Problem when selecting text

[ninjagame]

I keep getting a problem when I try to select text passages in a document:
There are two main methods to select text passages other than a single word (double click), a sentence (triple click), or a paragraph (quadruple click): (1), click at the beginning of the text passage to be selected, then "drag" the cursor over the whole text you want to select; (2), click at the beginning of the text passage to be selected, press the "Shift" key and click at the end of the text passage to be selected. (I hope this makes sense to a native speaker of English.)
Now, when applying method (2) for more than two, three times in a row, the following happens: the selected text disappears; the death ball begins to spin, I can neither input anything nor stop or abort the process, and several seconds later (up to half a minute), the application crashes. Upon restart, I've got another two or three tries until the same thing happens again.
The effect seems to be related to OS 10.5 since I didn't experience it until I upgraded to Leopard. First I thought it happens with one specific document and because the document I'm working on is imported from NW Classic but I soon learned that it occurs with documents created with NWP from scratch as well.
Has someone else experienced the same problem and come up with a solution?
Oh, by the way, hardware: PowerBook G4, 1 GHz, OS 10.5.7., NWP 1.2

THX,

ninjagame

[feat]

yes, it happens to me rather frequently, like twice a week, and it's invariably because of an ill-formed expression in the RTF representation

it can be a faulty foot-note, an image duplicated a hundred times, or anything, yet it will reveal only when attempting to perform certain operations, like moving paragraphs or regenerating a TOC after a page break has been inserted

if the problem can be narrowed down to the faulty paragraph, you may scrutinize the underlying code, locate the problem, and eliminate it, but the fastest way is to cut the text, paste it into a text-only editor, then paste it back; of course, you'd better have a backup copy so you can fetch the missing elements, notes, tables, images, and paste them back one by one

also, problems can be cured by converting the document to another format: it looks like in some cases NWP will perform some integrity check on certain data structures, but then again, sometimes not…

[ninjagame]

Thanks, feat, for the reply! It tells me that this seems to be not a problem of my files only.
I should add that "imported" doesn't describe the process exactly. Actually, I had the whole text (chapter of a novel) copied from the NW Classic file and then pasted without format ("Paste Text Only") into an NWP Document Template. That should provide for the same "cleaning" process you suggest in your reply. The text doesn't contain tables, footnotes, or images - just text (in Plain, sometimes Italics or Bold). Neither does it have a TOC.
What's puzzling me most, however, is that the effect happens with texts created in NWP as well.
Let's see what the Nisus people say about this!

ninjagame

[feat]

> the effect happens with texts created in NWP as well…

ah, but precisely: I was talking about problems that occur with pure, genuine, original NWP documents!

[martin]

Next time the problem occurs, please submit a bug report using the menu Help > Send Feedback. It would be great if you could tell us exactly how to reproduce the crash.

One thing to note: if the application truly crashed the crash log will automatically be collected when you submit a feedback. However, if NWP hung and you had to "force quit" it, then we would appreciate it if you could copy-paste the information from the Apple force quit reporter. That information is unfortunately not logged anywhere for us to pick up automatically.

Thanks!

[ninjagame]

Thanks, Martin!

Give me a day or two and I'll send the document in which the problem occured first. I will also try to reproduce the problem in order to send you an appropriate feedback.
By the way: When it occured first, I tried force quit repeatedly but the application wouldn't comply. Ever since, it crashed by itself after several seconds (which may be due to my slow 1 GHz processor).

ninjagame

[martin]

Thanks, your help is appreciated. It is odd to hear that "force quit" sometimes does not work, since that's a mechanism built into OSX that should never fail.

[ninjagame]

Martin -

I haven't forgotten to send the document in which the "crash when selecting text" problem occured first, as I promised. I just wasn't able to reproduce it since I wrote my first post on this topic. It's kind of superstition-inducing! But since the document itself won't tell you enough, I'll have to wait until the problem occurs next time so I can submit the crash report along with the document

ninjagame

[ninjagame]

... and there it was again! Moments after submitting the last post I tried it again and got another crash, only this time without the selected text disappearing.
Now I really get superstitious
I've submitted the document via Help > Send Feedback.

ninjagame

[feat]

information from the Apple force quit reporter

• no file on my system has the words force and quit in its name…
• I've looked every place I could think of, including the log collection from /Library/Logs and ~/Library/Logs
• just where is this information located?

[Kino]

information from the Apple force quit reporter

• no file on my system has the words force and quit in its name…

That is Crash Reporter which will show a window like this
http://www.matasano.com/log/wp-content/ ... isters.jpg
when you hit "Report..." in such a dialog box:
http://www.matasano.com/log/wp-content/ ... Dialog.png

Edit: To be exact, it is Crash Reporter.app in Tiger but Problem Reporter.app in Leopard. Apple just changed the name without changing that of CrashReporterPrefs.app.

[martin]

information from the Apple force quit reporter

• no file on my system has the words force and quit in its name…
• I've looked every place I could think of, including the log collection from /Library/Logs and ~/Library/Logs
• just where is this information located?

Kino's screenshots show where we need you to copy the information from. As you've noticed, after you force quit an application, no information is logged to any file. This is exactly why we need users to manually copy the information from the Apple reporter that appears after you force quit NWP; otherwise we could collect it automatically as we do with the crash log.

[feat]

precisely: my console is always open and nothing was ever reported there — when infinite loops happen, the only thing that can be done is to take a few samples of the misbehaving application, and as far as I know, unless the app was compiled with debug information, there's not much a mere user can do about such an unfortunate event