All of my cross-references have disappeared

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

The newest Affinity Publisher update seems to have done extensive damage to my existing documents. Sidebar text is now invisible by default if the box was too small to contain all of it, which is almost always because the update also seems to have changed the spacing of many things on me by just enough to screw things up. A few objects have moved from where I'd painstakingly placed them to seemingly random other locations in the same spread. While irritating, most of these have easy fixes or affect few enough things not to be game-changers.

But one thing has me fuming  to the extent that I'm seriously considering uninstalling Affinity and going (ugh!) back to Adobe: My cross-references have all disappeared.

Again! These documents were imported from IDML originals and that move also destroyed all my cross-references. I had just fairly recently (in the last few weeks) painstakingly put them all back and now they have vanished a second time. Along with the obvious practical issues, this has severely damaged my (already not that strong) trust in Serif and Affinity.

So basically, two things:

1. Please tell me this is a known issue and there's an easy way to restore them. After all, they must exist in some form in the most recently saved versions of the files. Is there a way to retrieve them from there?
2. More importantly in the long run, give me some reason to think this won't be something I have to deal with a third time, and a fourth, and on from there. At this point, why should I trust you or your software? You had a big head start there simply by not being Adobe, but that doesn't go all that far in the face of incidents like this.

[stokerg]

Hi @Philosoraptor - Jeff H,

7 hours ago, Philosoraptor - Jeff H said:

• Please tell me this is a known issue and there's an easy way to restore them. After all, they must exist in some form in the most recently saved versions of the files. Is there a way to retrieve them from there?

It's not a known issue that I'm aware of.  Are you using the book feature or is this a single .afpub file? If using the book feature, do you have all the chapters loaded? Which operating system are you running Affinity on?

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

Book feature, but opening the chapters that contained the cross-referenced text did not make the cross-references reappear. Plus, some of the references were to the same chapter and those vanished as well. I haven't tried it with all the chapters loaded, but I didn't need that before.

Windows 10.

 

[walt.farrell]

9 hours ago, Philosoraptor - Jeff H said:

Sidebar text is now invisible by default if the box was too small to contain all of it, which is almost always because the update also seems to have changed the spacing of many things on me by just enough to screw things up.

Were you perhaps using Variable Fonts in the older release (2.4.2?) where they weren't supported. With the changes in 2.5.0/2.5.2 to support such fonts, spacing changed in some cases.

[MikeTO]

I feel your pain - back when cross-references were new I had to fix hundreds of them multiple times because there was an issue with them. But my cross-references weren't deleted entirely, they were just all broken so I could double-click them and re-select the target. It sounds like yours are entirely gone which would be worse.

You can probably find where the cross-references were by searching for two spaces. Unless you're a double-space person, missing cross-references are likely the only place where there would be two spaces together, now that the field in between is gone.

For me, cross-references have been rock solid for a long while now but I don't use the Books feature for them. Do you ever edit the Chapter documents with the Book file closed?

What did you target with the cross-references? Anchors, Paragraphs, Index Marks, or a combination? If you targeted anchors, are these ones you created yourself or ones that were generated by the TOC feature?

Good luck.

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

13 hours ago, MikeTO said:

I feel your pain - back when cross-references were new I had to fix hundreds of them multiple times because there was an issue with them. But my cross-references weren't deleted entirely, they were just all broken so I could double-click them and re-select the target. It sounds like yours are entirely gone which would be worse.

Unintuitiuve though it is, this seems to be correct. There's no sign of them, including ones to the same document.

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You can probably find where the cross-references were by searching for two spaces. missing cross-references are likely the only place where there would be two spaces together, now that the field in between is gone.

Nope, probably because they nearly always ended sentences or were enclosed in parentheses. But between those very punctuation things and certain word choices that tend to be found in their vicinity it's nearly as easy as you say to find them. It's an RPG rulebook, not an academic work like I believe you do, so I have a couple of mostly-standardized wordings for when I'm telling the reader where to find a relevant rule.

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Unless you're a double-space person,

BLASPHEMY!

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Do you ever edit the Chapter documents with the Book file closed?

Yes. That's what I was doing when the problem first arose or at least I first noticed it, but the problem seems to persist with the book file open.

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What did you target with the cross-references? Anchors, Paragraphs, Index Marks, or a combination? If you targeted anchors, are these ones you created yourself or ones that were generated by the TOC feature?

Paragraphs, 100% of the time. (Specifically, headings, so I can look for "paragraphs" written in certain heading styles and just cross-reference those.) Every cross-reference is essentially "see $SectionName starting on page XX". In fact, one thing I do like about Affinity, when it works, is that I can get it to automatically use that wording, with the formatting I want and everything, whereas in Indesign I had to type parts of that out manually.

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Good luck.

Thanks.

[Philosoraptor - Jeff H]

17 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Were you perhaps using Variable Fonts in the older release (2.4.2?) where they weren't supported. With the changes in 2.5.0/2.5.2 to support such fonts, spacing changed in some cases.

I seem to recall making a point of downloading a non-variable version of the two main fonts for this project, precisely because Affinity didn't support variable (properly) at the time. I'll look into it as time and morale permit.