All 300+ reference end notes description gone...

[Cogent30]

Dear all,

 

I am happy that Affinity Publisher is now gaining traction with new updates. However in addition to persistent crashing at times (from backspacing body paragraphs), I am perplexed that all of a sudden, I have lost over 300+ worth of citation Endnote descriptions.

Each and every single one of them. All gone. Lost. No reason that I can trace. 

I did not touch a single thing what so ever on endnotes~ whether it is noted on the body and the actual reference itself at the end of the document. 

What is strange is each and every reference point retains their original positioning in my body content. 

I do however keep regular backups.

But the question here is, do I have to start over by copying and pasting each and every 300+ worth of citation descriptions?

I understand that this is hard to diagnose, but if there is one thing that can possibly be an issue connected, is that I have been witnessing a lot more crashes recently; when editing text in general. Backspacing Body normal paragraph styles somehow revert erroneously to H2 headers, and a few seconds later, crashes occur. I may have to submit a separate support ticket on this. 

However, I remain appreciative if anyone can possibly raise any ideas as to "why" ~ the sudden disappearance each and every citation that I (manually with labour of love) copied and pasted before. One by one. 300+ of them. 

 

Sincerely,

 

CG30.

  

[Old Bruce]

59 minutes ago, Cogent30 said:

However, I remain appreciative if anyone can possibly raise any ideas as to "why" ~ the sudden disappearance each and every citation that I (manually with labour of love) copied and pasted before. One by one. 300+ of them. 

Did you make the notes with the text of the note inside the square brackets or outside of them? Easily done. Inside is what you want/need.

[Dan C]

I'm certainly sorry to hear this @Cogent30, as it isn't something I've seen being reported previously.

Although I appreciate these no longer appear in your document, would you be able to attach a copy of your file here for me?
If you could also provide a copy of a previous backup where these End Note descriptions exist, please attach this here for me also - as it may help to give a better idea as to the cause of this.

If you'd like a private upload link for these files, please let me know!

[Cogent30]

hi @Old Bruce yes I am aware of this nuanced guideline and yes I made sure that each and every of the 300+ citation are actually inside the open [ and close ] brackets. I am attaching screenshots below from my previous backup copy  below.

Hi @Dan C thank you for the offer for private uploading not sure how I am going to go about doing this. I will have to do some deliberation for ND/nondisclosures purposes beforehand.  this unfortunately may take a while which I will have to set aside some time, not a quick 15 min job I'm afraid. 

 but in any case, I remain grateful for the prompt response of the community as always.

Regards, CG30. 

*Edit* - considering its large document and its ND/nondisclosure nature it will take some time before I can arrive a decision whether to surrender a file (with deliberate restyling for privacy) or to keep self-troubleshooting these myself. But meanwhile, I am happy to consider any or all inputs from anyone, or those who have had similar predicaments. Regards, CG30. 

Edited July 10, 2023 by Cogent30
Edit - course of action advance notification

[Dan C]

No problem at all, I certainly understand regarding NDA's and the ability to share your file.

I can see that your End Notes appear to be entered correctly within the End Notes section, though I do note that these all either end with rounded or square brackets - though this of course should technically be no issue, I am intrigued as to whether this may be part of the trigger for this issue.

In your backup document, do any of your End Note descriptions end with different characters?

I'd like to request a copy of your crash reports, to see if these contain any relevant information to the possible cause also, can you please attach these here for me?

Many thanks 

[Old Bruce]

2 hours ago, Dan C said:

I can see that your End Notes appear to be entered correctly within the End Notes section, though I do note that these all either end with rounded or square brackets  ...

The last one in the screen shot has a full stop as a final character, more importantly in the first post the screenshot of the "handful" of notes which were included all but one seem to formatted with closing brackets as final characters. So I too doubt that is a condition or recipe for loss.

[Cogent30]

Dear all, so I decided to go through my Mac (Mini M1 base model) crash reports. The recent crashes I believe may give us some leading clues or "proxy" to why I have lost all my citations...

These are all the .ips files that I could find. I am happy for anyone to be able to decipher them. From memory I remembered seeing a lot of persistent "exc_bad_access"' ~ upon which these crashes coincide repeatedly when I was making recent amends to my book (but not adding any more citations). 

