Exporting Books to PDFs crashes constantly

[kaikaisen]

Hi!
I am having big trouble exporting my book.

It is a collection of 29 single documents built on the same template file. The preflight is green, except for one nonproportional scaling, which is however intended. Export of each file individually works fine.

However, the entire thing crashes if I try to export the entire book with the same export settings. (PDF, digital, high quality)

Ive recorded this screencast demonstrating what happens.

After recording, i played around a bit and can provide the following information to narrow it down.

The export works fine when going for "print" settings. Digital, small file size also crashes.

The export also crashes when waiting long enough for the preview render.

On the digital small-size preview, the render is so fast, i had to approach it multiple times to change it away before it crashed.

This leads me to assume this might point to some internal overflow or pointer error when following the digital configurations. Here's a crash dump as well. I read it's an EXC_BAD_ACCESS type of error, so it is something with memory pointers.

Is this something known? Is there a workaround or upcoming bug fix?

Edit:
little addition: Exporting a smaller book works fine (6 chapters). I will test more limits.

Thank you!
Kai
 

Affinity Publisher book export crash 2023-11-09 at 17.06.25.mov

affinity_publisher_crashlog.txt

[MikeTO]

You might try a test with turning off hyperlinks in export, and another with turning off bookmarks. Those are two of the features that are different between the two presets so it would be interesting to know if one or both of them are causing the issue.

If it turns out to be exporting hyperlinks is the issue, then it would be good to review your hyperlinks one by one in the hyperlinks panel. There were bugs that have since been fixed with malformed hyperlinks but perhaps there's still a lingering issue.

Good luck

[kaikaisen]

Hi Mike!
Indeed, deactivating the hyperlinks feature enables the export.
So I know what to look for now. Thank you very much. Indeed, the problem is not out of the way yet, but that's more a question of hard work on my end, checking hundreds of hyperlinks. 

Hypothetical question

If this is a known issue and it is bound to invalid Hyperlinks, wouldn't adding a preflight option for finding these mistakes be a great value addition to affinity? 

[stokerg]

Hi @kaikaisen,

I'm not aware of any issues with hyperlinks that weren't resolved in a previous update, so this could be a new issue.

If you can upload the chapters used for the book, I'd be happy to see if I can track down the problem hyperlink and get this logged with the Developers.  I've created a Dropbox link here for you to upload the chapters to.

[MikeTO]

@kaikaisen As Stokerg said, there aren't any known issues, it was just a hunch.

You should upload the document to dropbox but if you know you have some hyperlinks that are different than the others, check those.

If you're in a hurry the fastest way to figure these things out is to make a copy of the document, delete half the links, and export. Keep deleting different batches of the links until you find the one(s) that are causing the problem.