Hi Beta Users,
Thank you all for your feedback regarding bugs especially those regarding missing text or lag issues. Mirrorscape, your bug report regarding lag was just sensational (the best yet) - you helped us find a particularly nasty bug that was virtually invisible had it not been for your detailed analysis. It’s because of people like you that help us solve these issues much faster than we could normally. So, a big thank you. That’s certainly, not to belittle other’s bug reports - just that this was a standout in solving a bug that we just couldn’t replicate until Mirrorcapes post.
We have made resonably good progress in trying to find and fix the root causes of the lag and missing text issues, and have pretty much fixed the font and font sizing changing issue.
With the lagging text issue, we started to make changes to how the dictionary looks up words. Currently, every character entered triggers a dictionary lookup if the dictionary is enabled in Edit>Options - Auto-Correction Tab.
The dictionary is extremely efficient in the way it does its lookups, but we thought it must be the dictionary as we couldn’t re-produce this issue ourselves. So, we introduced a timer based system where dictionary lookups are only triggered if the user pauses typing for .5 of a second, we also restricted the range of the dictionary text to search. We had almost completed this when we started working through Mirrorscapes post:
https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/does-doing-this-make-your-scrivener-lag-addressed/8424/27
Then we found a nasty bug that had to do with a very expensive event that was being triggered, when it shouldn’t be, that actually paralysed our own machines if we focused on triggering the event. So, we backed out the dictionary changes and made a fix to the event code triggering. We’d like to test with this fix extensively first before we decide whether to make the dictionary changes as we can always re-introduce the dictionary efficiencies again - but, I’m thinking we may not need to with the current fix? I want to take this step by step.
The missing text we believe we may have also fixed - once again, we are struggling to reproduce this consistently. Unfortunately, this potential fix involved augmenting the source code for Qt itself (Qt is the C++ framework on which we build Scrivener for Windows). What this means is we can’t simply swap out an old and new Scrivener.exe file when we release beta 1.3. We have to go through an unistall and reinstall process as all the library code (dlls etc.) have had to be re-built. This frightens me a little as some users have had trouble swapping out previous Scrivener.exe files with new ones - but this is a complete uninstall and reinstall.
So, we’re going to continue testing the beta and making other smaller fixes for the next couple of days to ensure that what we think we have fixed we have before releasing it. I’ll also need to work on the installer a little bit to ensure it behaves nicely. I’m thinking if all goes well either late Sat or Sunday this week.
Currently, we have fixed the following in beta 1.3 (there will be a few more that we’ll fix tomorrow)
- In the corkboard view, if you drill down into a text file by clicking on the icon in the upper left hand corner of an index card and then click on a folder in the inspector nothing happens - you are not taken to the corkboard view of that folder’s contents as you are supposed to. (in fact if you keep clicking on the folder Scrivener acts like you have double clicked and want to change the folder’s name rather than see the corkboard).
If you try to get back to the corkboard by clicking on the icon at the top of the screen - e.g. The icon in between the icon for scrivenings and the icon for the outliner - you get a blank corkboard, despite the fact that the folder highlighted contains numerous text files.
The only way to get back to the corkboard here is to click on one of the text files in the inspector and then click on the folder icon again, which this time takes you to the corkboard view. Note - it does not seem to matter here if the text file that you click on in the inspector is the same as the one you drilled down into on the corkboard, it seems that the mere act of clicking on a text file icon in the inspector is what matters. We have fixed this.
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The spell checker is not recognising certain words, specifically contractions containing the apostrophe ( ’ ). For example, the following words are underlined in red like so:
I’ve
Isn’t
Doesn’t
Mustn’t
Couldn’t
Wouldn’t etc. This has been fixed. -
Scrivener was not preserving first line indentation. It now does.
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Selecting text does not populate the synopsis; the opening lines of the document did instead. Now if no text is selected the opening lines populate the synopsis, otherwise if text is selected the selected text populates the synopsis.
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Pressing CTRL + ARROW UP or ARROW DOWN didn’t work work in the Editor. It only jumped from word to word horizontally (left and right). Pressing CTRL + ARROW UP now takes you to beginning of paragraph, CTRL + ARROW DOWN - end of paragraph, CTRL+ LEFT - next word the left, CTRL+RIGHT - next word on the right.
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Fonts and font sizes are now maintained. There is still an issue with empty paragraph’s fonts which we will need to address when we re-write part of the rich text parser. However, this fix certainly put a smile on my face now that my fonts and font sizes persist. This was driving me bonkers!
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Any changes to the outliner columns, selections etc. will persist.
After this beta is released. I expect we’ll be pretty busy for the next month fixing up the parser, associated import issues, and the remainder of editor bugs. So, the daily updates will become a little mundane for a while as we will not have a whole of improvement to show until these are fixed properly.
Lee