These are the only reports I can find, at least - tied to Affinity Publisher 2 (under Library > Logs > Diagnostic Reports). 

Once again, thank you all for your help. Maybe what I will try is that I will try self-reproducing these crashes by going back to my previous copy, and deliberately make copy changes....and if I do experience more crashes I will try to find the time to submit / record / screenshot them...

sincerely, CG30. 

 

Affinity Publisher 2 Affinity Store-2023-07-09-221407.ips Affinity Publisher 2 Affinity Store-2023-07-09-201052.ips Affinity Publisher 2 Affinity Store-2023-07-09-200039.ips Affinity Publisher 2 Affinity Store-2023-07-09-195319.ips Affinity Publisher 2 Affinity Store-2023-07-09-191340.ips Affinity Publisher 2 Affinity Store-2023-07-08-102129.ips Affinity Publisher 2 Affinity Store-2023-07-08-102045.ips

[Dan C]

Many thanks for providing these crash reports - many of the reports indicate an issue with 'Symbols' (aka Master Pages), both with unexpected locations and seemingly Preflight checking (perhaps during a 'live' scan, or when you go to export) these 'Symbol' objects, both of which are seemingly causing the app to crash.

Unfortunately there are many reasons for this, your Master Page may be out of sync unexpectedly, it may be that they are physically in the incorrect location on the canvas or even in an unexpected layer order for the page - so this would unfortunately require either deleting all of your master pages to see if the issue continues, or manually checking each page to try and determine the exact culprit. 

Of course we wouldn't usually expect our users to have to follow these steps, as it's part of the Technical Support role in trying to recover a file/stop the app from crashing, but with the aforementioned confidentiality blockers, this may be rather difficult for you to do, without having the previous knowledge/experience to know exactly what you are looking for - my apologies. 

[Cogent30]

hi @Dan C thank you so much for the generous response so soon and my apologies for not keeping this thread alive soon enough.

From the clue you hinted surrounding master pages, I tried:

1. Copy and paste just few pages worth of content into a fresh new document, alongside some the citations with it. 
2. Copy and paste ALL content into a fresh new document, alongside all the citations with it. 
3. Make a new master spread, reassign the document pages into this new master spread.

.....And I was expecting a miracle. No. all actual citations still gone. 

As it currently stands, looks like I have to gulp it all - by manually entering the citation one by one by one from my latest backup copy....

One thing that I am glad. There is no "deadline" in this project. However, were this be an actual one, I would certainly be demanding others, who are working with long documents with hundreds of citations - to do thorough "battle-testing". From these user base ~  I would love to hear your experience and witnessing, if any, very surprising problem which for no reason I could trace at all - that all Endnotes citations simply disappear just from daily content editing (without actually touching, adding or removing any endnotes at all.

And thus once again as it currently stand, this remains largely unsolved. And I would appreciate anyone, including myself, sanity and time provided - to keep this thread alive. 

sincerely,

CG30. 

[Dan C]

Apologies for the delayed response here and thank you for the update - I'm certainly sorry to hear you were unable to discern any further information or recover these citations.

I have been speaking with members of the team internally regarding this and I can conclude that it hasn't been reported by any users previously, and thus far there aren't many suggestions as to how this could have occurred, especially considering the table notes were retained.

Out of interest, if you select one of your Footnotes in the main story text and use the 'Go To Note Body' option within the Text > Notes menu, where does the app locate the view to? Are you shown the blank list of footnotes at the end of your file, or perhaps something else?

[Cogent30]

Hi @Dan C likewise my thanks for you to keep this thread, and I do apologize myself for the delayed response, have been inundated elsewhere. 

The "Go To Note Body" simply takes me to the Endnotes end of the document, or the file should I say. It takes me to exactly where the citation number resides, which to my knowledge thus far is not erroneous... 

It is just  that each and every individual endnote entry content themselves somehow disappears....while strangely somehow retaining each and every citation numbers intact. There was no hidden characters I could see that resemble paragraphs, no accidental character style massive global overrides being applied, etc. Each and every citation actual text content, just somehow disappears...

