Tables get resized, can't undo, keep crashing after

[aeneis]

After chaining two text boxes into one thread on two separate pages, all the tables that were included in the thread were resized vertically,

• I was not able to undo the resize
• Started to edit them manually to get the originaly height of the tables
• In some cases when I touched the bounding box of the tables Publisher crashed
• so I tried to execute actions in different order, after the 5-6th attempt the file stopped opening, crashed Publisher immediately, so can't open the file at all. 

Now I hope I have an earlier version somewhere... Tables' documentation and behaviour are just tricky enough, but all the bugs around are hijacking to work effectively and can't really make this tool good enough for professional work unfortunately, please take a look into this!

[thomaso]

Hi @aeneis,
Welcome to the Affinity Forums!

I am not able to reproduce this issue, neither with inline nor float pinned tables, nor with chaining the text frames before or after pinning the tables.

Maybe it depends on specific conditions, e.g. contents, style, fonts. Were the tables filled in APub from scratch, or imported (pasted, placed) from another document?

Can you upload an.afpub with sample pages & objects that show this behaviour, with a note what steps will cause the issue, so the community can investigate it?

[Old Bruce]

7 hours ago, aeneis said:

After chaining two text boxes into one thread on two separate pages, all the tables that were included in the thread were resized vertically,

Do I understand that the Tables are in the Text flow? Do they perhaps try and flow from one Text Frame to the next? If so then there is nothing we can do because Affinity doesn't have that capability.

[thomaso]

22 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Do they perhaps try and flow from one Text Frame to the next? If so then there is nothing we can do because Affinity doesn't have that capability.

But then the pinned tables do jump between frames but don't get "resized vertically", as the OP wrote, – right?

I vaguely remember unwanted table scaling which could not get reset as a former bug but AFAIK this was solved some app versions ago. @aeneis, what Affinity version are you using?

There is also an unwanted increase of table row height, caused by certain special characters (breaks) in rotated tables. But none so far I see caused by pinning + text flow.

[aeneis]

Thanks for the quick reply!

Unfortunately I'm not able to upload the file 1. it's a sensitive content 2. Also I can't even open it, after opening it 5-6 times and was trying to fix the issue at one point the file stopped opening and to AP crashed immediately w/o any notice. 

 

On 8/20/2022 at 5:16 PM, Old Bruce said:

Do I understand that the Tables are in the Text flow? Do they perhaps try and flow from one Text Frame to the next? If so then there is nothing we can do because Affinity doesn't have that capability.

Yes it's in the text flow, but it's not about the capability of flowing table content, but it might be the root cause of the bug... The resize bug appeared in multiple cases when I created a new Text Flow by connecting two Text Frames which included Tables. 

Why I'm sure it is a bug, because I was not able to Undo it, up until I was able to open the file the only way to "undo" is to close the file and open a previous version/state. 

 

On 8/21/2022 at 4:00 PM, thomaso said:

But then the pinned tables do jump between frames but don't get "resized vertically", as the OP wrote, – right?

I vaguely remember unwanted table scaling which could not get reset as a former bug but AFAIK this was solved some app versions ago. @aeneis, what Affinity version are you using?

There is also an unwanted increase of table row height, caused by certain special characters (breaks) in rotated tables. But none so far I see caused by pinning + text flow.

Yes, tables are pinned and I get used to that, having them jumping from one page to another depending on the pin's placement. So that's fine. 

Yes, I'm using the latest AP version. No, I don't have rotated tables either. 

What I suspect as a trigger is: pinning + creating new text flow (+ something unexpected with the format, see below)

 

On 8/20/2022 at 4:49 PM, thomaso said:

Hi @aeneis,
Welcome to the Affinity Forums!

I am not able to reproduce this issue, neither with inline nor float pinned tables, nor with chaining the text frames before or after pinning the tables.

Maybe it depends on specific conditions, e.g. contents, style, fonts. Were the tables filled in APub from scratch, or imported (pasted, placed) from another document?

Can you upload an.afpub with sample pages & objects that show this behaviour, with a note what steps will cause the issue, so the community can investigate it?

 @thomaso do you suspect copy-pasting content from another file might cause the issue? Although I pasted them from Pages, I got rid off all the text styles long ago. Also, I gave custom height to each of the rows when made the stylistic changes. 

 

 

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, aeneis said:

do you suspect copy-pasting content from another file might cause the issue? Although I pasted them from Pages, I got rid off all the text styles long ago. Also, I gave custom height to each of the rows when made the stylistic changes. 

Yes, I do. There are various threads reporting issues that finally appeared to be caused by copy/pasted text content, e.g. from Word, for instance triggered by a hidden / special character (which are not influenced by styles). Another reason which let me assume to be contents related is the fact that it does not happen generally, for instance with the empty tables I used for a test.

