Is the built-in help not yet available?

[R C-R]

When I try to open Affinity Publisher Beta Help from the Help menu, after the usual (on my Mac at least) delay while the Mac help system tries to get its act together, I finally get a window titled "Affinity Publisher Help" but it is empty. I have waited for the 'wait' spinner next to the search field to stop, & then a few more minutes after that, but the window remains blank.

Also, after the first launch of the beta, the first Help menu item said "Affinity Designer Help" but after quitting & relaunching the app it became "Affinity Publisher Beta Help" as I assume it should, but the help window remains blank.

[furtonb]

If you searchv for something (e.g. “master”), it is going to load. At least for me it did.

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, furtonb said:

If you searchv for something (e.g. “master”), it is going to load. At least for me it did.

It is doing that for me now too ... sort of. At first, all I get is this:

... but after a variable delay while the tiny little blue progress bar below the buttons finally starts moving again, I eventually get some results. That was also a bit weird in that the first time I got results there were some odd ones with the Publisher badge with cryptic names like "???" but the second time I tried the same search, I just got the badged "Master pages" one. The first time, none of the badged ones would load anything besides a blank window, & that also happened on the second try with the "Master pages" one. But the third time was the charm & it finally loaded.

I am attributing all this to the generally flakey way Apple's help viewer works with large third party help 'books' because I see similar things with other apps that have extensive help.

[acapstick]

Hi R-C-R,

Yes the help behaviour isn't great but it's Help viewer-related I'm afraid. The blue progress bar when searching is relatively new (High Sierra?) but I find it a bit slower than I'd like. 

Some things..

- If you find any returned results that are odd please let me know.

- Any "???" text returned in search descriptions is a docs issue and we need to catch up with these over the beta.

- Anyone else not getting the "Get Answers Fast" landing page loading reasonably (putting the search function aside for the moment?)

\Andy Capstick

  

 

 

[R C-R]

13 minutes ago, acapstick said:

- Anyone else not getting the "Get Answers Fast" landing page loading reasonably (putting the search function aside for the moment?)

Probably unrelated but is there any reason none of landing pages for the Affinity apps use the 'browse topics' button at the top of the Help window like Apple's apps do & instead rely on the three line 'hamburger' icon down in the page for that?

The button method is nice because it slides over & reformats the currently displayed help topic, while the in-page icon just slides out the topics list, covering part or most of the current topic. It would also give me something to click on when the landing page is empty so I don't have to resort to use the search function to populate the window.