APu 2.3.1 crashes after selecting a long text

[Fantomas.CZ]

Hi Affinity Team, 

after repeating the same crash like three times, I recon it's time to share it with you. I'm working on M1 Mac mini with Sonoma 14.2.1 on it, Affinity Publisher 2.3.1.

Steps to reproduce the crash:

1. Open the file.
2. Go to page 374.
3. Select the Latin text (left column) from AD LAUDES to ... well, it varies. I wanted to copy the entire feast of Nativity, i.e. from AD LAUDES to a third Antiphon (Aña.) on page 378, but sometimes it crashes even before that. 
4. It crashes just by selecting the text, nothing else needs to be done.

Once I was able to select the text and even copy & paste it, only to have the program crash on me doing the same with the Czech text in the right column.

Thanks for taking care for this, I think I don't need to tell you, how bloody annoying is to have the program repeatedly crash, reopen all the documents I need for my work, because - and this might be a good idea to fix too - it doesn't reopen all the bloody documents, so I need to bloody do it manually, although my settings say otherwise!

Psalterium diurnale S.O.Cist.afpub

[walt.farrell]

Are you getting any crash reports when this occurs?

 

[MikeTO]

There are too many missing fonts for me to track down to try to replicate the issue, but please ensure you have Metal disabled if you're on an M1 or later. Open Affinity Settings, click Performance, and deselect Hardware Acceleration > Enable Metal. Then change Display to OpenGL. There are some 'random' crash bugs like this with Metal enabled. It can crash when zooming in, when rescaling a picture, etc. All of that goes away with Metal off.

Good luck.

[Fantomas.CZ]

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Are you getting any crash reports when this occurs?

 

Yes, I got those.

Affinity Publisher 2 Affinity Store-2024-01-13-145854.ips Affinity Publisher 2 Affinity Store-2024-01-13-150059.ips Affinity Publisher 2 Affinity Store-2024-01-13-150158.ips Affinity Publisher 2 Affinity Store-2024-01-13-150707.ips

[Fantomas.CZ]

 

On 1/13/2024 at 4:02 PM, MikeTO said:

There are too many missing fonts for me to track down to try to replicate the issue, but please ensure you have Metal disabled if you're on an M1 or later. Open Affinity Settings, click Performance, and deselect Hardware Acceleration > Enable Metal. Then change Display to OpenGL. There are some 'random' crash bugs like this with Metal enabled. It can crash when zooming in, when rescaling a picture, etc. All of that goes away with Metal off.

Good luck.

OK, I have disabled Metal and this went away. BTW, is it just me, or is the interface a bit slower? 

Anyway, if you want to try to replicate the crash, here are the fonts:

I believe you will have the rest.

 

Edited January 15, 2024 by Lee_T
Removed fonts due to copyright issues.

[MikeTO]

It is a tiny bit slower with Metal off but on an M1 it's plenty fast enough. I'm glad turning it off solved the problem for you.

Please ensure that any fonts you post publicly here are not paid fonts - it's usually better just to provide the fonts directly to serif if they ask you for them instead of publicly in the forum. Note that I don't work for Serif.

Good luck.

[Fantomas.CZ]

OK, so I need to report that just now I did the same with Metal off, and it crashed again. So it will be a somewhat bigger problem...

I just tried copying a somewhat larger amount of text, from the big title In nativitate Domini on page 371 to about where I finished up yesterday, about the end of page 378. I mean is APu that sensitive, that it cannot select 7 pages of slightly formatted text? 

[MikeTO]

There must be something else going on. I haven't had any random crashes like that with selecting long blocks of text, at least with Metal disabled.

[Dan C]

Hi Fantomas.CZ,

I've tried and I can't replicate your issue at all (using the provided fonts).

The crash reports point towards a redraw issue, but I can't see any reason for this.

Is anything else running on the system at the same time, and is it reproducible after a fresh reboot as the first application launched?

Lee

[Fantomas.CZ]

Hi Lee, 

yes, of course Affinity Publisher is not the only running program, there a lot of them. But it's nothing with a special need for display, overlays etc., just some text editors, Safari, some downloading client in the background... Nothing really special. I can try it again just after restart, when I'm at home and have actually time to do this.

I also have two monitors, one is a 4K, the other 1080p, both with a different scaling, so that could also be a contributing factor. However for APu, I'm using only the 4K display.

[Fantomas.CZ]

@Lee_T Hi Lee, 

so I have tried this right after restart, selected a bit of Czech text, and it crashed. The Latin text was fine, but the Czech one lead to the crash. I did exactly this:

Steps to reproduce the crash:

1. Open the file.
2. Go to page 371.
3. Select the Czech text (right column) from NEŠPORY to ... well, it varies. If you manage to copy the entire feast up to the end of page 381, it works. For me it always crashes. 
4. It crashes just by selecting the text, nothing else needs to be done.

[MikeTO]

How are you selecting the text?

Are you placing the cursor on page 371 and then scrolling to page 381 and holding Shift while clicking? Are you drag selecting from page 371 to 381? Or are you placing the cursor on page 371 and using a keyboard shortcut to select to the end of the story?

What is the source for the font Bookman BT O.S. Cist.?

Thanks

[Fantomas.CZ]

@MikeTO I'm just drag selecting the text and holding the mouse down on the screen, until it gets to the end. (for some reason, I cannot use the mouse wheel to do this on Mac, meanwhile on Windows, it works fine)

Bookman BT S.O.Cist. is a font that I massively edited to contain the Czech special characters (áéíóúůžščřťň etc.), special Cistercian characters and the c_t ligature used automatically in Latin text (and æ+œ too, but there's nothing special about that) and couple of other characters and programming. There are no special functions for the Czech language. 

[MikeTO]

12 minutes ago, Fantomas.CZ said:

@MikeTO I'm just drag selecting the text and holding the mouse down on the screen, until it gets to the end. (for some reason, I cannot use the mouse wheel to do this on Mac, meanwhile on Windows, it works fine)

Bookman BT S.O.Cist. is a font that I massively edited to contain the Czech special characters (áéíóúůžščřťň etc.), special Cistercian characters and the c_t ligature used automatically in Latin text (and æ+œ too, but there's nothing special about that) and couple of other characters and programming. There are no special functions for the Czech language. 

If it comes to it you might need to provide the font to Serif because without it, the text you're seeing on page 371 isn't what others will see. But it's probably unimportant.

Are you able to at least workaround the bug for now by selecting the text the other ways (Shift+click or select to end of story shortcut)?

 

[Fantomas.CZ]

I have already provided all the fonts here, but someone deleted the message. Of course, they may still have been available for Affinity.

BTW, there is one more thing that might be different: I'm using a Latin hyphenation dictionary mentioned here and standard Czech hyphenation dictionary from LibreOffice, which might be in some kind of conflict with the Mac spellchecker, which however doesn't contain hyphenation.. (in my Languages list, there are two items for Czech: Čeština and Čeština (CS), for some reason...). This might also be causing some kind of error.