Crash when switching from light to dark mode

[MikeTO]

I've reported this before but can't find the thread and I know others have reported it over the years. There's a lurking bug in switching between light and dark modes on macOS. I can never reproduce it on demand.

Today it happened with Publisher open for a while but it may have paged out of memory as I was doing other things. I returned to it and immediately switched from light to dark mode which crashed. I have metal off.

Affinity Publisher 2 Beta-2023-08-06-154009.ips

[Callum]

Hi MikeTo,

It will be difficult for us to solve this without a consistent recipe for replicating this issue. Out of interest were you using the Photo persona in Publisher at all and do you know if the histogram panel was undocked?

Thanks
C

[MikeTO]

2 hours ago, Callum said:

Hi MikeTo,

It will be difficult for us to solve this without a consistent recipe for replicating this issue. Out of interest were you using the Photo persona in Publisher at all and do you know if the histogram panel was undocked?

Thanks
C

I was using Publisher in the Publisher persona and hadn't switched personas during that session. The Histogram panel would have been docked had I switched to the Photo persona.

I know this report isn't particularly useful on its own but maybe over time we'll see a pattern. I really thought I'd started a thread on it before but searched hard and didn't find it. I've had this crash about two dozen times in the past year. It's frequent enough that I save my work before switching modes.

The next time it happens I'll take a screenshot after restarting to make a record of my panel setup in case there's something unusual there. I had been testing things reported here so I may have had a different combination of panels open than normal but I've reloaded my studio preset since then.

Thanks

[MikeTO]

I had it crash again just now when switching from light to dark in the beta. I had just closed the only open document so at least we know the crash doesn't require a document to be open.

In case it's studio panel specific, the cross-refs panel was docked in the left studio (this was in the beta today) and the last thing I did before closing the document was add a cross ref. I don't recall which panel was open in the right studio but it was likely text styles, paragraph, studio, or preflight.

I'll try to take a screenshot before toggling light and dark in the future. Maybe there will be a clue, like a panel that wasn't properly refreshed or something.

Thanks

Affinity Publisher 2 Beta-2023-09-07-104701.ips

[MikeTO]

I took a screenshot before switching from light to dark mode today and it crashed so here's a screenshot of my panel setup. I had just switched in the left studio from Find to Notes and then closed my document and created a new one before going to settings. I doubt it has anything to do with Notes since I hadn't interacted with it yet, perhaps it had something to do with focus on the Find panel. But it may have absolutely nothing to do with panels. I'm just grasping at straws since it crashes all the time when changing modes. It won't crash if I just start Publisher, it has to have been running for a while so there is some unknown step in here.

[MikeTO]

One more piece of data - I got the same crash just now when changing from default to large UI font so this bug isn't specific to the dark/light mode toggle.

Affinity Publisher 2 Beta-2023-09-29-092946.ips

Next time I want to change the UI I'll first try changing from mono to colour icons. If I can get a crash out of that then maybe it's just any UI setting change that can sometimes cause a crash.

[MikeTO]

Yes, changing from mono to colour icons also crashes it so it appears that any UI change can crash, you just have to have been working in Affinity for a while before making the change. Most people don't change UI options often but I'm making a point to do it every so often to look for a pattern and can crash it several times a day.

Affinity Publisher 2 Beta-2023-09-29-182720.ips

[MikeTO]

I think the title of this thread is a red herring, the crash has nothing to do with switching between dark and light modes.

Here's another crash report but this time from Designer. I wasn't changing modes, I opened Settings to User Interface and clicked "Show Text in Points" to select it.

It seems that clicking anything in the UI pane can crash Affinity but there has to be some other precondition since this can't be repeated on demand. 

Affinity Designer 2 Beta-2023-10-20-103351.ips