Find & Replace Crashes Program

[Mike Lewis]

MacOS 10.10.5
Affinity Publisher 1.9.3

Lots of people learned to put two spaces after the period of a sentence. My boss takes this to an extreme and sometimes puts 3, 4, even as many as 6 spaces between his sentences. (Must be a visual thing for him or something.) He doesn't care because he knows everything goes through me first to have it edited, corrected, and typeset for finished documents. First thing I do with my boss' documents is search and replace all double spaces to single spaces (and I run the search several times until no more double spaces are found.)

So I'm trying to get my workflow more into Affinity Publisher and out of Adobe InDesign, and this is the first time I've tried this, so I don't know if it used to work in earlier versions of Publisher, or has never worked.

I open the Find & Replace studio, and when I go to type two spaces in the Find field, the application crashes when I type the second space. Initially happened on my existing document. Tried it also on a brand new document (after making a single text box and filling it with filler text), and the same result happened.

I just tried again by searching for something other than double spaces, and it appears to crash consistently whenever any second character is typed. This is with the default Find & Replace settings. Very consistent on my particular setup.

Edit: Typing more than one character in the Replace field also has the same effect.

Edited April 20, 2021 by Mike Lewis
Added one detail about the Replace field.

[walt.farrell]

I can't help with the crash, other than to say it doesn't happen for me on Windows. But your process is inefficient in requiring multiple passes with Find/Replace, and if you improve the efficiency you may be able to avoid the crash.

Rather than repeated Find operations, you can do it with one operation:

1. First, make sure that Find/Replace is operating in Regular Expression mode (click the Formatting cog in the Find field, and select Regular Expression).
2. Then Find (without the quotes) " +" and Replace with (without the quotes) " ". That will catch all the cases of multiple spaces at once.

 

[Old Bruce]

7 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I can't help with the crash, other than to say it doesn't happen for me on Windows. But your process is inefficient in requiring multiple passes with Find/Replace, and if you improve the efficiency you may be able to avoid the crash.

Rather than repeated Find operations, you can do it with one operation:

1. First, make sure that Find/Replace is operating in Regular Expression mode (click the Formatting cog in the Find field, and select Regular Expression).
2. Then Find (without the quotes) " +" and Replace with (without the quotes) " ". That will catch all the cases of multiple spaces at once.

 

Remembering to have the replace field be one single space.

[Mike Lewis]

37 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I can't help with the crash, other than to say it doesn't happen for me on Windows. But your process is inefficient in requiring multiple passes with Find/Replace, and if you improve the efficiency you may be able to avoid the crash.

Rather than repeated Find operations, you can do it with one operation:

1. First, make sure that Find/Replace is operating in Regular Expression mode (click the Formatting cog in the Find field, and select Regular Expression).
2. Then Find (without the quotes) " +" and Replace with (without the quotes) " ". That will catch all the cases of multiple spaces at once.

 

I concede that using regular expressions would be much more efficient.

Either way, unless this bug is fixed, I'll only be able to search and/or replace single characters. Not sure how useful that is.

- Mike

[loukash]

3 hours ago, Mike Lewis said:

it appears to crash consistently whenever any second character is typed

Works for me on El Capitan.
I don't have any Yosemite partition to test, but it could be a Yosemite specific bug.

1 hour ago, Mike Lewis said:

using regular expressions would be much more efficient

Find: (\s)\s+
Replace: $1

[nwhit]

Also doesn't happen for me on Catalina in APub 1.9.2.1024 beta. F&R works fine.

[Pauls]

this is a Yosemite specific bug which is logged with us

[Spencer]

I have the same problem (OS 10.10) and switched back to Publisher Version 1.9.1  „Find&Replace“ works fine with 1.9.1!