Affinity Publisher Book forgets where all the ‘chapters’ are when I go to another Mac

[Ian Tindale]

Affinity Publisher‘s book feature is good but has lots of stupid bugs which should’ve been caught in testing

On one MacBook, if I compose a book for my magazine from all the article files (which it wants to call ‘chapters’) which are in the Affinity Publisher folder in iCloud (and in turn inside a few subfolders), then save the book, then go to another MacBook and open the book from where it is in iCloud (at the same level as the article files), it stupidly can’t locate the articles again – this shouldn’t happen

[MikeTO]

[EDIT - this post is wrong, it does use relative paths]

This issue isn't specific to books, it also happens if you open a document with linked resources on another computer.

I wish it could use relative paths for linked resources and chapters.

Edited August 25, 2023 by MikeTO

[walt.farrell]

12 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

I wish it could use relative paths for linked resources

Serif staff said back in the V1 timeframe that it does use relative paths, with one specific setup: you have the parent document in a directory, and in that directory you have another directory that contains the linked files.

I was never able to get that to work reliably, but it seemed to work in some cases.

Additionally, V2 allows linked services, which automatically is supposed to handle iCloud for Mac and iPad users, though I haven't gotten it to work on Windows. And you can manually configure Dropbox. Using this function is supposed to handle the problems for any linked resources that are in a linked service.

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

Serif staff said back in the V1 timeframe that it does use relative paths, with one specific setup: you have the parent document in a directory, and in that directory you have another directory that contains the linked files.

I was never able to get that to work reliably, but it seemed to work in some cases.

I was completely wrong, it does use relative links and it works fine on macOS. I was thinking of something else. If I move a document and its images, whether in the same folder or in subfolders, to a different drive it will find all the images when it reloads. If I move a book with its chapter documents to a different drive it will find the chapters. Sorry for the confusion.

So back to @Ian Tindale, I'm unsure why this isn't working for you. You're not even moving the book or its chapters, they're in the same cloud path.

Are you signed in to the cloud as the same user or did you share the files with another user account?

This might be a cloud sync issue, which cloud are you using? I'm speculating but perhaps if the files aren't downloaded yet on the second computer Affinity there could be an issue. Perhaps next time force the download from the cloud before you open the book on Mac #2. With iCloud it should just download but you can click the cloud+down arrow icon next to the files if it doesn't do it on its own.

Good luck!