Images spontaneously resizing themselves after being placed

[ogdredweary]

This is very strange and frustrating, and I don't know what's causing the problem because all the steps I take are consistent. I'm posting this in macOS bugs because that's what I'm working on now, but this problem was present on the iPad as well. Below is a screen recording of the problem in action. I blurred the content of the document, but you should still be able to discern the cursor movements and image frames.

Basically, I select an image; scale it up to fit the page; centre it; try to select the next image; wait for Publisher to catch up; select the next image; partially scale it up; wait for Publisher to catch up; finish scaling it up; centre it; try to select the next image; wait for Publisher to catch up again—then suddenly, with no input from me, the previous image scales itself up beyond the boundaries of the page. Then I have to go back and fix it before I can carry on. 

This doesn't happen for every image that I resize and place. Sometimes it'll happen repeatedly over multiple pages, one after the other, then it will be okay for several pages, then it might go every other. The project is more than 1,000 images like this that need to be scaled and centred, and this bug is becoming a real problem. If there's a better way to do this, I'm anxious to learn it.

 

System specs: 2019 MacBook Pro 16-inch, 2.3GHz 8-core Intel Core i9, 64GB RAM, 8GB AMD Radeon Pro 5500M, macOS 12.5

Input device: Logitech MX Ergo Trackball Mouse (connected via USB dongle, i.e. not Bluetooth)

Other details: No other applications were running at the time (except for Quicktime to take the screen recording)

 

 

Edited November 25, 2022 by ogdredweary
Added OS info

[MikeTO]

I know you've blurred it for privacy but it's quite hard to follow what's happening without being able to see the mouse, transform panel, size handles, and so on.

I've never had to wait for Publisher to scale an image, it's always instantaneous. Even with my former i7 circa 2015 it was faster than what you're showing.

How did you create this document with 1000 images? Ideally you would have placed a picture frame on a master page and scaled it to fit the page and set its content scaling to Max Size scaled from the centre. Then if you added the 1000 images to 1000 pages, they'd all be scaled and positioned accurately from the moment they were placed.

Did you create this document from a PDF of scanned pages? If so, there's an easier way to make all 1000 images fit the page:

1. Open the PDF. Let's assume it's a US Letter size page (8.5x11 in) with 1 in margins on all sides.
2. Choose File > Document Setup. You don't need to change this but the Scaling tab will be set to Anchor to Page and the centre anchor which is what we want.
3. Click Dimensions and change the page size to 6.5x8.412 in and then click OK. This will remove the margins from all sides and crop a bit from the top and bottom.
4. Choose File > Document Setup again.
5. Click Scaling and change Position to Rescale. Leave Resample alone unless you know you want a different option.
6. Click Dimensions and change the page size to 8.5x11 in and then click OK. This will add back the margins.

Doing this will maintain the images' aspect ratio, too. You'll have to adjust the page sizes in the two steps depending on the page sizes and margins.

Cheers

[ogdredweary]

55 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

I know you've blurred it for privacy but it's quite hard to follow what's happening without being able to see the mouse, transform panel, size handles, and so on.

Yeah, sorry about that. I adjusted it as much as I could to help with cursor/frame visibility without compromising privacy, which is why I also included a detailed written description. Had hoped together they would be enough to present the problem. 

Quote

I've never had to wait for Publisher to scale an image, it's always instantaneous. Even with my former i7 circa 2015 it was faster than what you're showing.

How did you create this document with 1000 images? Ideally you would have placed a picture frame on a master page and scaled it to fit the page and set its content scaling to Max Size scaled from the centre. Then if you added the 1000 images to 1000 pages, they'd all be scaled and positioned accurately from the moment they were placed.

Did you create this document from a PDF of scanned pages?

Hm. I suppose I’ve been using the software wrong from the start then. The images do not come from a singular PDF document. Each page is a separate file. I personally, manually scanned thousands of handwritten pages, many of which had to have excess margins cropped out. I balked at having to open each file one at a time to do the cropping, which is what made me seek out professional software. This project started in Publisher V1, and I added the images via Document -> Add Pages From File… It was actually a bit of a nightmare because I had stupidly scanned the pages with OCR and every image had useless junk layers filled with gibberish characters—all of which I manually deleted in the first pass as I cropped, scaled, adjusted, and repositioned as necessary. That copy had larger margins since it had been my intention to have it bound after printing. I am now working on the digital copy with much smaller margins and a clickable TOC. I had really wanted to figure out a way to get it into an EPUB format, but I’ve given that up and am resigned to the PDF…it will have to be good enough. 

Boy, oh boy did I ever make things harder on myself it seems. I’m a little more than halfway through my current edits and I’m sitting here wondering if it wouldn’t still be faster and easier to start from scratch using the ideal method you described. I’d have to re-crop all the earliest scans, but that may be way less than what’s left that needs rescaling and repositioning. 

I can’t thank you enough for your detailed reply. Still not sure the best way to proceed from here, but at least I have options now. Thanks

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, ogdredweary said:

Boy, oh boy did I ever make things harder on myself it seems. I’m a little more than halfway through my current edits and I’m sitting here wondering if it wouldn’t still be faster and easier to start from scratch using the ideal method you described. I’d have to re-crop all the earliest scans, but that may be way less than what’s left that needs rescaling and repositioning. 

If you're halfway through you could make two copies of the file and delete the finished and unfinished pages from each half. Then use the document resize approach I suggested for the unfinished half before merging the two files back together. It's worth a try anyway.

[ogdredweary]

3 hours ago, MikeTO said:

If you're halfway through you could make two copies of the file and delete the finished and unfinished pages from each half. Then use the document resize approach I suggested for the unfinished half before merging the two files back together. It's worth a try anyway.

