Affinity Publisher 1.8 crashes when changing fonts

[hays]

Since upgrading to 1.8 yesterday Affinity Publisher has crashed a dozen times, always when changing the font.  This only happens when searching for a font.  For example, if I am looking for palatino, and I scroll no problem.  But if I type 'pal' then the application crashes.  Previous version had no issues with changing or searching for fonts.  I've lost my work a few times because of this bug.

Edited February 28, 2020 by hays

[music2bmade]

1.81 Same problem here. Nasty. Had to start completely over several times.

Will have to avoid typing in the search tool for the fonts.

 

[rusty5]

6 hours ago, hays said:

Since upgrading to 1.8 yesterday Affinity Publisher has crashed a dozen times, always when changing the font.  This only happens when searching for a font.

Are you working on a Mac or PC? What version of the OS are you running on your specific platform?

[hays]

MacOS Catalina 10.15.3

[Patrick Connor]

We have replicated the typing search crash in the font selection and have reported that to the developers. For now please scroll only.

Thank you for reporting this.

[bmaenner]

Same problem here on 1.8.1... 😤 Publisher crashes while typing to search for a font. In my case I discovered the problem in the glyph browser window. I tried to find a workaround using Designer... same here. Very annoying, especially because it worked just fine before the update. 

[garrettm30]

On 2/29/2020 at 7:33 AM, bmaenner said:

Same problem here on 1.8.1

Patrick's post above indicates that they are aware of the issue, but they have not yet released another bug-fix beta since that time.

Note that Publisher 1.8.1 does not have any fixes regarding 1.8 issues. There were some emergency fixes in both Photo and Designer in 1.8.1, but Publisher just got a version number bump for the sake of Studio Link compatibility:

On 2/26/2020 at 3:39 AM, Patrick Connor said:

NOTE: This was originally released as 1.8.0 on the Affinity Store and the Mac App Store. Affinity Photo 1.8.0 on the Mac App Store had a permission missing that caused a problem with plugins and Affinity Designer on the Mac App Store had a single file missing causing lots of issues. Those build have been replaced with an otherwise identical 1.8.1 builds. Affinity Publisher did not have these problems, but it has been rebuilt to keep numbering systems in sync with the Mac App Store for StudioLink reasons.

 

[zhanchik]

Same here. Software crashes when I type out the font name in the Context Tool Bar.   Can anyone tell me if:

1.  A setting can be selected that will automatically continue to save changes to the document as I continue to work on it?  Or at least at a specific interval.  Right now, unless I physically hit "Save", I don't see that's happening.

2.  How do I get the software to recover my document after the crash? 

These options (if available) should somewhat soften the blow of crashes until they are fixed.

Thanks!

[Patrick Connor]

@zhanchik  and other readers of this thread

I would suggest that you avoid typing any font name into the font selection UI, but there will be a customer beta released shortly that will not have this problem, so you could use that in preference.

[zhanchik]

Patrick, thanks for your quick response and assurance of a fix coming soon.  

Any feedback on the software's capability to save changes instantaneously as you go?  

And any way for it to prompt to bring up a recovery document after the crash?

[Patrick Connor]

7 minutes ago, zhanchik said:

Any feedback on the software's capability to save changes instantaneously as you go?  

In Preferences > Performance > File recovery interval  you can set the time between autosaves. (default to 5 mins = 300 sec)  

7 minutes ago, zhanchik said:

And any way for it to prompt to bring up a recovery document after the crash?

This will happen automatically when you restart if you use the application icon.

[zhanchik]

Patrick, thanks again for that tip on autosaves. I totally looked over that option!

FYI, perhaps, it might be useful info.  First time the software crashed on me (when typing font name) I got a dialog box that asked if I wanted to recover the document. Since I haven't made any major changes to the document in that instance, I replied "no".  Since then I've experienced additional crashes and this recovery dialog box would not come up again.  Something in the code that accepted user's response as a permanent decision?

[Patrick Connor]

12 minutes ago, zhanchik said:

Something in the code that accepted user's response as a permanent decision?

That is not how it is meant to work, no. Not being offered a recovery has nothing to do with your initial answer. It normally means that the autosave time (5 minutes) have not passed (since the first edit to the file was made), so no new autosave had taken place when it crashed.

To test this, if you (1) load the file, (2) make an edit, (3) wait 5 minutes (or whatever your current setting) then (4) make another edit you should get an auto-saved document. (5) use the font combo search to crash the application. (6) restart the application and you should be offered the file as it was with 2 edits made, before the crash.

[zhanchik]

Patrick, appreciate your response again!  Your explanation makes complete sense as to why my recovery document option was not popping up.  Many thanks!

[Patrick Connor]

We have made fixes/improvements to this area (Crash when trying to type into the Font Dropdown) of the program in the latest customer beta. If you would like to try these changes the beta software is available in the forum posts listed below.

The latest beta builds are downloadable from links at the top of each of these beta forum posts.

• Affinity Photo 1.8.2.174 for Mac
• Affinity Designer 1.8.2.4 for Mac
• Affinity Publisher 1.8.2.619 for Mac

These betas install parallel, next to the release version (they do not overwrite your release) and so the fixes can be tried in the beta without affecting your normal workflow in the release version.

Once these programs have been through a full beta process the change will be released in a future free 1.8.2 update/patch to all customers.