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Publisher 2.0.3 Mac – Publisher crashes reproducibly when changing footnotes to sidenotes


JanG

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Hi,

I started to work on a book project yesterday. The text was written in word and contains  about 250 footnotes. It imports smoothly into the text frames I have created, showing all the footnotes without issue. But when I activate the replacement function in publisher (Text --> Notes) Publisher crashes, i.e. it just disappears from the screen. An info window with a report for Apple appearing a few seconds later is all info I get.

I am running Pub 2 on a MacBook Pro M1 with M1pro and 16 GB under macOS Ventura 13.1. I have restarted my system several times but no improvement. This is extremely deterring as the book is my main work right now and the whole design concept relies on sidenotes. Is this a known issue?

Thanks

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If I may also suggest a new feature, it would be to enable also the vertical positioning of sidenotes, i.e. to enable a positioning starting at the top of the page/frame (running down just one after the other) or at the position of the text where the sidenote is entered or that the sidenotes are filled up one over the other on the side to end at the bottom of the the page/frame. Or even to make the frames of the sidenotes freely movable around the page.

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Hi Jan, I can't reproduce the crashing problems and I have the same system as you. Could you share a test docx file?

I recommend dividing this up into batches. Divide the Word document into logical chunks, perhaps chapters, and import just the file into a frame. Get that one working first. With fewer notes hopefully you'll have fewer problems. Then start a new series of linked frames for chapter 2 and import the second file into that. Convert that to sidenotes. And so on. I don't know that this will work but it's worth a try.

3 hours ago, JanG said:

If I may also suggest a new feature, it would be to enable also the vertical positioning of sidenotes, i.e. to enable a positioning starting at the top of the page/frame (running down just one after the other) or at the position of the text where the sidenote is entered or that the sidenotes are filled up one over the other on the side to end at the bottom of the the page/frame. Or even to make the frames of the sidenotes freely movable around the page.

Thinking about the worst case, the note marker is in the last line of text and the 1-line note is at the top of the frame, it would be so far away. Would you really want that?

But it does seem like a reasonable request if your document tends to have lots of longer side notes.

Cheers

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18 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

Hi Jan, I can't reproduce the crashing problems and I have the same system as you. Could you share a test docx file?

I recommend dividing this up into batches. Divide the Word document into logical chunks, perhaps chapters, and import just the file into a frame. Get that one working first. With fewer notes hopefully you'll have fewer problems. Then start a new series of linked frames for chapter 2 and import the second file into that. Convert that to sidenotes. And so on. I don't know that this will work but it's worth a try.

Thinking about the worst case, the note marker is in the last line of text and the 1-line note is at the top of the frame, it would be so far away. Would you really want that?

But it does seem like a reasonable request if your document tends to have lots of longer side notes.

Cheers

I will share a part of the file later.

I have found a work around in manually replacing each footnote by a sidenote. I really hate(!) that the sidenote content is not just placed in a textframe that could(!) be moved around independently – and actually I am thinking about doing that myself to gain more freedom in designing the pages. Publisher crashes here whenever I do quite ordinary things like copying text into sidenotes that extent over more than one page (yes, I have actiated split notes).

Actually, I am thinking that the problems might have to do with the Word file I am using as material. As I have learned it is itself a file that was exported from Pages. And I ran into problems with such a file before ... Is that possible? (The file opens and behaves very well in Word.)

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31 minutes ago, JanG said:

I really hate(!) that the sidenote content is not just placed in a textframe that could(!) be moved around independently – and actually I am thinking about doing that myself to gain more freedom in designing the pages.

If you could move the sidenote or footnote frames then Publisher would be unable to automatically reorder them when you insert a note between two existing notes. If you want to position notes manually then you'll have to use the pinning feature and if you do that you'll lose the automatic numbering.

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It would be extremely helpful, though, if you could make the sidenotes start at the top of the page. Now everything is pushed to the bottom of the page and the next page. It simply doesn't seem the best way to organize sidenotes.

Also we want to add images to make the side info more valuable, and that the side notes don not fill the page height limits us.

BTW, here is the word file that let the Pub crash - or at least the first ten pages of it.

The result should look more or less like the pdf. 

Example.docx 20230113 Satzexperiment01 p4-6.pdf

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Hmm, that Word file didn't import very nicely, every paragraph came in numbered and there were a lot of numbered blank lines at the start and thousands of numbered blank lines at the end. I deleted those from my test document and converted to side notes without issues. Then I changed from closest side to away from spine to match your PDF. This part all worked well and there were no crashes. Hopefully if you do it in chunks like this you'll be able to get it all imported and set up correctly.

For the pictures, I hadn't tried that before. You can pin an image in a sidenote but I didn't get usable results.

  • You have to use float instead of inline because inline will result in the sidenote number appearing to the left of the image.
  • The "keep within bounds" option for floated images was intended for keeping it within bounds of the main text frame, not a sidenote frame. I couldn't find a way to keep the image within bounds of the margins which is what I wanted. Maybe there's a way to do it but I couldn't find it.
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Okay, I tried to follow your advice, Mike. I even stopped using the photos because I would like to have the foot- to sidenote conversion ready first. I even improved the text source by importing and exporting it to my original MS Word (Office 2021).

But still some things d not work and one thing lead to an inevitable of publisher 2.

Look at the file I have created for you (Example 2). The sidenotes start on page 5. But if you look at page 8 and 9 you still see, what the 'sidenotes' looked like after the conversion: they still use the style of the footnotes, though somewhat changed as can be seen from the style name 'footnote+'. Now, that is not a major issue and can easily converted to the sidenote style called 'Körper' here. This worked nicely until I tried to convert sidenote 7. It included much more text in the original version, and let Publisher repeatedly crash if I changed the style to the more space consuming 'Körper' style.

Now I would like to invite you to add further text to sidenote 7, by typing or copying whatever you prefer.

You will note, that sidenote 9 and to a growing amount 8 as well disappear. This is especially strange for sidenote 9, as it is already completely an the next page 8, although its referencer is on page 7. What is even more spooky is, that sidenote 9 reappears, if you remove the text again in sidenote 7. But sidenote 8 never appears again in its full length. Just the first line reappears.

Actually, I just noticed that publisher seems to add a full, though invisble page to the document if you add further text to sidenote 7.

I think there is something very buggy with your sidenotes. 

Example2.afpub

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1 hour ago, JanG said:

But if you look at page 8 and 9 you still see, what the 'sidenotes' looked like after the conversion: they still use the style of the footnotes, though somewhat changed as can be seen from the style name 'footnote+'. Now, that is not a major issue and can easily converted to the sidenote style called 'Körper' here.

This is a known issue with importing footnotes from Microsoft Word - they come in with character attributes applied over the styles. Manual clean up is required for now.

As to the disappearing notes, yes, but I think Serif has enough details here now to fix this issue. I played with it some more and managed to crash Publisher when auto flowing text to further pages.

You might have to work around this until the next update. Footnotes and endnotes seem pretty solid but I guess there are still some stability issues with sidenotes, all probably related to the placement issue.

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