Major problems with long (or not long) documents in 2.1?

[waltzmn]

Nisus Folks --

Today, for the second time since upgrading to 2.1, I've had a major problem with a document. I was typing along, and all of a sudden I got an error about typesetting. It told me the document was unstable and suggested I save it. I saved it, re-opened it, watched it get about 40% through the "typesetting text" phase -- and hang. I can't even get back to the previous version, because it's autosaved, and the document won't open to let me revert! (I do have backups, but they're a few hours old -- a significant amount of work, in this case.)

This document is about 3/4 megabyte -- a small one by my standards. No footnotes, only a few cross references.

The document opens in Word, with formatting fouled but the text apparently intact, so it looks as if I can recover the text, but at this point I'm scared of 2.1. Earlier, a larger document has become uneditable, because NWP repaginates forever. It can be edited in draft view, but not in page view, which means I can't edit the footnotes.

Has anyone else had similar problems?

Is there a way to revert to 2.05? I haven't noticed anything in 2.1 that I actually use (I don't WANT autosave, as this fiasco demonstrates), so I'm open to suggestions.

[MacSailor]

Have you tried to download and install the new beta available at http://nisus.com/update/pro-v211-beta.php ?

[waltzmn]

MacSailor wrote: Have you tried to download and install the new beta available at http://nisus.com/update/pro-v211-beta.php ?

I hadn't tried it; none of the listed bug fixes seemed relevant, so beta software seemed risky. I may have to reassess that. At minimum, I can see if the beta will open the file. 2.10 cannot, even though Word can!

But, no, it doesn't help. I just downloaded it, and it's hanging up at exactly the same place.

[waltzmn]

An update on the problem that won't help anyone (except maybe Nisus Software): I looked at the file itself in BBEdit. At the precise point where I was editing when the breakdown happened, there is a line in the RTF code,

You {\f3\i think} you\rquote
re saying, \ldblquote Here\rquote s something I need you to do,\rdblquote in which case the response will be, \ldblquote I\rquote ll do it.\rdblquote But what the person with autism is exper{\nisusselectcaret \par
\par

Note the item "{\nisusselectcaret". It's an entity with an OPENING curly bracket but no closing bracket. This is clearly the problem point -- it's where NWP went haywire when I was creating the document. But when I either add a closing bracket } or I delete the whole entity, and try to open the file in NWP, the file TERMINATES at "is exper," even though that ignores the roughly 60% of the file after that.

So, somehow, NWP inserted that {\nisusselectcaret entity, failed to close it, noticed it had a problem but failed to correct it, and now goes into an infinite loop because it's seeing an open {\nisusselectcaret entity and never finds the closing "}".

But I don't know enough about RTF to know how to cure that!

[martin]

I was typing along, and all of a sudden I got an error about typesetting. It told me the document was unstable and suggested I save it.

This warning is a new feature in Nisus Writer Pro (NWP) version 2.1 that shows in certain situations where the Apple text layout engine has become unstable. In prior versions of NWP the errors would go unreported to the user, potentially causing inexplicable behavior. Unfortunately this instability occurs more frequently under OSX 10.10. We've reported some of the scenarios to Apple, and hopefully they'll fix the problems in a system update.

I saved it, re-opened it, watched it get about 40% through the "typesetting text" phase -- and hang. I can't even get back to the previous version, because it's autosaved, and the document won't open to let me revert!

This on the other hand is likely to be a bug specific to NWP's page layout. Could you send me the file so I can diagnose the problem? You can email it to us privately at:


At the very least we can probably edit the document so you can open it and have access to your content.

Is there a way to revert to 2.05? I haven't noticed anything in 2.1 that I actually use (I don't WANT autosave, as this fiasco demonstrates), so I'm open to suggestions.

You can access all older versions of NWP from our version archives. Just beware that there may be some complications with your preferences and other settings due to sandboxing, but they can be overcome.

[martin]

Note the item "{\nisusselectcaret". It's an entity with an OPENING curly bracket but no closing bracket. This is clearly the problem point -- it's where NWP went haywire when I was creating the document. But when I either add a closing bracket } or I delete the whole entity, and try to open the file in NWP, the file TERMINATES at "is exper," even though that ignores the roughly 60% of the file after that.

If adding an extra closing brace to the RTF truncates the content, that implies the curly braces are already properly balanced. But it's best to avoid speculation. If you could please send us your document, we'd be very happy to have a look.