Excellent suggestion, thank you. I will give that a try.

[ogdredweary]

On 11/25/2022 at 11:05 AM, MikeTO said:

If so, there's an easier way to make all 1000 images fit the page:

1. Open the PDF. Let's assume it's a US Letter size page (8.5x11 in) with 1 in margins on all sides.
2. Choose File > Document Setup. You don't need to change this but the Scaling tab will be set to Anchor to Page and the centre anchor which is what we want.
3. Click Dimensions and change the page size to 6.5x8.412 in and then click OK. This will remove the margins from all sides and crop a bit from the top and bottom.
4. Choose File > Document Setup again.
5. Click Scaling and change Position to Rescale. Leave Resample alone unless you know you want a different option.
6. Click Dimensions and change the page size to 8.5x11 in and then click OK. This will add back the margins.

Doing this will maintain the images' aspect ratio, too. You'll have to adjust the page sizes in the two steps depending on the page sizes and margins.

This is working to an extent, although the 6.5x8.412 is cropping way too much and cutting into the handwriting. None of the remaining pages require any cropping, so I experimented with varying percentages of scale and have found a narrow window. Either the image is scaled ever so slightly smaller than the page or ever so slightly larger than the page, which would be good enough except that the image is for some reason being moved up the page and not perfectly centred after the adjustments. I’ll manually reposition every image if I must (I’ve made it this far after all), but I wanted to ask on the off chance that maybe there’s some other setting to be selected that could help. Even if there isn’t, these steps will have still saved me a lot of tedious work.

[MikeTO]

If the images aren't perfectly centred after doing this mathematically I'd guess they were slightly off before you did the scaling down and back up because they should be exactly centred after you're doing. I tested it and it worked perfectly.

But I just thought of a better way to do this than the page scaling. If you've already scaled that's fix, this will still work with your pages now that you have that done.

I'm assuming your images aren't in picture frames. Draw a picture frame on the master page and that frame will then be on every page, below the images. (If it's not, apply the master to all the pages.) By default this frame will be set to Scale to Max Fit and align to the centre anchor but you can check that with Properties in the Context Bar.

Then go to a regular page and if the image isn't perfectly centred you could just drag the image's layer onto the new picture frame layer using the Layers panel. After you drop it onto the frame, presto, the image will become centred and scaled to fit the page. This is much easier than manually dragging and scaling the image.

Cheers

[ogdredweary]

17 hours ago, MikeTO said:

If the images aren't perfectly centred after doing this mathematically I'd guess they were slightly off before you did the scaling down and back up because they should be exactly centred after you're doing. I tested it and it worked perfectly.

But I just thought of a better way to do this than the page scaling. If you've already scaled that's fix, this will still work with your pages now that you have that done.

I'm assuming your images aren't in picture frames. Draw a picture frame on the master page and that frame will then be on every page, below the images. (If it's not, apply the master to all the pages.) By default this frame will be set to Scale to Max Fit and align to the centre anchor but you can check that with Properties in the Context Bar.

Then go to a regular page and if the image isn't perfectly centred you could just drag the image's layer onto the new picture frame layer using the Layers panel. After you drop it onto the frame, presto, the image will become centred and scaled to fit the page. This is much easier than manually dragging and scaling the image.

Cheers

I would have expected the images to have been centred automatically when I added them, but then again, I did start this project several years back in V1 (and in a very roundabout way it seems), so perhaps they were not centred correctly after all. 

Either way, this is the answer! I still need to manually drag all the image layers to the picture frame layers, but it’s definitely much more efficient than what I had been doing. 

 

Even though I have a better method to do this work now, I think the problem I originally posted about remains worth looking into. My system should be more than capable of handling the document I was working with, and the program shouldn’t have been so slow to respond to my inputs, so I’ll leave it open.

[Dan C]

Hi @ogdredweary,

Thanks for your report and our sincerest apologies for the delayed response here. We are exceptionally busy following the release of V2 and we thank you for your continued patience and understanding here.

On 11/29/2022 at 8:01 PM, ogdredweary said:

My system should be more than capable of handling the document I was working with, and the program shouldn’t have been so slow to respond to my inputs, so I’ll leave it open.

Can you please confirm for me, what file formats are the images you are placing in this file?

Can you also please navigate to Affinity Publisher 2 > Preferences > Performance and provide a screenshot of your settings here for me?

Many thanks in advance

[ogdredweary]

17 hours ago, Dan C said:

Thanks for your report and our sincerest apologies for the delayed response here. We are exceptionally busy following the release of V2 and we thank you for your continued patience and understanding here.

Happy to hear from you!

17 hours ago, Dan C said:

Can you please confirm for me, what file formats are the images you are placing in this file?

PDF images—high res scans of handwritten pages (originally OCR, but I removed the OCR layers a while ago because they were gibberish)

Also, just double-checked the size of the file in question and it's 5.9 GB. The file I ended up with in the end is 7.53 GB, and Affinity would still freeze up a bit while I was working in that file, particularly adding the final headings for the TOC. 

17 hours ago, Dan C said:

Can you also please navigate to Affinity Publisher 2 > Preferences > Performance and provide a screenshot of your settings here for me?

[Dan C]

Many thanks for verifying that for me, and the screenshot provided!

I'd recommend unticking Hardware Acceleration at the bottom of the Performance dialog, then restarting the app and seeing if this improves the responsiveness for you

[ogdredweary]

3 hours ago, Dan C said:

Many thanks for verifying that for me, and the screenshot provided!

I'd recommend unticking Hardware Acceleration at the bottom of the Performance dialog, then restarting the app and seeing if this improves the responsiveness for you

I'll give that a go, thanks!