I’m having hang-up \ freeze incidents right now!!!
Here’s the scenario:
I’m working on texts. After entering some notes in one text file that’s inside a folder, and then try to select another text file, OR after creating a new text file I try to go into the main window to write, the program not only hangs but it complete disables the capacity of the mouse to click on anything else – totally. I can’t even click on items in the Force Quit window and can only move down the list with the arrow key, but, for instance, attempting to relaunch the Finder won’t work. I’ve had to press for a second the power button to call up the shut down box.
I’m really worried because I have a deadline I have to meet – tomorrow!!!
I guess I will have to put Scrivener aside for now and work elsewhere. I can’t risk my work until this is resolved.
System & Software: MacBook Pro, 2.16GH, 2GB-RAM, running OS X 10.5.5. The first time I had Scrivener, Apple Mail, Safari, and Bookends on. The second time only Safari, besides Scrivener, of course.
Please post new bugs in their own topic rather than posting them as replies to existing ones (I know both bugs involved hangs but they are quite different in description, so having them separate makes it easier for me to deal with them separately and help you more quickly). I’ve split this to a new topic accordingly.
I really need more information on this in order to be able to help, as the only information you’ve really given is that your computer hangs while using Scrivener. Obviously, this shouldn’t be happening. So that I can help you and look into what might be happening, please post the exact steps it takes to reproduce this bug - exactly what you are doing when it happens - and also a crash report if there is one, or anything that gets output to the console. If you’re not sure how to find these things, this post (which is at the top of this forum) should help:
Many thanks for your response. I will go back to work inside Scrivener and see if it happens again. So far I couldn’t send you an OS X report because none was generated (I checked inside user\library\logs\crash reporter but those found there relate to other applications. I did have a Scrivener crash on 2008-10-18 but I can’t remember this being the issue. I could email you that other report if you think it could help.
Now, here’s the scenario for each incident and the step-by-step path as far as I can remember it:
The file I’m working with has several text folders located in some cases three folders deep. These are a few notes and several longer texts, ranging from 2,200 to 7,300 words each. Over in the Research section I have several folders containing one web page each, plus one folder containing a big 25MB pdf file (itself made up of 23 high-resolution images, generated with Adobe Acrobat Professional out of a collection of 23 separate high-resolution jpg files). The Scrivener file is now only 27MG in size because I moved out various things after the freeze.
In each of the two incidents it froze all mouse input attempts (clicks of menus, icons, text window, or even outside Scrivener when I used command+tab to cycle through opened applications (see list above. At the moment it happened I was attempting to switch from one text file where I had been typing some other text file with text or an empty text file. Each time, once I clicked on the icon for the text file on the left-side file structure pane, the system had the hang-up as soon as I clicked there.
The program simply produced a behavior in which the mouse could no longer produce responses from any program once I attempted to click, wherever, not even the Finder or the Dock, i.e., input stopped: no menu came down, no Dock item responded, and even when I called up the Force Quite service I couldn’t select anything with the mouse. If I remember well, had to resort to using the down-arrow key to move down the list. Next, I attempted to relaunch the Finder, thinking it might help. The Finder didn’t relaunch normally: it seemingly just made a quick attempt, flipped the icon of files on the Desktop, for example, but nothing else.
Next, I resorted to my last option: touch quickly the power button to call up the shut-down box, press the return key to turn it off, then leave the machine off while I fumed a bit. As you can see, I did have keyboard input response but not with the mouse. This has never happened before, although I’ve been using Scrivener only for a couple of weeks, nor as far as I can remember with other applications (I’ve used OS X since 10.2). The mouse I use is a regular Apple mighty mouse connected directly to the MacBook Pro.
I will resume work in Scrivener with the console.app on. I will take notes as soon as it happens, if it happens again, but I can’t guarantee that I will be able to have a crash report because none was generated before. Of course, I will now be generating Scrivener-produced backup files every few minutes, just in case.
It sounds as though something has caused Scrivener to go into a loop which has eaten up too much memory. (I’ve been optimising memory management in loops quite a lot for the next update.) This sort of thing can happen in very, very large projects whilst compiling the draft or big operations - but it certainly shouldn’t be happening when you click on a file. That said, I do seem to recall coming across a text document once that could freeze not only Scrivener but other apps that use the same text system, such as TextEdit… That said, I can’t find any information on it now, but I believe it turned out to have some strange characters in it, if I recall correctly. Did you import these documents into Scrivener from another application (such as Word)?
Either way, if this is still happening consistently for you, could you please zip up the project and send it to me at support AT literatureandlatte DOT com? Also, are you using Tiger or Leopard?