Affinity Photo Menu Options in Affinity Publisher

[icreate]

Hmmm, for some reason I had a different Document menu which didn't match yours or the tutorial I was following (on a Mac - see below).

I quit Publisher and opened it again to see the correct menu. Was I in some other 'mode'?

[Patrick Connor]

@idcreate

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums  

I have split your post from the original thread as it is something much more significant and not something we have been able to reproduce yet. You are seeing Affinity Photo's menus (including Arrange and Filers) . Can you tell me if this was your first ever run of the software?

[icreate]

Hi Patrick.

I downloaded it yesterday to take a quick look at it but had to get back to work so I quit out of the application. This morning I thought I'd take a look at it in more detail before the work day started.

I opened it and started following your tutorials (in order) and got to the tutorial where you change an embedded image to a linked image. When I went to the document menu that's what I saw, not what was on the tutorial, which is why I searched the forum and came across the original thread. I tried multiple times by clicking on different tools, master pages etc in case it was supposed to change depending on what you were doing but it stayed like that.

Then I quit the application and fired it up again and I saw the menu as it should be.

I didn't have Designer or Photo open at the same time, only Indesign, Firefox, Airmail and Atom.

Can you tell me what I need to remove in the preferences/application support folders (etc) to return it to 'factory defaults' and I'll see if I can replicate it again for you?

[robinp]

See here too

 

[Fingermouse]

I have this exact problem, which is making the software almost impossible to use as most of the Publisher-specific features completely vanish.

When I first load Publisher, I get the correct menus:

But at some point they get replaced by the Designer/Photo menus. If I save a file whilst the Designer/Photo menus are showing, then as soon as I load the document again (even straight after loading Publisher), I'm unable to access Publisher-specific features:

Obviously I can't do very much in Publisher with this as the 'Document' menu. I spent ages trying to follow tutorials and not being able to find the Resource Manager anywhere.

I don't know if it's linked with the (non-working) Designer and Photo persona buttons, but right now I've got a file that I worked on for a while which always forces the wrong menus to display. Reloading Publisher and starting a new file resets the menus to the correct versions, but as soon as I load my 'bad' file, the menus are wrong. I have never tried to load that file in Designer or Photo - it's only ever been loaded in (and created from) Publisher.

If I start a new file from scratch after reloading Publisher, everything's fine for a while but then at some seemingly random point the menus will switch. I have a three-monitor setup so thankfully I can open pretty much all the tools that I need (such as the Resource Manager) and they stay open even when the menus change to the incorrect versions.

I've attached a version of the Publisher file that causes my copy to use the wrong menus (I've wiped the content and renamed it and it still forces a menu change on my system).

Wrong Menus.afpub

[MEB]

On 8/31/2018 at 11:46 AM, icreate said:

Can you tell me what I need to remove in the preferences/application support folders (etc) to return it to 'factory defaults' and I'll see if I can replicate it again for you?

Hi create,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
Press and hold ⌃(ctrl) while you launch the application until a Clear User Data dialog appears then press Clear in that dialog to reset the app to its defaults. Let us know if you experience the menu problems again.

[MEB]

Hi Fingermouse,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
Do you mind trying the procedure described in my post above and check if it happens again? It probably will but at least we know the reset doesn't fix the issue and there's something triggering the bug when using the program. You file loaded correctly for me - Publisher displayed the correct menus.

[Fingermouse]

Just now, MEB said:

Do you mind trying the procedure described in my post above and check if it happens again? It probably will but at least we know the reset doesn't fix the issue and there's something triggering the bug when using the program. You file loaded correctly for me - Publisher displayed the correct menus.

 

Clearing all my user data (selecting all items in that dialog and clicking 'Clear') allowed me to load my 'Wrong Menus.afpub' file and still retain the correct menus. I hadn't previously changed any of the app preferences from the default, so I'm not sure why this worked but glad it has!

Loading other files wasn't previously forcing the menus to be wrong — just this one (and the original that it's based on),  so that's weird that this has fixed it. Obviously a lot of the codebase is shared with Designer/Photo and I'm guessing that the different personas will (eventually) change the menus as appropriate — were my user settings combined with a certain file somehow forcing a switch into a different persona?

I'll let you know if I manage to reproduce the issue.

[MEB]

When I said it probably will I meant the issue may come back again after the reset as soon as you start using the app regularly. So although the reset may fix this initially there must be something else triggering the bug during normal use. Let us know if you get to the wrong menus state again now that the app has been reset and what operations/actions you performed that lead to it if possible. I'm also checking/trying to reproduce this here.

[maxgrafik]

I had the same problem twice and still trying to reproduce this with no luck. But i did essentially the same as @icreate ... switching back and forth between Indesign, Publisher and (in my case) Safari to watch the tutorial videos. Maybe this helps to narrow down the problem.

[Patrick Connor]

We are still no closer to finding this problem.

Do the people in this thread have Affinity Photo installed?

Did you insert Affinity Photo .afphoto files?

Did you insert multipage PSD files or RAW files?

I cannot replicate having tried for an hour now and nor can my team.

[robinp]

2 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

We are still no closer to finding this problem.

Do the people in this thread have Affinity Photo installed?

Did you insert Affinity Photo .afphoto files?

Did you insert multipage PSD files or RAW files?

I cannot replicate having tried for an hour now and nor can my team.

When it happened with me I was placing / working with a placed Designer file.

[maxgrafik]

I have both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer installed, but none of them were open. Only InDesign, Publisher and Safari. When the menu switch occured I was playing around with the Place Image Tool and Picture Frame Tool. No RAW files, just JPGs. However, I am not able to reproduce it.

