Documents causing crash in 2.5.5 (split)

[rjav]

Using 2.5.5. I am revising documents created two years ago. There are a couple of documents which cause crashes whenever I touch anything with the selection tool. Obviously revisions are impossible. I have a publishing deadline! The only suggested solution I have seen recently is to turn off hardware acceleration -- which has no effect. I attach the most recent crash report.

1bbcb8b3-54df-4a1d-b9fc-465aa7483f4c.dmp

[rjav]

Here I am nearly two weeks later with annoying crashes persisting. Some documents are okay but some crash when I touch anything and a few just crash as soon as they open. I keep getting presented with Recovery files. What's going on? Help!

[rjav]

Here I am nearly two weeks later with annoying crashes persisting. Some documents are okay but some crash when I touch anything and a few just crash as soon as they open. I keep getting presented with Recovery files. What's going on? Help!

The publishing deadline was yesterday -- here's a list of the crash reports I had to deal with. In some cases, my only option was the edit the PDF because I couldn't open or use the original AP file and that brought up another problem -- it appears that "opening" a PDF means that AP "reads" the PDF with OCR so that words containing, for example, "ti" or "ft" are seen as a new character and have to be found and replaced manually (although Find and Replace seems to work). 

This is a 480 page document and, to produce it, I had to break it up into smaller sections every time I encountered a crash problem, resulting in a nightmare of file management! This experience has shaken my confidence in AP, especially given the fact that I have had no response to this post.

[rjav]

Anyone out there?

[MikeTO]

Hi, it appears you're on Windows but what version are you using?

Could you please post a screenshot of your performance settings? If you have hardware acceleration on, try turning it off to see if that makes a difference.

Publisher does not use OCR to read a PDF - most PDF files contain text but it's set as characters and not as paragraphs so Publisher attempts to covert it into useful paragraphs for editing. There is an option to favour editable text over fidelity that you could experiment with.

Good luck

[MikeTO]

Continued in this thread:

 

[rjav]

MikeTO, thank you for the reply. For some reason, I did not see your response of 28 November. That's why I started again.

I have Windows 11 Home which, they tell me, automatically updates drivers -- the last update was just a few days ago.

Screen shots attached.

The problems I have with opening a PDF in Publisher are (1) some letters not recognised ("ti" replaced with A tilde, "tt" with J circumflex") and (2) each line being separate (ie, no word wrap) -- an edit which changes the length by more than a few characters means you have the change the next line, and then the line after that, and so on. It didn't offer a very effective solution when I couldn't edit the original Publisher document which I used to create the PDF.

[MikeTO]

I'm not going to be able to help much more with the crashes since I don't have a Windows PC to test on but the screenshot should help somebody else help you. However, the RAM usage limit is too low. The minimum requirements for Affinity are 8GB and you've set your memory to 4GB. Do you really have only 4GB in your computer? This might be the cause of crashes I recommend setting that to about the actual amount of memory you have. I don't know why Affinity allows us to drag the slider below the minimum.

When opening a PDF, ensure you have selected both of these options. The second one will group all of those separate text frames into a single frame. The first one might fix the problem with the special characters.

 

[DuncanL]

Can you attach one of the problematic documents here for people to try?  I'm using Windows 11, all Affinity products at 2.5.7, with current Nvidia drivers. 

[rjav]

MikeTO

Thank you very much for the import tips.

Grouping lines fixes that problem. The separate frames can then be linked so that text can flow freely. There's still work to do -- for example, captions above the text were included in the text but these cut be cut out and repasted in the correct position. If I'd known that at the time, I could have re-created the document fairly quickly.

The editable text option didn't fix the errant characters problem which is what makes me think Publisher is "reading" the text, not finding the actual text. (I don't know enough about what happens under the hood when a PDF is written.) I used Find and Replace to correct the errors. A bit tedious but at least it recovers the document.

DuncanL

Thank you for the offer.

I will have to go back into the job folder to find the problematic documents. In the interests of getting the job done, I didn't stop to write down a log of all the problems.