Is there a text size limit to DT?

[markwlyon]

I’m trying to write a text article in DT. Sometimes, when I delete a character near the end of a file, the program deletes everyting from my character to the end of file. I can use the Undo command to recover the text but I still cannot delete what I want.

Is this a bug or a feature?

thanx.
Mark

[Bill_DeVille]

@markwlyon

I’m trying to write a text article in DT. Sometimes, when I delete a character near the end of a file, the program deletes everyting from my character to the end of file. I can use the Undo command to recover the text but I still cannot delete what I want.

Is this a bug or a feature?

Mark:

That wouldn’t be a feature.

I’ve never encountered such behavior. Are you working in plain or rich text? How big is the document? Are you selecting the material to be deleted, or using back delete (the delete key) or forward delete (on the extended keyboard)?

[markwlyon]

Hi Bill:

I created an .rtf file with Text Edit on the desktop, dragged and dropped it to the folder in DT and deleted it from the desktop. Length is 800 words. Problem happens in all three modes: selected the text to delete, backspaced and forward delete. If I open the file in Text Edit, it works fine.

Please let me know what you need from me to treouble shoot this.

Thanks,
Mark

[Bill_DeVille]

Mark:

That’s a small text file. I’ve edited files many times that size.

And I can’t replicate the problem. It’s never happened to me.

Perhaps a cosmic ray has twiddled a bit in memory, or some such. Try quitting DT Pro or, better yet, restart the computer. Then try again.

[tvillemw]

I have seen this behavior in Mail when editing text I’ve pasted into a message. I don’t recall how I got around it. It may be a bug in the Cocoa library responsible for re-displaying text in a window; the data is there but you can’t see it. If I were you, I’d copy the text into a separate document as a backup and see if you can’t get your text to display completely.

For a fuller of the bug, scroll through this Drunkenblog entry:

drunkenblog.com/drunkenblog- … 00605.html

Here is a pertinent excerpt:

The Tiger Text Bug from Hell

I gave an example of one of the weird things I was seeing regarding text above, but there are more:

If I have a body of text I’m editing, I’ll do something to cause all the text below the insertion point (where I’m typing) to start overlapping itself. It doesn’t go away, the display is just completely messed up. This can be caused by hitting return, pasting in text, cutting text, deleting text, or just typing and having the line wrap.
Same as above, except I’ll get doubled lines instead of everything below the insertion point going crazy.

(2) is much more common than the first, but in both cases the data itself is just fine, its just the display is completely screwed up. It can only be fixed by selecting the text in its entirety, forcing it to redraw, minimizing to the Dock.app and then bringing it back up, or paging up and paging down to where you were again…

[markwlyon]

tvillemw:

Thanks for the tip. I read the thread. The behavior sounds like mine. But the author was having rouble with Text Edit and I am not. The problem I have is in DT. It is consistent and repeatable.

I was able to resolve the issue for a single session by going to another point near the end of the file and deleting a single character. This did not erase the rest of the file. When returning to my original edit point and starting over, I could delete or add text and did not see the same behavior.

However when I close DT and reopen the file, the original behavior reappears.

Bill:

I’ve quit DT Pro and restarted and still have the problem.

krgds,
M.

[tvillemw]

Mark,

My problem was not in DT but in Mail. And it was so long ago I don’t recall how I resolved it. I have no way of knowing how DT is programmed to handle text but… if I’m not mistaken, DT and TextEdit use the same system-wide text-editing routines.

Is the problem restricted to the one document you first mentioned? Or do you see it other DT documents you’re editing? Have you tried editing the the document in a different view?

[Bill_DeVille]

@tvillemw

My problem was not in DT but in Mail. And it was so long ago I don’t recall how I resolved it. I have no way of knowing how DT is programmed to handle text but… if I’m not mistaken, DT and TextEdit use the same system-wide text-editing routines.

Is the problem restricted to the one document you first mentioned? Or do you see it other DT documents you’re editing? Have you tried editing the the document in a different view?

That’s correct. DT handles text exactly as TextEdit does – same code for Cocoa text – and there are still some rare bugs in that code.

Try this:

Open the document in TextEdit. Select All and Copy it to the clipboard. In DT/DT Pro, press Command-N to create a new document with the clipboard contents. Try the edit at the end of the document again. If it works, delete the original database copy of that document. If that doesn’t work, open the document once more in TextEdit, use Save As to save it to, e.g., your Desktop, then import that copy into DT and try your edit.

If that doesn’t work, and if this is the only text document posing your problem, might be a corrupt cache problem, a corrupt font problem (perhaps an invisible character embedded in the text) or one of those other mysterious kind of things. Try retyping the last paragraph or so of the document, to eliminate the possibility of an embedded invisible character.

As previously noted, I haven’t encountered the problem and can’t replicate it.

[markwlyon]

Hi Bill:

Nothing in paragraph one of your post worked. I think you are right with suggestions on paragraph two. I tried converting to plain text and back to rtf. Still didn’t solve the problem. I have a table at the beginning of the document that I imported from Word and edited in DT. Perhaps that has something to do with it. In the end, I separated the table and the rest of the text and the deletion problem seems to have left. If it returns, I’ll post again.

Thank you and tvillemw for your help.

krgds,
Mark
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