Introduction

This is sort of a test diary / potential test script.

Crash with heading styles

I’ve installed the test build three times (on Win95).

All three times, the first time I’ve run it, AbiWord has crashed after

doing the following:

-start AbiWord

-type “test” <return>

-select “test”, apply “Chapter Heading 1" style using the style combo

box

-select “Chapter Heading 1“, apply “Numbered Heading 1" style using the

style combo box

-AbiWord crashes, I think the message is “This program has performed an

illegal operation and will be shut down.”

Once I maximized the window before typing test, the other two times I

let the window stay at its default initial size (not maximized).

In all three cases, when I try it again after restarting AbiWord, the

crash does not occur.

The more testing I do, the more it seems that this problem box occurs all the time, in fresh or non-empty files, wherever I insert “test"<enter> and change the styles as described.

(This paragraph is an anomaly, described later.)

Other anomalies

Slightly different behavior -- when I apply the “Chapter Heading 1" style, followed by “Heading 1" style, it did not crash, the “Chapter 1" remained (not nice), and the space between “Chapter 1" and “test” increased (also not nice). (In both cases, the character between Chapter 1 and test is a tab, “test” has moved from the (default) tab stop at 1" to the stop at 1.5“.) Here’s a sample. (In creating two copies for this example, the numbers have changed because of automatic numbering, but it happens regardless.) “Chapter 1 test” (below) is the result of applying “Chapter Heading 1" style to test. “Chapter 2 test” (below) is the result of applying “Chapter Heading 1" style to test, and then applying “Numbered Heading 1" style.

Oops, and now something totally wierd happened -- as I was adding stuff to the end of the previous paragraph, possibly as I hit enter to start a new paragraph, Chapter 1 disappeared and was replaced by the greek letters you now see. (And, the te of test was not visible until some other repaint occurred. And, I can’t copy and paste those greek letters here (to preserve them in case they change again). This may be intentional, but it is wierd -- it is not quite like the similar word97 behavior where you can’t even select the leading characters of an automatically numbered style (but I probably have to double check that behavior to describe it completely correctly). (I’m adding another anomaly to the bottom of this list -- I’d add it here but I’m a little afraid something will happen to mess up the examples listed here.)

test

(Update: Consistently repeatable.) At least once when I went back to edit the previous paragraph, I hit end and the cursor went to the beginning of the next line. Attempting to repeat, I pasted another copy of the paragraph below. (This occurred before I changed to bullets -- I left these several paragraphs unbulleted so the behavior would be repeatable -- I haven’t tried it with a bulleted paragraph -- I suspect the behavior I saw was just an unlucky coincidence, but, as I said, it is repeatable in the paragraph below.) I went back to add quotes around Chapter 1 at the end of the second line. I moved the cursor (using the mouse) to in front of the C, typed “, then hit <end>. Cursor went to the beginning of the next line. I can repeat it every time. (Happens even “now”, when I’ve inserted enough other text that lines 2 and 3 span a page (break) -- now the cursor jumps to the (beginning of the line on) the next page. And, it seems to happen whenever I insert a quote before a word near the end of a line, does not happen if I insert an “i”. (Only other insertion I’ve tried.) (Another aside: I originally typed this paragraph in normal. When I went back and applied the “Bullet List” style, it took an excessive amount of time, and resulted in screen blanking, etc. I was afraid I lost the document. -- at some point in time I will try this on another long paragraph and time it.)

(The following is the paragraph where I originally experienced the cursor moving to the beginning of the next line on <end> behavior.)

-Slightly different behavior -- when I apply the “Chapter Heading 1" style, followed by “Heading 1" style, it did not crash, the Chapter 1 remained, and the space between Chapter 1 and test increased. (In both cases, the character between Chapter 1 and test is a tab, “test” has moved from the (default) tab stop at 1" to the stop at 1.5“.)

When I start a file, name it, and save it, it does not appear on the MRU file list.

When I open the file, it appears on the MRU list.

If a crash occurs (like the one described with the style combo box), when I open AbiWord the next time, the file is not on the MRU list.

Finally, I closed the file. (It closed AbiWord, I forgot that I have to change a preference somewhere to get the other behavior -- have to find that email.) When I reopened the file, the file was (finally) on the MRU list.

Note to myself: I need to create an indented paragraph style (at least for myself) to serve as a continuation paragraph within a bulleted list. (I was going to make each different “anomaly” a separate bullet, with continuation paragraphs as necessary. My next step may be to create a separate heading for each, as a workaround until I do that.)

(Maybe I should change the word from "anomaly” to “observation”.)

When I hit enter twice after a bulleted paragraph, after the second <enter>, the bullet disappears from both new paragraphs, but the style is still listed as “Bullet List”. (This behavior is pretty much the same as Word97, but it never seemed correct -- I think you should either continue to get bullets, or the style name should change to reflect the lack of bullets (i.e., “Normal).)

If the style of a paragraph is “Bullet List”, and I apply “Normal” or “Normal Clean”, the round bullet switches to a thick vertical bar. (Sort of like a shorter version of | in bold face -- ahha, I just noticed that it is the symbol that introduces “Block Text” -- now I guess I know what “Block Text”, but that is sort of surprising as well.)