Whilst it is unfortunate I may not be able to resume working on this document as my attention is needed elsewhere. I am still  nonetheless retaining a view to nevertheless set aside time (plenty of time) to re-copying and pasting each and every 300+ citation content. 

At the very least, I am a little grateful that there is no actual deadline, per se. However if it is, well, then a more compelling case and attention is obviously warranted.

My thank you's nonetheless to the affinity team, cheers CG30.

[Cogent30]

Hi All @Dan C

There is however, something that raise further question. As I slowly am re-copying and pasting each citation it appears that there are special character "/" (slight-left slant-straight stripe)  in addition to the familiar "[" and "]" . Does this suggest anything that may be erroneous?

regards, CG 30. 

 

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, Cogent30 said:

There is however, something that raise further question. As I slowly am re-copying and pasting each citation it appears that there are special character "/" (slight-left slant-straight stripe)  in addition to the familiar "[" and "]" . Does this suggest anything that may be erroneous?

I've never seen a slanted vertical bar special character before. Any chance you could create a document that just has this endnote in it? You could delete all the other pages and then delete all the other endnotes, leaving just the one.

Also to possibly figure out how it got there, click in that endnote and then look at the Notes panel. What is in the Format > In Note Body > Number Text field? Is there anything that might be the vertical bar? You can copy and paste the text from that field into a blank text frame to examine it in more detail.

Here's a table of all known special characters although I found one more while testing your issue. There's a pound sign # that can appear in blue if you copy and paste an endnote number. I'll add that in a future version of this chart.

 

[Oufti]

6 hours ago, MikeTO said:

I've never seen a slanted vertical bar special character before.

The bar itself is not slanted, it is just in italics. And if you look carefully, you'll see there are also two dots on the left side of the bar. (Well visible on note [51].)

This is apparently what you named "Broken endnotes brackets - Result of copy/paste" in your Special characters chart. 

The name is frightening, even if I don't know exactly what it refers to… 

 

[MikeTO]

3 hours ago, Oufti said:

The bar itself is not slanted, it is just in italics. And if you look carefully, you'll see there are also two dots on the left side of the bar. (Well visible on note [51].)

This is apparently what you named "Broken endnotes brackets - Result of copy/paste" in your Special characters chart. 

The name is frightening, even if I don't know exactly what it refers to… 

Oh you're right, I didn't see the dots there. Yes, these are broken endnotes brackets. It's not frightening - you're just able to select these brackets for some reason and if you do and then copy/paste you'll get the broken bracket symbols because they are not a real endnote reference.

[Oufti]

9 hours ago, MikeTO said:

It's not frightening

It depends on the perspective. For @Cogent30, finding itself with broken endnotes characters could be not such a good news… 

[Dan C]

On 7/22/2023 at 4:36 PM, Cogent30 said:

The "Go To Note Body" simply takes me to the Endnotes end of the document, or the file should I say. It takes me to exactly where the citation number resides, which to my knowledge thus far is not erroneous... 

On 7/23/2023 at 4:09 PM, Cogent30 said:

There is however, something that raise further question. As I slowly am re-copying and pasting each citation it appears that there are special character "/" (slight-left slant-straight stripe)  in addition to the familiar "[" and "]" . Does this suggest anything that may be erroneous?

On 7/22/2023 at 4:36 PM, Cogent30 said:

At the very least, I am a little grateful that there is no actual deadline, per se. However if it is, well, then a more compelling case and attention is obviously warranted.

Thanks for the above, I can confirm the following:

• I have logged a bug report with our developers regarding the copy and pasting of these Endnote brackets - I'm not entirely sure at this time if this is related to the specific issue reported with your file, but in either case this should not occur and will hopefully be addressed in a future update.
   
• I have logged an improvement request for the auto-cursor placement / hit detection when editing Endnote bodies, as although we've verified these were added in the expected location for your file, I believe this should not be as easy for users to accidentally add the body outside of the brackets.
   
