Crash when adding decorations

[MikeTO]

I recently suggested constraining the values for all of the text fields that let you enter nonsensical values. But here's another that can lead to a crash.

I wanted to know how many decorations could be added to a paragraph - it would make sense to limit it to something like 10 or 25 but after hammering on the button hundreds of times it appears to be limited only to how crazy you are.

But if you click the plus button very quickly too many times in a row then Publisher will crash. Here are a few crash reports. No normal user will ever encounter this crash.

Affinity Publisher 2 Beta-2023-11-09-092949.ipsAffinity Publisher 2 Beta-2023-11-09-092745.ipsAffinity Publisher 2 Beta-2023-11-09-093413.ips

[Dan C]

Hi MikeTO,

I'm unable to recreate this in the release version, I'll move this to the beta forum.

Lee

[Sean P]

Hi Mike,

Does this happen for you when you don't select any of the decoration elements (i.e the sides)? I've got up to 464 decorations without any problems even whilst clicking very quickly with two fingers to add them.

I then clicked all 5 buttons and then it did crash shortly after, although retrying on a new frame I got up to 146 without any crashes.

[Seneca]

On 11/9/2023 at 2:37 PM, MikeTO said:

it would make sense to limit it to something like 10 or 25

I don’t think that any artificial limit on a number of decorations one can add to a paragraph style would be any good. I remember when Publisher beta was released I tried to see how many decorations I could add to my paragraph style and I remember I arrived at 1024 and kept going. Nobody will ever use that many decorations but it’s good to know that there is no limit. What’s more important to me is being able to name a given decoration. At the moment a Decoration 1, Decoration 2 etc doesn’t say anything what it does unless you selected that option from the menu and look at the panel.

[MikeTO]

On 11/13/2023 at 10:24 AM, Sean P said:

Does this happen for you when you don't select any of the decoration elements (i.e the sides)? I've got up to 464 decorations without any problems even whilst clicking very quickly with two fingers to add them.

I then clicked all 5 buttons and then it did crash shortly after, although retrying on a new frame I got up to 146 without any crashes.

I tried it twice more this week and can't duplicate the crashes I was seeing. I know it was in a blank test doc and I'm fairly certain I did set decoration elements. I tried it a few hundred times with one or more sides set, and sometimes with the fill on, and now I just tried it 800 times with different combinations of side, fill, and insets.

When I first did this I was saving the test doc every 150 or so, if it hadn't crashed, so it was all with the same combination of settings. If the issue was setting specific I guess I've just been unable to replicate the necessary combination.

I don't think this is a big deal, nobody will ever add more than a handful of decorations, so let's just close this until somebody reports a real issue.

17 hours ago, Seneca said:

I don’t think that any artificial limit on a number of decorations one can add to a paragraph style would be any good. I remember when Publisher beta was released I tried to see how many decorations I could add to my paragraph style and I remember I arrived at 1024 and kept going. Nobody will ever use that many decorations but it’s good to know that there is no limit. What’s more important to me is being able to name a given decoration. At the moment a Decoration 1, Decoration 2 etc doesn’t say anything what it does unless you selected that option from the menu and look at the panel.

There are a lot of options in Affinity that allow you to enter over 2 billion of whatever is being measured. Allowing too big of numbers can cause performance issues so I think there should be hard limits for some things. In this case the limited UI means that nobody will ever create too many decorations so that's a good thing. As you've pointed out, the lack of naming means you couldn't keep them straight.