I rather doubt that different row heights are the culprits but can't tell why. Although there have been different + frequent issues with the new table feature in APub. One of them in particular with row height which could not get set by the users / or with suddenly increased the last row. These issues were solved in later updates, but maybe there is a leftover in combination with pinning?

If you can't open your .afpub any more can you reproduce the issue with a similar document + contents? Or can you restore an earlier version from your backups? In case Serif moderators will pop-in it will be useful to ask them for an upload link of your affected / broken .afpub with private content.

[Dan C]

2 hours ago, aeneis said:

Unfortunately I'm not able to upload the file 1. it's a sensitive content 2. Also I can't even open it, after opening it 5-6 times and was trying to fix the issue at one point the file stopped opening and to AP crashed immediately w/o any notice. 

Sorry to hear this @aeneis, you can upload this file to the below link which will remain private, allowing our team an opportunity to repair this file for you -

https://www.dropbox.com/request/N4frBOnKHejBlSmX3Wop

Once uploaded, please reply here to let me know. Many thanks in advance

[aeneis]

@Dan Cthanks for jumping in, I really appreciate! 🙏 File uploaded!

@thomaso I will get back with your proposed solutions—as I also really appreciate the kind help of the community. I hope I can investigate this properly and give some hints on what could went wrong in my case!

[Dan C]

No problem at all, thanks for confirming that for me!

I have been able to recover your file, however I can see within a Hex editor that some data may have been lost from your file, causing the app to fail to open it - so please be sure to check the returned file carefully.

I will be sending this to the email address associated with your Forum account now, through Dropbox.
I hope this helps

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, Dan C said:

I have been able to recover your file, however I can see within a Hex editor that some data may have been lost from your file, causing the app to fail to open it

Great you could recover the file! – Can you give us any hint what part of table, table contents, pinning or text flow was causing the issue of increased table size –> inability to resize –> inability to reopen the .afpub?

[Dan C]

6 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Can you give us any hint what part of table, table contents, pinning or text flow was causing the issue of increased table size –> inability to resize –> inability to reopen the .afpub?

For the first 2, as I don't have the users fonts installed the document does not appear 'as expected' for me - so I have not yet been able to replicate the issue being reported. The majority of the users pages have table elements, which are Pinned 'Floating with text' within text frames, so I'm not 100% certain where in the document this is occurring for the user, or the exact changes being made to exhibit the issue.

I am currently under the assumption that the file corruption was also causing strange behaviours within the document, but only the user can confirm this with the repaired file I've returned.

As for the last point, as in my post above there was missing HEX data in the file provided, so I believe this was the cause for the error when opening the file.

[aeneis]

Update:

Currently I'm working with the recovered AP file, my findings are the following:

• the resize issue not just stayed with us, but it repeats itself when I attach two text flows, the table cell height changes even if I reseized them back once before.
• The problem is most probably cuased by the content of the tables which I pasted from Pages (this was the only workaraound where I was able to keep the table's content w/o falling apart). So I recreated one of the tables manually in one of the the problematic threads and when I connected two threads again only those tables fell apart which were not recreated (included the copy-pasted text from Pages), the newly, manually created table with the same style and parameters kept being the same.

So my take away until the bug is resolved: copy-pasting from Pages is a big no-no. 

Do you have any recommandations how to copy paste table content from any kind of tool/notetaker which won't bring in this bug? This would make me a lot of work, writing all the tables manually. 

[Dan C]

Thanks for the update @aeneis, it would help tremendously if you could provide a screen recording of the steps you're taking when this Table issue occurs, as I'm still having a little trouble understanding your exact workflow.

If you're unsure how to take a screen recording, please check out our FAQ linked below - 

Many thanks in advance

[aeneis]

18 hours ago, Dan C said:

Thanks for the update @aeneis, it would help tremendously if you could provide a screen recording of the steps you're taking when this Table issue occurs, as I'm still having a little trouble understanding your exact workflow.

If you're unsure how to take a screen recording, please check out our FAQ linked below - 

Many thanks in advance

@Dan C Sure! Find them attached. I show there the original look of the table first, then you can see the broken result after connecting the the text boxes as threads. 

Screen Recording 2022-08-31 at 11.38.22.mov

Edited September 1, 2022 by aeneis
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[Dan C]

My sincerest apologies for the delayed response here as I have been discussing this issue further with our QA team.

I can see that your tables are Pinned Inline objects and we believe this may be part of the cause of this issue, though I'm not able to replicate this in a new file.

Currently, the copy of your document I have is after linking the text frames, with the expanded table. Are you able to provide a copy of the .afpub file used in your above recording, which has the text frames unlinked? This can again be provided to the below link for me:

https://www.dropbox.com/request/N4frBOnKHejBlSmX3Wop

Many thanks once again