• I have collated the information provided in this thread into a bug report - though without a copy of the document itself I'm unable to officially 'open' this report. Instead I have forwarded this directly to one of our lead Publisher developers and requested further comment regarding this issue, to see if they have any further suggestions or inclinations as to a possible cause for this.
  It may be that the team are able to determine a potential causation based on the apps codebase, rather than from your file directly, but I cannot be certain of this currently and I will be sure to update you here with any further information I am provided.

I hope this helps

[Cogent30]

Dear all thank you so much for the generous and promptly responses it is highly appreciated as always. 

Strangely upon opening my current document where I briefly continued working where I left off (on manually copying and pasting the citation, 1 by 1 from the backup document) ~  the slight slanted vertical stroke is no longer there. However I do notice that there is now a straight " | " special character. Not sure once again if this is erroneous. video provided. 

Also I attached a screen of my previous document backup when I had all the 300+ citations attached.

Once again, many appreciations here. thank you.

CG30 

 

 

Edited July 25, 2023 by Cogent30
added "from the backup document"

[Oufti]

21 minutes ago, Cogent30 said:

the slight slanted vertical stroke is no longer there. However I do notice that there is now a straight " | " special character. Not sure once again if this is erroneous.

Please report to this post above:

 

[Dan C]

22 hours ago, Cogent30 said:

Strangely upon opening my current document where I briefly continued working where I left off (on manually copying and pasting the citation, 1 by 1 from the backup document) ~  the slight slanted vertical stroke is no longer there. However I do notice that there is now a straight " | " special character. Not sure once again if this is erroneous. video provided. 

As above, these indicate that the special character blue brackets, automatically added for Endnotes, have been copy and pasted - which result in a slightly different version of this character when pasted.

I had logged this as a bug with our development team as I had not seen these occur previously, however they have since confirmed that this is specifically by design, and the pasted brackets will appear 'broken' to indicate that they have been copy and pasted and no longer interact in the same way as the original characters.

As this is expected behaviour, we don't believe the copy and pasting of said brackets to be the cause of your Endnote bodies being lost - and these 'broken' pasted characters can simply be removed using backspace, as with any other unwanted characters.

In regards to the original issue, this is still being further investigated by the team and again I will be sure to update you here ASAP

[Cogent30]

Dear all @Dan C , thank you once again for keeping me updated. I am thankful for the attention received into this. 

- Yes, and indeed - my apologies that our attention may have been slightly off the tangent. The original issue so far still remains a mystery, and that I have decided to nonetheless proceed into manual re-copying and pasting the mysterious disappearance of all endnotes.

As for anyone else, please feel free to contribute your thoughts as to what you think could be the cause for these perplexing disappearance of all endnotes. 

regards to all, 

CG30. 

 

[Oufti]

On 7/26/2023 at 3:55 PM, Dan C said:

we don't believe the copy and pasting of said brackets to be the cause of your Endnote bodies being lost

 

On 7/29/2023 at 3:32 PM, Cogent30 said:

please feel free to contribute your thoughts as to what you think could be the cause for these perplexing disappearance of all endnotes. 

I don't have any idea if this is what happened to you but I found a method to loose your text when playing with endnotes…

I posted a bug report demonstrating it here:

[Cogent30]

Dear @Oufti thank you for chiming in! One thing I actually forgot to mention, is that so far in this "book" document I am working so far - I have not, I repeat - have not set up any TOC'ing system. At least not yet. 

~~~ But for a slightly good news ~~~. Finally after many days (counting to weeks) I have now finally and manually completed copying and pasting one endnote ~ that is one after another ~ from the latest working backup copy. A labour of love but nonetheless ~ soon I can and will work throughout the document as normal (I hope).

Despite this problem still remains a mystery I am hoping this thread to remain open, until at least the administrators believe they have found a causality or at least a response update for all stakeholders to take note.

Nonetheless, my sincerest thanks to all once again for all their response   .

CG30. 

Edited August 11, 2023 by Cogent30
Added ~ at least not yet.

[Oufti]

6 hours ago, Cogent30 said:

[…] in this "book" document I am working so far - I have not, I repeat - have not set up any TOC'ing system. At least not yet. 

As you maybe have read in the discussion following my bug report, we are strongly advised not to include TOC's in an existing story. A separate text frame will be safer, as it seems.