence of pages) that has a "see also" reference, references an index mark that HAS NOT yet been added to the document.
I do have lots of memory in the "very fast" machine 64 GB 2667 MHz DDR4; 2.4 GHz 8-core Intel Core i9; available disk storage 2.81 TB; Catalina 10.15.3 and using AFPUB 1.8.3 currently.
Thanks for helping out - hope what I've written might help to narrow down what is going on.
 

Plenty of published books, magazines, sales pamphlets, and brochures, etc., use decorative frames, or nested frames, to contain graphics and photos. The idea should not limited to "photo book" publishing. I love the idea of integrating it into Affinity Publisher in some way that is flexible for many publishing needs.

Thanks, Walt - I've a lot to learn about etiquette in this forum. Especially that I should not make assumptions about how the forum works. There were just a few older bug reports that had been archived and were still outstanding - so I think I'm finished reporting those. I do appreciate your hint that I should include a link/pointer to the prior report as needed.
Cheers!

Thanks, Walt. You can teach an old dog like me new tricks 🙂
The link to that July 19 topic is:
 
 

I didn't see it mentioned in this thread. One way to make the process quicker is to use the Studio Index window. After doing a "Find" on an index topic (right-click), if you wish to remove all index marks from a topic, there is an "All" checkbox just above the first word item in the Topic list. Just unchecking that box will remove the index marks from all of those words in the document - or - add index marks to those found words. This page is very handy and saves lots of time, for one more feature there is that the "Find" will show any words that have not yet been indexed and give you the opportunity to check the boxes to include them. One certainly does not have to go through the document manually word-by-word to remove or add index marks.

You may already know about this, but it saved me from losing hard work. Inside the Preferences is a setting for "Performance/File Recovery Interval." This automatically saves changes periodically.
During the Beta, AFPUB crashed on me a lot. So I set this to 90 seconds. It took that long to open my large document. Right after a crash, I just restarted AFPUB and it offered to open the recovery file, and the document changes were always intact.
It's a setting that I left in place just in case, but AFPUB has been fairly stable since the latest version.

TYVM!

Thanks Pauls - the file is uploading now - it will take a short while to finish up, maybe 15 minutes or so. Good luck checking out the document...

Thanks, Bruce. OK - figured it out. It was not the history that caused the delays (since I have never saved history). However, it is the Resource Manager that goes quietly into action just after the file is fully loaded. Takes another 2 minutes or so and then the Resource Manager pops up with details. It has 746 unique entries (jpg) with some repeated as background/graphics, etc. The document file itself is 3.46GB and the photos are embedded. 235 pages at 2 pages per spread. Activity Monitor shows AFPUB using 25.48GB. Computer memory is 48GB and  system SSD is 1TB  with 555GB used. I think it is not wise to attempt to "do" anything until the Resource Manager has completed its tasks upon loading. No glitches so far during additional editing.

I believe this is working well now. I haven't had such a crash in several days of editing with 1.7.0.305 and the previous version.

Walt - thanks for your help. I tried your suggestions.
And it worked. Many thanks.
Now if Serif will just fix the splitting of single page numbers across two lines, line-leading commas and spaces, then it will be nearly ideal. (Separate bugs have been submitted already.)

I'd strongly suggest using a "Concordance" file in AFPUB to mark words or phrases to be indexed. MS Word and other s/w has this feature. I think they use a spreadsheet format for the file. The advantages are clear: all you have to do is to create an external text file with all of the words (or phrases) you wish to index (two columns). Then the software will read that file into the document and automatically mark the each word in the document to be indexed. Having to do this manually word-for-word in the document is a real slap in the face. A nice feature of the Concordance file is that it has two columns: the first column lists the actual word you want to find. The second column is how you wish that word to appear in the index itself. An example is:
financial services                 Services: financial
computer services               Services: computer
computer                               Computer
services                                 Services
The second column allows for a "parent" index word "Services" (I think indenting in the index child below the parent might be optional in some cases).
Handling phrases is a key feature that should be implemented. Note, for example, that "computer services" above might be listed in three places in the index as:
Computer    5, 10, 22, 75
Services       5, 33, 52, 75
Services: computer    5, 75
The follow-on for this type of feature is a "command" to remove all index entries from the document in one fell swoop.
The clear advantage of the Concordance file is that it can be used for many different documents, especially in a situation where many documents are 'technical' or fall into a particular genre. The file can be kept, shared among coworkers, added to over time, and edited as needed to restructure the final index appearance.

I have a document that uses a Master A with page# and Section fields. These fields show up on each page of the document with fields on the left for even pages and fields on the right for odd pages. I added a single page in the middle of a 2-page section which pushed the remaining pages forward. So the blank recto (odd) page was added. This page was mistakenly internally marked as dexter (even) and so the Master fields were in the wrong place. By re -applying the Master to the affected pages (2 of them) the problem was resolved. I had done this two times with a different set of pages and the same mistake happened. However, it seems apparent that APub lost its way during that exercise and probably needs a looking into. Using 1.7.0.238 on a Mac High Sierra 10.13.6.

