Cross references - any text style field is sometimes not populated

[Intuos5]

I am unsure yet what triggers this, but occasionally, when I create a new document, the paragraphs are not populated when creating cross-reference with the any style filter set. The work around is to pick another style and set it back to any style. It then looks like this (the fields are actually empty, was too lazy to do the editing).

If you can find the trigger to get the empty panel, please post back here.

[MikeTO]

I haven't seen this myself on macOS and I've added thousands of cross-references in documents with thousands of paragraphs and in test documents with just a few paragraphs, but I think @Hangman has seen a somewhat similar issue on macOS in which the list isn't redrawing correctly, and items that shouldn't be there are still there. Perhaps there is a lurking issue with redrawing this list.

[Intuos5]

Yeah, I have been late to fully testing cross-references in practice, because it appeared Publisher couldn't open my IDML. It turns out it took much longer than I expected (and there was no indication of it working other than the high CPU resource consumption).

But yeah, there may be some obscure redrawing issue. I have seen this happen at least 3 times today already, but I can't reliably reproduce it.

[Intuos5]

Allright, this is in a new document. Windows' trimming tool completely wrecks the recording, so see first 40s here (the rest is not relevant).

 

 

[MikeTO]

It doesn't do that for me on macOS so I think this is a Windows-specific bug that hasn't been previously reported. Hopefully Serif can fix it soon but at least you know how to fiddle with it to work around it for now.

Cheers

[Dan C]

Thanks for your recording @Intuos5, I agree this is incorrect behaviour - though I'm unable to replicate this here on Windows in a new file:

As can be seen, either when retaining the default Text Styles, or deleting these after creating the new file, the Cross-References dialog appears populated as expected.

Can you please confirm for me, are there any other steps you're taking with the file that I don't cover above, or perhaps a difference in the document setup when you are creating this file, that could be triggering the issue?

Many thanks in advance!

[Intuos5]

11 minutes ago, Dan C said:

Can you please confirm for me, are there any other steps you're taking with the file that I don't cover above, or perhaps a difference in the document setup when you are creating this file, that could be triggering the issue?

As far as I know, I haven't done anything different when I create a new document. I haven't performed any additional steps either. What I do know is that this is triggered only occasionally. So I did in fact test this a couple of times after I saw it happen first. Then on new files it didn't happen, but I managed to capture it again later using the same procedure in a new file. So the root cause remains illusive to me.
The document template I used was the default A4 one:

Though I recon it's possible to mitigate the issue by force refreshing the list when the length is empty for the [Any Style] filter.

[Dan C]

Thanks for verifying that for me - it's certainly helpful to know this isn't occurring consistently, but can be replicated more than once.

I don't believe it will hold any bearing here, but I should check for completeness' sake: Are you using Windows 10 or 11 with Affinity?

[Intuos5]

Windows 10.0.19045

[Dan C]

Thanks for verifying, our team have tested this further on both Windows and Mac devices to try and replicate the issue - though over multiple tests we're unfortunately still unable to replicate this.

We have however seen a similar report from another user on macOS, though equally have yet been unable to replicate this issue internally also.

Therefore we are currently collaborating these reports internally to try and determine a possible missing link that would trigger this issue, such as that we can officially report it to the developers.

Should you find a repeatable 'trigger' for this issue, please do let us know here

[Intuos5]

Thanks for the update @Dan C . Of course I'll let you know if and when I find out anything about the issue.