Repeated Crashing on Imported Word Document With Many Tables

[SamMN]

I've imported a 45ish page Word document (.docx) that has quite a few tables in it  (2 or 3 tables per page on average, most of those tables are 4 columns, 2 rows—the rest are 4 columns, 1 row) and Publisher is struggling to handle it. I've been reformatting it (going through the document resetting all styles (to clear any Word ones) and applying my own Publisher paragraph styles) and it has crashed a number of times (quits unexpectedly or stops responding / wheel of death).

The Word document was formatted using the default 'Heading 1', 'Heading 2', 'Normal' stylings on Word.

[SamMN]

I've attached an Apple crash report if that helps

publisher crash.txt

[Jon P]

It would be useful to see the docx file if you could upload it here.

Does it crash as soon as you import it, or afterwards?

Thanks

[SamMN]

File uploaded. It imports OK (as in, doesn't crash) but not brilliantly (in that not everything displays right). I had to break up the tables on Word because some of the larger tables clumped together and made everything below them in the document disappear. Even then, some of the tables imported sitting on top of each other in a bit of a jumbled mess; if there were a few tables in a row (as in, 3 or 4) without text in-between them they usually imported on top of each other —one group I had to delete entirely and place in a Publisher-created table because they just wouldn't sit right.

The crashing and quitting is somewhat random, but I could make it consistently crash if I tried changing the font size on the 'Normal' paragraph style (font didn't seem to matter). I've since gone through the whole document (in Publisher) and reset formatting on all the text (including everything in each cell) which seems to have helped (font size change no longer seems to automatically trigger a crash), but it is still very occasionally crashing.

A lot of visual oddities too. If I adjust a font size or table and it causes the document to reshuffle (as in, some tables get moved onto another page, etc.) the pages sometimes 'screw up' (stuff on a page is invisible, auto-correct red lines randomly placed on a page, tables on top of each other); managing to click into a table and editing the text then seems to snap Publisher out of its confusion and it'll rejig the page so everything is back in its correct place (I'll try to get a screenshot if it happens again)

[Jon P]

Hi Sam,

So I've imported this file into a frame and autoflowed it.

Regarding how it looks after import, I can see the text is spaced a bit close to tables, and on Page 40 after autoflowing I see the overlapping table you refer to. I've logged this to see if we can do a better job with it. When the frames are autoflowing i'd expect some reshuffling to happen if you are changing the size/position of elements in one of the frames?

I can't reproduce a crash yet, I've changed the font size of the normal text style via the text style dialog and couldn't reproduce one, and not had one whilst using the file yet. If you use the 1.7.2 beta on the forum does that help at all?

Thanks

[SamMN]

21 hours ago, Jon P said:

When the frames are autoflowing i'd expect some reshuffling to happen if you are changing the size/position of elements in one of the frames?

Reshuffling is fine, it's that it had an issue whereby three overlapping tables were on the bottom of a page and trying to reshufffle to the next, but got caught in a limbo whereby they just flickered between the two pages constantly (i.e. the bottom of one, to the top of the next). It was impossible to grab each table and move it beneath one another as they just kept jumping around, they were just this glitchy clump of tables. Only way I could fix it was to delete the lot and manually create a fresh table in Publisher.

Another thing that was odd on importing the document was that whilst most of the tables had been automatically set to 'InLine In Text', one particular group had been set to 'Float with Text'. No idea why. Don't know if that caused any particular glitches, but I just thought it a bit weird that 3 or 4 tables had come through with a different setting despite not seeming to be any different from any of the other tables in the Word document.

Just loaded the file back up again this morning and was met with invisible tables (see screenshot). They were in the Layers panel and and you could select them, they were just invisible in the actual document. Only way to force them to show up was by backspacing a new paragraph line and then they all appeared again.

I'll try running the Beta version and see if that helps.

If it's helpful info for diagnosis, I'm running Mojave 10.14.5 with the below spec:

iMac, 21.5 inch, 2017

3Ghz Core i5

16 GB DDR4

Radeon Pro 555 2 GB