N-Up printing in presets crashes Affinity

[zimmt]

With macOS Ventura n-up settings no longer work. Selecting a range doesn't work. Overall the print dialogue crashes much more frequently and our entire printing has come to a halt.

[zimmt]

Playing around with this further I found the following:

- Print presets containing N-Up data created before Ventura work fine if selected twice in a row.

- All print presets containing N-UP data created in Ventura crash Affinity (v1 and v2 alike) but not any other App (which of course doesn't look at N-Up data).

I've looked at the plist files but could not spot any difference between the presets created before Ventura and those created with Ventura. But I will look more closely.

Can anyone confirm/reproduce this issue?

[zimmt]

I've done more tests using different printers, latest drivers (OEM and AirPrint), resetting print system, clean plist files, and it all breaks down once N-up is added to presets.

Even just selecting N-up without entering any values causes the issue. I have attached a clean plist of a test preset that has N-up enabled but without any values.

The presets function got an overhaul in Ventura... maybe the plist structure was changed as well and now Affinity has trouble reading it?

Anyone else can confirm this issue?

[zimmt]

After a little more sleuthing I believe I located the issue.

The new presets system in Ventura seems to save less values, particularly those that are unchanged. In regards to N-Up, it only saves changed values whereas previous MacOS versions also saved the default values.

I've attached 2 plists for comparison.

The temporary fix is to put values in all fields and then change unneeded ones to "0" by editing the plist file.

For a permanent fix it is now up to the developers, developers, developers!!

 

Also, reading N-up values from presets has also always been a little buggy. When opening the print dialog and selecting a preset, it only showed the values of that particular preset even when selecting another one. So the only way to see the values of a particular preset is to open the print dialog newly for each one. That was just a minor bug, but with Ventura it doesn't want to read them back at all it seems.

And last but not least, the "Reverse Page Orientation" setting under "Layout" is not being written nor read from presets (even when manually added to the plist). This was also an issue in past Affinity versions although sometime last year it was fixed. With Ventura however it's back to being unfixed. All other Mac apps can save and read this setting just fine.

Affinity has been around many many years now and it would be great to see the print functions just work flawlessly. I doubt it would take that much time to solve and it seems like a high priority to have this working... as after all, we're not all designing for the digital space and we really need a full-fledge alternative to Creative Cloud.

 

Of course, all of the above is moot if this is an issue just on my side. So I'd appreciate it if someone could take a minute to quickly test for these issues to see if they can be reproduced. Thank you.

[zimmt]

Furthermore when switching between print presets the orientation is sometimes incorrect. Select the preset twice seems to fix it but not always.

Accessing printer specific settings causes Affinity to crash at times.

Basically printing with Affinity on a Mac is buggy. Printing and presets work perfectly from any other Mac app.

Can anyone confirm this?

[zimmt]

Are the forums still monitored by staff at all?

Would be great to hear if this issue exists for others as well.

[MikeTO]

Yes, Serif staff respond but they're still behind from the launch of v2. They'll get to it sooner or later.

Some of us customers have been pitching in and answering questions. I read your posts and tried to duplicate it but didn't immediately spot the problem. I only have one printer so I can't test everything that you're trying to do. And I've never saved a print preset so I didn't have old ones to test with.

I really dislike the new Ventura print window, it's not Apple's best design. I think Serif could make a few tweaks to work with it a bit better.

Cheers

[MikeTO]

FYI this thread may be a related issue.

 

[Sam's chum]

Mine doesn’t crash, it just won’t go to the print driver at all. I have got around it at the moment by exporting as a jpeg, then opening the mac preview and printing from there. It lets me access all the presets and profiles

 

[Lee_T]

Hi zimmit, 

Thanks for letting us know about this issue, i've reported this and we'll hopefully be able to resolve it soon.

Lee

[zimmt]

Thank you.

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "Print Presets with N-UP cause a hang when opening print dialogue." (REF: AFB-7230) has been fixed by the developers in internal build "2.1.0.1720".
This fix should soon be available as a customer beta and is planned for inclusion in the next customer release.
Customer beta builds are announced here and you can participate by following these instructions.
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Serif Info Bot to notify us.

[zimmt]

Seems to be fixed. Thank you.

There is one little bug (though it is easy to get around) which occurs when saving a preset with a Range of "Selection". If nothing has been selected (which affects documents with and without artboards) then Affinity crashes when using such presets. It should just pick the entire document instead or whatever artboard is available, if that is possible.

Interestingly when specifying a specific Artboard (by name) it does not crash on documents with or without artboards and just picks another artboard or the entire document as a substitute.