[Windows] Affinity Designer 2 cannot export page to PDF

[Seikilos]

Hi

I am trying to export a designer file into PDF but it fails. One time I got a

Quote

An error occurred while exporting to pdf

The pdflib log file doesn't say much and after one export affinity designer is in an inconsistent state. It shows my file as modified but hitting save or ctrl+s doesn't change anything.

I've also tried exporting text as curves only.

Are there more verbose log options for publisher? I've checked the Log.txt from Designer but nothing of use there

pdflib.log

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Seikilos said:

Are there more verbose log options for publisher?

No, and the PDFLib log is normally verbose enough to localize the issue.

[Seikilos]

I dug deeper into it and found an issue with a layer that had a mask. Rasterizing it fixed the issue. I am looking into an repro case but currently the layer uses licenced material which I cannot share.

And I doubt that pdflib is the problem here. I assume an internal exception in designer that breaks some internal state. When the export fails, I no longer can work with designer itself, e.g. I cannot hide layers any more, when I click on the hide button in the layer window, the visible/invisible state toggles, but the main view of the document does no longer update.

[walt.farrell]

4 hours ago, Seikilos said:

I am looking into an repro case but currently the layer uses licenced material which I cannot share.

The Serif Staff will be able to provide a private upload link so you can share it just with them for diagnostic purposes. They are busy but should be here at some point, so if you keep the broken version of the file you can upload it then.

[Seikilos]

Ok, funny part: It works now, it worked when I opened this thread but it is poor UI design plus maybe an optimization issue.

The bottom line: I export a PDF that has two high res layers with a mask on it. When I click export to PDF the dialog closes and then nothing happens.

No export dialog appears, the cpu load on my machine for Designer is at about 2-3%, so it appears that nothing is happening. I even can sort of click around in the designer, although with issues that I've mentioned above.

My observation from the program point of view: Designer is not dead, it seams, that it takes a very long time processing the high res layers with the masks (maybe rasterizing). It takes a lot of time, much longer than rasterizing the layer manually. And it does it's rasterizing async in a separate thread/task that does not block the UI but blocks underlying operations (that's why I can change visibility in the layers panel, but the main view does not reflect this change). Some time later, which can be a minute or three, the processing finishes, yielding the work to the exporter job, which then in turn spawns the export progress bar and does the pdflib write to disk.

If Serif give me a private upload ability, I will upload a file with only the layers I've mentioned where the issue can be observed.