Publisher crashes when opening a the attached .afpub

[Felix Kasza]

In thread https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/212291-numbered-illustrations-global-list-are-numbered-out-of-order/, Oufti figured out the cause of some weird behaviour I was seeing. I figured that for three pages of text, I should probably create a new master spread, this time with the text frames in correct order, copy-paste the existing text into new pages, and delete my mistake.

Creating a new master sprad: OK.
Creating new pages attached to new master spread: OK.
Copy/paste contents from old pages into new pages: BOOM.

As I was trying different things (copy/paste with pinned images, without images, one paragraph at a time, via a plain-text editor to force plain-text etc.), Publisher kept crashing; I stopped counting after a dozen attempts.

To narrow down the crash and speed up the repro attempts, I then saved the document after having created the new master spread and the new pages (but before copying the contents onto the new pages). And wow, did it ever speed up the crash – because now, Publisher crashes reliably and repeatably when trying to open the file.

A close look shows that Publisher opens the file, displays the last page and complains about missing resources (I moved the pictures away to exclude their being involved):

Quote

"Missing resource(s).

Some of your linked resource files are missing. Would you like to locate them?"

500 msec later, Publisher un-displays the document, sings a heart-rending aria, and dies. (OK, I might have invented the singing bit.)

The .afpub is, of course attached.

Thanks,
Felix.

 

 

Statistics with the TI-nspire CX-II.afpub

[Gnobelix]

Hello @Felix Kasza,

The provided file cannot be opened in Publisher, for whatever reason. I solved the problem as follows.
Create new file.
Add Pages from file.

 

Some resources are missing

 

Cheers

Test-Statistics with the TI-nspire CX-II.afpub

[Felix Kasza]

Thanks, @Gnobelix – that is much better than redoing everything from scratch! The missing resources were intentionally missing, as their presence or absence does not affect Publisher's behaviour. But I admit that I am surprised to see "Add pages from file" working; I would have expected the same code to be at work for both opening a file and "just" reading it.

That said, I still believe that an application should not ever crash, not even when I feed it a pureed banana; and much less should it save a file that will cause a crash when reopening it.

Thanks again!

Felix.

[MikeTO]

I can open the file in Publisher 2.5.3 which indicates the problem is with the linked resources. Your resources are all in the same folder so you can rescue this project by renaming that folder, opening the document, and clicking Resource Manager. Click the first resource and click re-link. Find the file in the renamed folder and the document should hopefully now be useable again.

If it crashes while doing this, repeat the steps but instead of re-linking the resources with the Resource Manager, just find each resource and replace it. The original resource files should be fine.

Good luck.

[Felix Kasza]

Hi @MikeTO, and thank you for looking into this!

Renaming (actually moving) the folder with the pictures was pretty much the first thing I tried (without success). I even downloaded the file that I posted at the beginning of this thread and verified it still crashes on opening, with or without the resources folder present.

I just now opened the file in Designer, added a blank (to force saving) and saved the file back. It now opens perfectly fine in Publisher. I am certainly happy that it does, but I hope that Serif finds a root cause for the crash. It would make me sleep so much better!

Thank you for your help,

Felix.

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, MikeTO said:

I can open the file in Publisher 2.5.3 which indicates the problem is with the linked resources.

When I try to open the OP's file in APub on my Mac, it opens but immediately crashes the app. The crash report in part says this:

Quote

 

Crashed Thread:        25  Dispatch queue: com.apple.root.default-qos

Exception Type:        EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)
Exception Codes:       KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000000000010
Exception Note:        EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Termination Signal:    Segmentation fault: 11
Termination Reason:    Namespace SIGNAL, Code 0xb
Terminating Process:   exc handler [430]

 

For privacy reasons I do not post complete crash reports in public forums but if the staff wants to see this one I can send it by DM or to a dropbox link.