[Fingermouse]

1 minute ago, maxgrafik said:

I have both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer installed, but none of them were open. Only InDesign, Publisher and Safari. When the menu switch occured I was playing around with the Place Image Tool and Picture Frame Tool. No RAW files, just JPGs. However, I am not able to reproduce it.

Same here — both Photo and Designer installed but not open. The menus switched over while I was placing a bunch of PNG files — I didn't see it happen but I noticed as soon as I went looking for the Resource Manager to change all the images I'd just placed from embedded to linked. Can't reproduce it right now, though.

[Fingermouse]

Ok, I just managed to reproduce the problem and track down what's causing it, at least on my system (2017 5K iMac).

Every time I open 'Text Styles' my menu instantly shifts to the wrong version. This is either by using the menu item under 'Studio' or by clicking on the tab when 'Text Styles' is hidden. 'Text Styles' can be present in my tool palettes but as long as it's hidden it doesn't affect the menu. Make it visible and the menu switches over to the 'wrong' one until Publisher is restarted.

It looks like saving a document also saves the state of the various tabs and tool views for that file in the user settings.

• If I save a file with 'Text Styles' visible and restart Publisher, as soon as I load that file again, it brings 'Text Styles' to the front and the menu screws up.
• If I close or hide 'Text Styles' and save the file, when I restart Publisher and load that file again everything seems fine. At least until I need to view 'Text Styles' again.

This is probably why removing all user settings 'fixes' the file — it seems to remove the association of that view with the file

This is completely repeatable and happens every single time on my system. I would imagine that loading the same file on another computer wouldn't give the same result because their settings are not configured to associate that file with the same view — and obviously it's not happening on everybody's system anyway.

[Ridgerider]

Fingermouse is correct.  Publisher works fine until I select the Styles drop down.  Then the Publisher menu items change to Affinity Photo menus.  I have both Designer and Photo installed, but the Photo menus seem to be the only ones interfering with Publisher. 

[Patrick Connor]

19 minutes ago, Fingermouse said:

Every time I open 'Text Styles' my menu instantly shifts to the wrong version.

This may well be a huge clue, thank you. That would imply that the menu may have actually changed during our testing, but because we did not investigate the menu items (because the top level items still looked OK) that we may have missed the recipe. We will need to check the menus each time we do something, despite the top level items being right for Publisher.

[Patrick Connor]

Do you mean "Text Styles" Studio or the "Text Styles" menu entry in Text menu ?

[Fingermouse]

1 minute ago, Patrick Connor said:

Do you mean "Text Styles" Studio or the "Text Styles" menu entry in Text menu ?

'Text Styles' Studio, not the menu entry under 'Text'.

[Ridgerider]

Actually, after some further testing, the menus change to the Photo menus anytime any dropdown menu item from the contextual menu is selected.

[Patrick Connor]

Yup, got it, thank you. Now I need to get it again

[sreedFSF]

8 hours ago, Patrick Connor said:

We are still no closer to finding this problem.

Do the people in this thread have Affinity Photo installed?

Did you insert Affinity Photo .afphoto files?

Did you insert multipage PSD files or RAW files?

I cannot replicate having tried for an hour now and nor can my team.

I am also having this same problem with menu switching with specific files (two files, one a copy of the other), but not all files I've created with Publisher.  With those files, the only way I can get Publisher to go back to its original menus is to quit and restart the program. I did the defaults reset and opened one of the problem files. Publisher started off with its own menus, but I checked about four or five minutes in, and the menus had switched to Affinity Photo-like menus. I have other files that this does not happen to. At least, not yet.

The only things in the problem files were text, rectangles drawn in Publisher and an imported EPS logo. I've used the same logo in other files that don't show this behavior.

To answer the questions, yes, I have Affinity Photo installed, but it was not running when I worked with Publisher. 

I did not insert any Affinity Photo files. I did not insert any raster images at all. I did insert an EPS file, but I used that same file in other test documents without a problem.

I can understand the frustration. I've tried to duplicate the issue with new files and not been able to, but this issue is consistent every time I work with those problem files.

I am using Mac OS High Sierra on a 2017 iMac.

Additional: I posted before I read new comments about the text styles menu. I'm seeing that, too.

[nwhit]

I've had this happen to me as well. I do have Photo and Designer installed, but cannot remember the circumstances when the APub menu switched. But I knew it happened when I was looking for the Document/Resources item and the View/View Mode item. When they went missing, I could not figure it out. I did quit the app and reopened and things were back to normal. I didn't realize what had happened until reading this thread and a couple others. But it did happen a few times

[Patrick Connor]

@Chris_K has found/understood the recipe, thank you all.

1. Create Text Style
2. Assign any keyboard shortcut

or

1. Open document containing text style with keyboard shortcut
2. Draw text style name to the screen (in the text style studio)

Work Around:

1. In Text Style Editor Use the X next to the keyboard shortcut for the text styles that have a keyboard shortcut set,
2. Save the document,
3. exit the application and restart.

That document will no longer cause the problem

[maxgrafik]

I just found out what is causing the menu change for me. It's not selecting the Text Styles Panel, but changing the Keyboard shortcuts in preferences.

I have saved my preferred keyboard shortcuts in a file. As soon as I load this file the menu changes. Resetting the keyboard shortcuts also resets the menu back to Publisher's menu. Loading the file again the menu changes. Reproducible every time. I attached the buggy shortcuts file. 

buggy.affshortcuts