Printing / print dialog buggy

[zimmt]

I am experiencing issue with printing and presets.

1. The print dialog becomes very sluggish the more one prints. After maybe a dozen or more prints the dialogue starts beachballing when loading first and when switching between printers and presets. This gets worse (taking longer and longer to load) the more one prints without restarting the app (this is reset by restarting Affinity so perhaps it's a memory issue). This also can't be related to document size as this occurs even with documents less than a 1mb in size with just text.

2. Presets usually have to be selected twice before being properly applied. And even then, Orientation (Portrait or Horizontal) and Reverse Page Orientation never seem to be respected even when part of a Preset.

3. N-Up values are not shown when selecting a Preset with such saved values. Fortunately they are applied when printing. The values only show in the subtitle of the "Document Layout" tab but only when expanding and closing it again.

These are all occurring using the latest version of Affinity Designer on macOS Sonoma. This occurs with AirPrint printers and printers with OEM drivers alike. And these issues do not seem to occur with Mac apps it seems.

[NathanC]

Hi @zimmt,

On 12/21/2023 at 10:24 PM, zimmt said:

1. The print dialog becomes very sluggish the more one prints. After maybe a dozen or more prints the dialogue starts beachballing when loading first and when switching between printers and presets. This gets worse (taking longer and longer to load) the more one prints without restarting the app (this is reset by restarting Affinity so perhaps it's a memory issue). This also can't be related to document size as this occurs even with documents less than a 1mb in size with just text.

I'm not observing his speed degradation with subsequent prints in the same app session so far, does it require that the document be sent to the printer, or can you re-produce this by using the print to PDF function from the print menu? Could you also confirm if you observe this problem in a separate app which uses the same print dialog, such as Pages?

On 12/21/2023 at 10:24 PM, zimmt said:

2. Presets usually have to be selected twice before being properly applied. And even then, Orientation (Portrait or Horizontal) and Reverse Page Orientation never seem to be respected even when part of a Preset.

3. N-Up values are not shown when selecting a Preset with such saved values. Fortunately they are applied when printing. The values only show in the subtitle of the "Document Layout" tab but only when expanding and closing it again.

The apps use the standard MacOS print dialog/framework seen in other apps such as Pages, from Ventura 13.X onwards there have been problems reported to Apple with custom print presets not recalling correctly. Disregarding Affinity i'm seeing the same problem in Pages print dialog with it failing to recall certain settings from custom presets, including the 'Reverse Page Orientation' you mentioned was not retained when the preset was recalled.

I'm also observing the same issue with N-up not recalling correctly so i'll get this logged but it's likely to be related to the above Sonoma/Ventura Preset recall issue.

Ref:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254441027

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254484987

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254519103

 

 

[zimmt]

Did some further tests. Just opening and closing the print dialogue produces the performance degradation after doing so about 20 times. This is related to the RemotePDEService process which is created for each app the first time the print dialog is called up. With Activity Monitor one can see the memory of this process keep going up each time the dialog is opened and closed. Force-quitting this process resets it and makes everything snappy again until it gradually slows down once more.

I also tested this with Pages and the same occurs. Interestingly this does not seem to happen with Safari. Nor does it happen at all with Affinity on an M chip Mac (or it takes way longer for the performance degradation to set in). But on the M chip system I do not have the full suite of printers installed there and perhaps it's related to a specific printer driver.

But as this is reproducible with another app I'll just leave it be.

The only remaining issue is one that has plagued Affinity since version 1 (maybe it was fixed briefly but it certainly is present in version 2)... having a preset with the range set to "Selected" will cause Affinity to crash if no artboard has been selected.

[zimmt]

Also, Affinity does not respect having "Reset Presets Menu to Default Settings After Printing" checked while other apps do. Instead it keeps the settings of the last print (except reverse orientation of course).