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Alt + I = some kind of weird acute symbol?

Posted: 2007-06-29 02:00:27
by r-sparks
Every now and again I accidentally type Alt + I in an attempt to activate italics, rather than Command + I.

When I do this, an acute-like symbol appears, highlighted in a yellow block. When I Cmd + Z to undo, the symbol disappears but the yellow block sticks around.

Just now, I hit Ctrl + Z a second time and the keyboard locked-up. I couldn't type anything in Nisus (I could type in other programs), and had to close Nisus and reopen it.

What's going on?

Posted: 2007-06-29 12:52:40
by martin
This is standard behavior for native OSX applications. Pressing Option/Alt and "i" (or "e", etc) is called a "dead key", and is waiting for you to enter another character. Once you do so the dead key will be combined with that second character (if possible).

An example: Option + "e" is the dead key for an acute accent. If you type an "a" afterwards you will get an accented "a", eg: "á".

Nisus Writer Express should not crash when you undo one of these dead keys. If it does, I would appreciate it if you could send in a feedback report after it does so. It would be even more helpful if you could trigger the same problem in the Nisus Writer Pro beta. Thanks.

Posted: 2007-06-30 08:06:08
by r-sparks
martin wrote:This is standard behavior for native OSX applications. Pressing Option/Alt and "i" (or "e", etc) is called a "dead key", and is waiting for you to enter another character. Once you do so the dead key will be combined with that second character (if possible).

An example: Option + "e" is the dead key for an acute accent. If you type an "a" afterwards you will get an accented "a", eg: "á".

Nisus Writer Express should not crash when you undo one of these dead keys. If it does, I would appreciate it if you could send in a feedback report after it does so. It would be even more helpful if you could trigger the same problem in the Nisus Writer Pro beta. Thanks.
It doesn't crash. There are two bugs here. First is that a yellow block sticks around when the "dead key" function is undone. The second is that if the user then undoes again, the keyboard locks.

You can repeat this yourself.

1) Open a document and type some text.

2) Hit Alt + i, and then Cmd + z to undo. (Note how the yellow block sticks around.)

3) Hit Cmd + z again, which will remove the text you typed previously.

4) You should now find that the keyboard is locked and won't take any input in Nisus. Other apps are fine. The only way to overcome this is to restart Nisus.

Judging by the fact you asked me to try this in Nisus Pro (I haven't), can we paid-up Nisus Express users assume we won't be getting any more bug fixes?

Posted: 2007-06-30 13:40:10
by xiamenese
r-sparks wrote:
martin wrote:This is standard behavior for native OSX applications. Pressing Option/Alt and "i" (or "e", etc) is called a "dead key", and is waiting for you to enter another character. Once you do so the dead key will be combined with that second character (if possible).

An example: Option + "e" is the dead key for an acute accent. If you type an "a" afterwards you will get an accented "a", eg: "á".

Nisus Writer Express should not crash when you undo one of these dead keys. If it does, I would appreciate it if you could send in a feedback report after it does so. It would be even more helpful if you could trigger the same problem in the Nisus Writer Pro beta. Thanks.
It doesn't crash. There are two bugs here. First is that a yellow block sticks around when the "dead key" function is undone. The second is that if the user then undoes again, the keyboard locks.

You can repeat this yourself.

1) Open a document and type some text.

2) Hit Alt + i, and then Cmd + z to undo. (Note how the yellow block sticks around.)

3) Hit Cmd + z again, which will remove the text you typed previously.

4) You should now find that the keyboard is locked and won't take any input in Nisus. Other apps are fine. The only way to overcome this is to restart Nisus.

Judging by the fact you asked me to try this in Nisus Pro (I haven't), can we paid-up Nisus Express users assume we won't be getting any more bug fixes?

(1) No problem with Nisus Writer Pro beta here. Deleting the dead-key entry deletes the yellow highlight at the same time and no keyboard lock-up. Unfortunately, perhaps, I have found the NWP beta to be so stable that I have removed Express from my system, so can't test it.

(2) The June 1st Nisus Newsletter said:

"Now that Pro is getting ready to leave the nest, we are beginning work on the next version of Express. I can't really disclose too much at this point, but I will talk about a few things.

Express 3.0 will have the following features:

Glossaries
Text wrap around images
Widow and Orphan control
Small Caps support
Also included will be numerous fixes and enhancements. That annoying message stating that your notes are too long will no longer appear. There are other examples, but that's the only one I could think of at the moment."

So I don't think you need to worry about lack of future bug-fixes.

Mark

Posted: 2007-07-01 01:04:49
by r-sparks
That's great news. I look forward to it.

Nisus Express has never crashed for me. There are no critical bugs, which I guess is why they felt they could work on the Pro version.

The main bugs I see a lot of are minor display malfunctions. They're mainly to do with "pixel dust" — bits of characters left over when deleting, or particularly when scrolling. These fix themselves instantly, so this isn't a problem.

The indent/outdent also seems to have a display malfunction too. The last time I used these functions, the dragable sliders disappeared from the ruler, so I couldn't adjust them any further.

The only other bug I've had was in creating a British language profile, and adding some of my own QuickFix entries for the new profile. For some reason, they won't work. I get around this by using the American profile and switching the language options to "English (British)".

But other than that, I've got to restate that I like Nisus enormously. It's a great piece of software.

Posted: 2007-07-01 01:10:58
by r-sparks
xiamenese wrote:(1) No problem with Nisus Writer Pro beta here. Deleting the dead-key entry deletes the yellow highlight at the same time and no keyboard lock-up. Unfortunately, perhaps, I have found the NWP beta to be so stable that I have removed Express from my system, so can't test it.
Did you follow the steps and UNDO the dead-key entry, rather than delete it?

Start a new doc and :

1) Hit Alt + i

2) Hit Command + z to undo

In fact, I've just tried this again, and if you do the above two steps on Nisus Express, the keyboard will lock up. You don't need to bother undoing twice.

Some notes: I'm on a fully patched 10.4.10 system.

Posted: 2007-07-01 05:53:21
by ssampler
PB G4 OSX 10.4.10. Freeze here, too. On my PB -alt- is a shifted option key. However if I substituted OPTION-i, my keyboard froze after CMD-z, just as r-sparks stated. There was no crash log. Here is the console session. Each line is generated when I hit a key.


===== Sunday, July 1, 2007 9:48:13 AM America/New_York =====
2007-07-01 09:48:31.435 Nisus Writer Express[323] *** -[NSCFString getCharacters:range:]: Range or index out of bounds
2007-07-01 09:48:31.632 Nisus Writer Express[323] *** -[NSCFString getCharacters:range:]: Range or index out of bounds
2007-07-01 09:48:31.862 Nisus Writer Express[323] *** -[NSCFString getCharacters:range:]: Range or index out of bounds
2007-07-01 09:48:31.981 Nisus Writer Express[323] *** -[NSCFString getCharacters:range:]: Range or index out of bounds
http://www.nisus.com/forum/login.php

Posted: 2007-07-02 15:10:24
by martin
Thanks for all the information. I've verified that the problem is fixed in NWP. Once an update is released for NWX it should be fixed there as well.