Wordalizer 1.512 | Fixed the Infamous Pasteboard Bug
June 10, 2015 | Wordalizer | en | fr
For over a year, a sneaky bug was preventing Wordalizer from working in some CC environments. A few users had reported a pasteboard-related error that seemed to occur without definite cause—mainly in InDesign 9.0—and the question was, how to fix a bug which I cannot reproduce on my own testing platforms? Thanks to the patience and responsiveness of Pedro Eisner, a user from Argentina, we finally hit on a solution…
The Haystack
InDesign scripters and developers are faced with many bug species. We have to deal with both implementation errors, compatibility issues, unexpected or borderline contexts of use, cascading errors resulting from InDesign's own bugs, OS-related side effects, and so on. Furthermore, most of those events may occur at any level: ExtendScript, user interface layer(s), scripting DOM, InDesign's execution space, external libraries, I/O devices, operating system, memory… In large projects, tracking and fixing bugs is just like looking for a needle in a haystack!
In the worst case we cannot even “experience” the problem by ourselves. Unhappy users report an error message that appears to come from the beyond:
Seriously?
The Needle
Of course, the first impulse is to suspect we made a miscalculation somewhere. Well, this sounds surprising, since many beta tests didn't reveal it, but that shouldn't be a big deal anyway. As Wordalizer is intended to support a large range of InDesign versions (CS4, CS5, CS5.5, CS6, CC 9, and CC 10) it is plausible that some user setting interferes with the process under circumstances we did not anticipate.
But day after day, night after night, despite all the tests we run, the mystery deepens and unprecedented questions proliferate. Even in the most exotic configurations, there is definitely no reason why an object should “leave the pasteboard.”
The Volunteer
This is where Pedro comes in. Living at a five-hour time difference behind Paris, he was in testing the trial version of Wordalizer when he stumbled upon the bug. He outlined the symptoms giving a lot of attention to details. “Let me know if I can help you furthermore” he wrote. Two weeks later, I must say he helped beyond expectations!
In studying in depth the state of the wrongly generated document, we finally discovered a crucial fact: if and when certain factors are combined, InDesign 9.0 (and maybe only that version) does not manage page coordinate space in a consistent way. Through a series of “trial and error” stages, Pedro and I have identified those multiple factors.
Note. — I will not go into technical details, but there is no doubt to me this is an internal bug of InDesign. Partial clues can be found in this thread although the whole puzzle is more complicated.
The Workaround
From there, a fix has been designed and tested. It first attempts to purely circumvent the obstacle—and I'm very confident with this strategy. However, as one can never be sure of anything where internal bugs are concerned, an additional routine is responsible for checking that all is fine. In the wrong case, a rescue process is automatically run.
Now, our word cloud generator should properly operate even in InDesign biased environments. Give it a try and tell me!
A big thank you to Pedro Eisner.
Comments
Bonjour Marc,
Je rencontre un problème avec Wordalizer Pro 1.512 sous Indesign CC 2014.
Impossible de générer de faire une liste de plus de 16 entrées. Fâcheux quand la liste doit en contenir 40. :)
Une idée, une solution ?
Merci.
Franck
Bonjour Franck,
Un autre utilisateur m'a signalé un problème similaire. Il faudrait m'en dire plus sur votre OS, les opérations concrètes qui déclenchent le bug, la façon dont il se manifeste…
Pouvez-vous me contacter à support [at] indiscripts {dot} com?
Cordialement,
Marc
Looks promising, however the script window is not shown correctly on the 4K screen.
It just jump to the right bottom corner and it's not possible to move it to center of the screen.
INDD CC 2014 & 2015, Windows 8.1
Can you try to fix that?
Thanks,
Wichru
Hi Wichru,
Thanks for your feedback.
Yep, the '4K display' bug is a(nother) known issue which various users have reported on both Win8 and MacOSX.
That seems related to ScriptUI but I have no relevant clue for fixing this so far :(
Waiting for further detail…
Best,
Marc