Index and crashes

[Sierbahnn]

I have been working in a series of documents now, and something they all share in common is that at random intervals, when I try to insert an index-entry, the program simply crashes. No error-message, no restore-screen, nothing. It just closes down. I can restart the program, open the document again and sometimes I can mark the very same pieces of text and make it an index-entry, but sometimes it will simply result in another crash.

Has anyone else experienced similar issues when working with index-marks? Is there a way to make this more stable?

[Lee D]

If you can come up with a recipe to reproduce the issue each time, it'll be something we can look into. Does the same occur with any files or just a particular one? Are you using macOS or Windows? Also try monitoring memory usage as this may of been the cause.

[Sierbahnn]

I will look into it and while I can replicate it in a certain document (it happens every time I index a particular line of text) that does not help us much, as I am not at liberty to share the document, and I don't think the same issue would occur is I replaced the text and graphic elements in order to share it.

[MikeTO]

@Lee D I've experienced this before, too, but it's rare for me. See this other thread:

In my last post in that thread I promised to send a crash report the next time it happened but it hasn't happened since then which shows how intermittent it is for me. With Publisher 1.9 on my old Intel Mac, it happened frequently enough that I I'd think about whether I'd saved recently before inserting an index mark. With 1.10 on my M1 machine, I've only had it once or twice so I've stopped worrying about it. I don't know if the decrease in frequency is due to the change to 1.10, the change to the M1, or just the current state of my document.

But @Sierbahnn has a repeatable example which is more useful than my intermittent crashes.

Sierbahnn, do you have Text > Index > Show Index Marks on? If so, could you turn it off and then try repeating your test? It would be interesting to know if Publisher crashes with it off. I doubt it will make a difference but it's worth a try and it would rule one thing out.

[Sierbahnn]

I do not have Show Index Marks as on. I will redo the document and look at memory usage, and see if the crash reappears.

[Sierbahnn]

I looked at the memory usage and saw now spikes, and after getting three more crashes the index actually "stuck" without crashing. No idea.

[MikeTO]

@Lee DHere's a crash report for inserting an index marker. The good news is that out of ~200 index marks inserted this was the only crash. There was nothing special about this index mark compared to the others and it wasn't repeatable.

Affinity Publisher-2022-10-11-093313.ips

I tested by deleting all of the index topics and markers in my book and re-indexing it, rather than just inserting random index markers which I thought might not include whatever step triggers this. After deleting all the index topics and markers, I scrolled to the index and it had already disappeared which I thought was pretty neat, I expected that I'd have to Update or delete the outdated index. My index is on a master page and Update doesn't work for an index in a master frame so I was planning to delete it. Although it was gone, I mindlessly clicked in the frame anyway and Publisher crashed immediately. I've attached this crash report, too. I repeated these steps a few more times without crashing so this crash isn't repeatable either but I assume they're tied together.

Affinity Publisher-2022-10-11-090522.ips

The rest of this is just my notes in case it's helpful with understanding what led to the crash.

After inserting three dozen index markers without an issue I realized I hadn't encountered another index bug I wanted to test which is that sometimes when you insert an index mark the focus is given to the Parent Topic field rather than the Topic field. This isn't a crash bug, it's just annoying since I typically start typing without looking at the dialog and then end up typing into the wrong field. It will happen even if the Topic dropdown is displayed as I've shown in the second screenshot. I spent some time and figured out the trigger for this bug - when inserting an index mark, type your text into Topic, tab to Parent Topic, and then press Return to insert the index mark - the next time you insert a mark focus will be given to Parent Topic. This won't happen if you click OK instead of pressing Return - presumably that removes focus from Parent Topic before closing the dialog which avoids the bug. So this is just an incorrect dialog initialization issue and is likely Mac only. I don't think this is an important bug but because the crash in inserting the index marker didn't happen until after I did this I wondered if there was a connection. But I inserted a many more index marks both ways, leaving focus in Topic and other times switching focus to Parent Topic, but never had another crash.

 

I tried inserting index marks with and without the Index panel open. I tried inserting index marks with and without an index in the document.

After 100+ index marks I triggered the M1 file size bloat issue so I had to embed and relink the images to reduce the file size and continue. I thought that was interesting - I know that adding or removing blocks of text in a story with inline linked images can trigger the issue but I didn't know that even a hidden marker could trigger it.

I was disappointed that I couldn't duplicate the insert index marker crash more frequently but at least I grabbed these two crash reports.