Plenty of published books, magazines, sales pamphlets, and brochures, etc., use decorative frames, or nested frames, to contain graphics and photos. The idea should not limited to "photo book" publishing. I love the idea of integrating it into Affinity Publisher in some way that is flexible for many publishing needs.

Yes, this is exactly what I would expect. You did a great job working this out.
And you are also right about first selecting a picture and then clicking in assets as this would be consistent with the way styles are added to a layer.
I'd love to see that functionality and at least some predefined sample frames in the assets.
Please, devs, read this and consider it.

Correct, this is why I gave my set of potential improvements.  I don't think it needs to be dragged onto the picture; I think the picture should be selected then click (or maybe double-click) on the frame in the assets panel... but the Affinity team would obviously need to be the ones to decide if any of this happens at all and how.
 
Probably because this is not picture book software and no one likely thought of this use case or spent the time on it yet.  I do think this should be an easy enough request to flesh out if they decide to do this and it does not seem at all unreasonable.  Also, assets can be exported/imported so even if there are not frames included by default, if the functionality to swap them onto the pictures is provided, this would be a relatively easy thing for a 3rd party to offer a library of (even if they DO include frames by default, 3rd parties should be able to offer additional frame collections...)
 
Now that I am starting to think of groups in the mix, here is the behavior I am thinking would work:
 
If an asset in the panel is double-clicked on (or maybe single-clicked, not sure what the exact action should be here), it should be checked for the presence of a single picture frame or text frame object, possibly as the asset, or as a child layer within it.
If such a frame is found, and there are one or more objects selected in the document:
Loop through the selected objects.  For each one:
    if the object is an image or pixel layer and the asset contains a picture frame:
        check to see if the object is currently inside a picture frame; if it is, send that frame into step "replace frame" below
            if it is not currently inside a picture frame: add a copy of the asset to the document scaled to match the transform
                of the frame in the asset to the transform of the selected image or pixel layer; move the selected layer into the new
                frame as its content layer
    else if the object is a text frame and the asset contains a text frame:
        replace the selected object with a copy of the asset, scaled so that the text frame in the asset matches the transform
            of the one that was selected to begin with; if the original text frame was linked, connect the replacement frame in the
            same manner as the frame being replaced and reflow the existing text - otherwise, add the text from the object being
            replaced to the new text box
    else if the object is a picture frame and the asset contains a picture frame:
        send that frame into step "replace frame" below
end loop
 
to replace frame:
    add a copy of the asset to the document, scaled to match the transform of the contained frame to the transform
        of the frame being replaced.
    move the content layer of the frame being replaced into the new frame added as part of the asset (replacing any
        that might have been included in the asset)
    delete the original frame

Thank you for elaborating this idea, @fde101
I really hope that devs may read this and see if they can come up with one of your solutions.
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EDIT:
I played a little around with that. Now I have three layers in a group I named "My decorative border":
The border as Pixel or Vector The mask The empty picture frame I moved that group to my assets and deleted it. I dragged it back after that.
Now I place an image in my document. To get in into the frame the only way is to use the layers
panel and move that directly onto the Picture Frame layer. The group must be expanded first of course.
If the image is not already in the document I can choose the Picture Frame directly from the layers panel
and use the "Replace Image" option.
What I like to see is dragging the asset (which has ONE empty picture frame) ONTO an image and
the image gets automaticly wrapped into that group.
I think this is what happens in photo book software behind the scenes and maybe dev finds
that this convenience feature is easy to implement.
---
EDIT 2:
And beside making it easier to use I think the Publisher should already come with a small set of decorative frames.
There are icons and glyphs. Why no frames?

This isn't exactly photobook software, but this does seem like a reasonable extension to the assets panel.  I believe you can already set up a custom group of objects and store pre-designed "frames" there:
You could store them to be used as masks; to use them as masks (currently) you would need to drag one out, resize it over the picture/frame, and drag it in the layers palette to the mask position of the image/pixel layer.  Potential improvement would be able to mark it as a mask in the asset panel and clicking on it with an object selected would replace the object's mask (if any) with an appropriately scaled copy of the asset.  Note that using as a mask would not allow for them to become "borders" - they would constrain the shape of the image but would not add a border to them.
You could alternatively use them as preset frames, which would allow for a border; for this you would convert them to picture frames before storing them in the asset group, then you would drag one out and have an empty "fancy" picture frame to add your photo to.  Currently I do not believe this would allow for dynamic switching; potential improvement would be for the asset panel to replace a selected container with a scaled copy of the one clicked on in the palette when another frame of the same type is selected (ex. if a picture frame is selected and you click on a picture frame in the asset palette, the selected frame would be replaced with a scaled copy of the one clicked on in the palette, which would receive the content of the one that was replaced - similar could be done with a text frame).