Crash with Book - open

[MikeTO]

I encountered a repeatable crash when trying to open two Books with the same filename but stored in different directories. They were versions of the same Book but it's easy to repeat this with a blank Book. This isn't really that obscure of bug, I often open older versions of my documents to compare them and that's what I tried to do with this Book.

1. Create a Book and choose Save Book from the panel menu, there's no need to add chapters for this test
2. Choose Save Book As and save it somewhere else under the same filename
3. Choose Open Book and open the first one you saved. It will result in this repeatable crash.

Affinity Publisher 2 Beta-2023-09-01-202312.ips

[walt.farrell]

Just a comment: If you did have chapters in the book, that could be a dangerous operation as changes to either book would affect the same chapter files, and you might end up with a real mess.

[MikeTO]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

Just a comment: If you did have chapters in the book, that could be a dangerous operation as changes to either book would affect the same chapter files, and you might end up with a real mess.

That would be dangerous but each book had its own chapters. I had the book in a folder and to make backups I duplicated the entire folder.

[walt.farrell]

14 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

That would be dangerous but each book had its own chapters. I had the book in a folder and to make backups I duplicated the entire folder.

But, can you be sure that the duplicated Book file wasn't still using the original chapter files?

I would hope that if the .afbook and .afpub files were in the same directory then relative paths, not absolute, would be used. But I have not (yet) verified that.

[MikeTO]

51 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

But, can you be sure that the duplicated Book file wasn't still using the original chapter files?

I would hope that if the .afbook and .afpub files were in the same directory then relative paths, not absolute, would be used. But I have not (yet) verified that.

Fair point

[NathanC]

HI @MikeTO,

I've replicated and logged this with the developers. 🙂

[Serif Info Bot]

The issue "[macOS] Opening two .afbook files stored in different directories but with the same file name causes an app crash" (REF: AF-44) has been fixed by the developers in internal build "2.3.0.2083".
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.