Note the style of this and the preceding paragraph is listed as “Normal” which it clearly is not. I need to try to reconstruct the series of events that got me to this position -- it wasn’t really that unusual.

Note: I’m having a devil of a time getting a plain “Normal” paragraph here, in the “midst” of this bulleted list. Finally resorted to copying a plain paragraph from elsewhere in the list, but now after a few “faux pax"s, it is an indented paragraph. How did this happen? OK, I checked Format --> Paragraph -- the left indent is now set to 0.5" -- I never fooled with it, only applied various styles. Somehow that seemed to get set as a side effect of one of the style changes.

OK, I changed the left indent back to 0.0000" (wow, 4 decimal places -- is this really appropriate? useful in some other units of measurement? (can we change units of measurement?))

And, I start another new paragraph (this one) to experiment with. It starts out with “Normal” style, and appears to be normal. I apply the “Bullet List" style. (Aside: even the change on this fairly short paragraph is fairly slow, with a lot of repainting.) Now I apply the “Normal” style, and I have the “Block Text” like thing -- bulleted with the short, bold vertical bar. Now, for kicks, I hit enter to start a new paragraph.

Same style. (Oops, just noticed that already, this style and the previous one are labeled “Normal" but are really bulleted with the short, bold vertical bar.) Ok, now I apply “Bullet List” style to this again. That takes me back to the round bullet and the properly named style. Now I apply “Normal Clean”. Similarly, I am back to a bulleted item with the short, bold vertical bar, but the paragraph style is labeled “Normal Clean”.

So, I was going to question my mindset of how styles should behave (and I might still), but I thought Normal Clean, at least (if no other style), would set all style parameters back to those for “Normal”. So, I think this much, at least, is a bug.

Some words are incorrect or missing from the dictionary:

wierd

bulleted

AbiWord

mindset

Hmm, that’s wierd. AbiWord shows up as misspelled in this sentence (and in an earlier sentence). It also showed up misspelled on the above list until I added mindset and hit return -- now it shows OK on the list, but still misspelled in this paragraph (and above). Another wierd thing, is almost just the opposite, mindset shows up misspelled on the list and in this paragraph, but in the previous paragraph where I used mindset (starts with “So, I was going to question my mindset”) the red line underneath has turned into a series of red dots, almost like “cursor dirt” typically left behind when a word is corrected and before the entire paragraph is redrawn (or something happens to clean up the cursor dirt). As it happens, in that previous paragraph, the letter directly under the first letter of mindset is “l” (the first letter of least). Is that what causes the described appearance? (This problem seems to come and go -- when I copied and pasted the first part of that paragraph to insert it in the sentence earlier in this paragraph, something happened to repaint the paragraph, and it looked OK. I just went back to look again, and apparently something else repainted the paragraph again, and it’s back to the way it was.)

(The other anomaly I referred to several paragraphs up.) (I’ll first describe the specific example, and then experiment to see how general the case is.) See the chapter headings below. If I position the mouse pointer to the left of chapter 1, press the left mouse button, and try to swipe right and down to select all three headings, none are selected (that’s wierd, try that on a normal or bulleted paragraph -- the selection does work). If I position the cursor in front of or within the first “test”, the same “gesture” selects test on that line, and the next two headings (completely). If I go to the third heading, position the mouse pointer after the test, press the left mouse button, and swipe left and up, all three headings are selected.

test

Oops, I’m back to this 0.5" indent again -- maybe it’s from “Chapter Heading 1" style. (Left this unbulleted to show the problem.)

Reset the left indent to 0 again.

(New item) The chapter numbers in the previous example were numbered 1 through 4, but, as the “Chapter Heading 1" style is used earlier in this document (twice), the numbers should be 3 through 6.

Another wrinkle (let’s see if this is repeatable). Hit enter twice after this list to get rid of the bullets. Style (as noted earlier) is listed as Bullet List (in that paragraph). Now hit the up arrow and then the down arrow twice. You are now back in that paragraph that is normal, but was labeled “Bulleted List”, but it is now labeled “Normal”.

Ok, now what did I do? Somehow, now hitting enter twice is not taking me back to the no bullet style. I suspect what I did was select “Bullet List” on a blank normal paragraph, and it somehow switched me to something like “Bullet List” mode. (Interesting (but maybe not so good).)

I’m about to quit for now. I think somebody should read over this (or I should later) and decide what is worthy of immediate pursuit. I think that more discussion and then revision of some of the behaviors with styles is necessary, but I would need to spend more time reviewing what happens in AbiWord and remembering what I’m used to in Word (and that could be a mistake). Maybe we should release this as 0.9.3, and ask that interested people concentrate on testing the behavior with styles. (I can’t be the only interested person.)

I’m still in that mode -- how do I get out of it -- presumably apply another style, like Normal or Normal Clean.

Nope, that doesn’t work. Now can I hit enter twice and get out of this?

Yes, son of a gun. And, this paragraph is labeled “Normal Clean”, but, so, unfortunately, is the previous paragraph.

Oh, the thing I forgot when I uploaded First to twiki -- I meant to say something about numbering defaulting to hierarchical style for headings below level 1.