Exporting error for PDF in Affinity Publisher 2

[RZi]

Hello. I have an Affinity Publisher v1 document that I opened in Affinity Publisher v2. I went to File > Export as I wanted to test the v2 layout of a PDF side-by-side with the output from v1 to see if anything needed to be fixed with my layout due to the upgrade.

I'm getting an "An error occurred while exporting to:" error when I do this, with no details. How do I best debug with error? Any logs somewhere? I never saw this error in v1.

Thank you.

[RZi]

This is with Affinity Publisher 2.0.0 on macOS Ventura 13.0.

[Boyd Pander]

I am having a similar issue, running Publisher 2.0.0 on Monterey 12.4. I followed this V1 thread to enable logging: 

Debugging results:
At one point I kept the export window open until a preview has been generated which took quite a while (fans spinning up too!). That seemed to result in a single successful export. But any other time, the export fails. In the log the following error is printed before PAGE 14 in the PDF can be completed:

PDF_begin_template_ext(p_0x7f9936f61be0, 0.000000, 0.000000, "transparencygroup={colorspace=DeviceRGB isolated=true} boundingbox={0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0}")
[Begin template 0]
[0]
PDF_end_template_ext(p_0x7f9936f61be0, 0.000000, 0.000000)
[Last exception 2171 in PDF_end_template_ext]["Template has no dimensions"]

However, in batches I've been able to export these 'issue' pages just fine. The issue pages also aren't always consistent, so it seems likely that the issue is not with the content.

[Dominika]

Hello, 
I have An error occurred while exporting trouble too. (Publisher 2, macOS) It would be nice to know where the problem is and what to do about it. Thanks. 

[s15]

Yup me too. Larger document of 50+ pages, at first thought it was a hyperlink issue but ive painstakingly been through each one. Tried opening in original Publisher as a way around getting the PDF done for my client but it won't open things created in 2. Please any work around urgently required. Sat here 25 minutes now and still no preview 😮 

[Steve Kenson]

Also encountering this "An error occurred while exporting" error. Is there a workaround?

[JazC]

On 11/30/2022 at 4:59 PM, LondonSquirrel said:

You need to find out which element is broken. Refer to the linked post above your post.

If you have pictures in your document (I make an assumption that you do), another method may be to open Window/Resource Manager, look at each picture in turn, and see if you have any which apparently have a zero size like this:

Thanks, LondonSquirrel. I had a 2-page document created in Publisher 2 that wouldn't export to pdf, and the Resource Manager worked well to find a couple of files that were a problem. I'd originally placed them as .svg files, but they kept disappearing when I re-opened the document. I converted them to .jpg but they seemed to have left 'ghosts' of themselves behind in the layers. I deleted them and now the pdf preview appears instantly and export is fine.

[RZi]

After a page-by-page deletion experiment. I was able to identify the page that was causing the export error. Once I identified the page, I start removing elements and text blocks one at a time, until I discovered that the export error was due to an email hyperlink that had a space at the end of it. I deleted the space and the PDF now exports. Affinity Publisher v1 allows documents with a space after the email hyperlink to export. The space was a typo on my end, but Affinity Publisher v2 is less forgiving, it seems.

 

Edited December 11, 2022 by RZi

[R C-R]

15 minutes ago, RZi said:

Affinity Publisher v1 allows documents with a space after the email hyperlink to export. The space was a typo on my end, but Affinity Publisher v2 is less forgiving, it seems.

If it worked in V1 then it is probably something that should be reported as a bug in V2.

[UZZIELEON]

On 12/11/2022 at 5:23 PM, RZi said:

After a page-by-page deletion experiment. I was able to identify the page that was causing the export error. Once I identified the page, I start removing elements and text blocks one at a time, until I discovered that the export error was due to an email hyperlink that had a space at the end of it. I deleted the space and the PDF now exports. Affinity Publisher v1 allows documents with a space after the email hyperlink to export. The space was a typo on my end, but Affinity Publisher v2 is less forgiving, it seems.

 

Dear RZi, I had the same problem, but I fixed it by deleting the "mailto: " instruction from the E-mail interactive field. Due to my experience using Adobe Acrobat PRO, I assumed that I had to place the mailto before the email, but it seems that in Affinity Publisher this is not necessary. The hyperlinks of my PDF worked just fine. Thank you for all your replies!