Issue 55464 - Writer losing large portion of my document
Summary: Writer losing large portion of my document
Status: CLOSED DUPLICATE of issue 17171
Alias: None
Product: Writer
Classification: Application
Component: ui (show other issues)
Version: OOo 1.0.0
Hardware: All Windows 2000
: P2 Trivial (vote)
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: michael.ruess
QA Contact: issues@sw
URL:
Keywords: oooqa
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2005-10-04 19:16 UTC by allsorts46
Modified: 2005-10-04 21:11 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

See Also:
Issue Type: DEFECT
Latest Confirmation in: ---
Developer Difficulty: ---


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Description allsorts46 2005-10-04 19:16:59 UTC
I have experienced a reproducable bug where Writer loses a large piece of my
document. Unfortunately, it only occurs in one document that I have, and due to
it's nature, I'm not able to attatch this document. I will try to describe the
situation in as much detial as possible:

The original document is in Word 2000 format. The original is also password
protected, but I've tried it without the password protection and this does not
have any effect, so that is not related.

A part of my document looks like this, under Word:

AAAABBBB

CCCC

Both A and B are one continuous block of text, and are labelled different only
to help illustrate the change that occurs. In fact, the A-B join is mid-word,
not whitespace of any kind. C is the following paragraph. Overall, these blocks
represent about 20,000 words. When imported and displayed under Writer, it
displays as:

AAAA
BBBB

CCCC

A mysterious new line has appeared, which is, as previously mentioned, mid-word.
Enabling the option to show hidden formatting characters shows only a newline
character, nothing unusual.

Obviously I don't want this new line, so I position the cursor at the end of A,
and press the delete key once to bring B upwards. What happens however, is that
B disappears completely, and I'm left with:

AAAA

CCCC

If I choose the undo option here, the text does not return - it's lost and I
have so far found no way to recover it, other than reloading the document.

If I position the cursor at the start of B, and use backspace to achieve the
same effect, an even larger block of text disappears, which seems to extend from
the end of A, far up into my document. Possibly 50,000 words or more.

I also tried positioning the cursor at the end of A, and typing some text. Any
characters I type do not appear. If I delete a few characters from the end of A,
say five, then I can replace those five deleted characters with five more, but
cannot type beyond that limit. Curiously, if I type some extra characters on the
end of this line, although they are hidden, they show up if I cause the bug to
occur, leaving me with:

AAAA[Extra characters]

CCCC

This bug occurs in both the 2.0 RC, and the latest 1.x version. I tried saving
the document under various formats, including OpenDocument, OpenOffice 1,
Microsoft Word, but the same thing occurs in all cases.

I tried altering the document in Word first before importing it, applying
styles, adding whitespace and other things, and all of these show in Writer, but
do not help the issue.

I tried cutting the document down to just the area that has the problem, and
this causes the problem to disappear. However, deleting half of my document is
obviously not a solution. Copying the area of the document to a new, blank
document, also does not exhibit this bug. Copying the entire document to a new,
blank document *does* exhibit this bug. Clearly, the position is important in
some way. It's on page 146.

As mentioned, I cannot provide the document, but if there any any debugging
tools or other methods I can try to see any 'hidden codes' and such at the point
where the problem occurs, or any more information you would like to know, I am
happy to provide. Possibly I could write some kind of script to scramble the
text so that I could submit it. I can reproduce this bug on demand, so I can
also try other suggestions and report the result if requested. If screenshots
would be helpful in any way, I could provide those too.

I am using Windows 2000 Professional SP4.
Comment 1 Regina Henschel 2005-10-04 20:14:07 UTC
It sound like a too long paragraph. The size of a paragraph is limited to 65535
characters. Is the paragraph longer than that? (which would be issue 17171)

Can you send the document with private mail to a developer? Or can you exchange
the content with a dummy-text?

Other ideas:
Have you tried to use the "Web Layout"?
Are you using a non latin language, are you using a spezial font?
Perhaps the text is inside a frame in Word? Frames cannot extend over several pages.
Comment 2 allsorts46 2005-10-04 20:45:39 UTC
The block where the problem occurs is, according to Word, 156,868 characters in
length (including spaces) and is continous text.

After reading #17171, I did a character count in Writer up to the mid-word
break, and indeed, it's 65,534 characters.

Thanks for identifying the problem for me, but can I ask why this issue (17171)
is given such low priority? I understand the argument that it's not ideal to be
writing such long paragraphs, but it's a serious issue that writer DISCARDS
large amounts of text if any attempt is made to rejoin the paragrpahs. Undo has
no effect.

At the very least, Writer should not allow any actions that would cause this to
happen, and present an error and explanation to the user. Simply 'losing' the
text is unnaceptable.
Comment 3 Regina Henschel 2005-10-04 21:09:46 UTC
So I will close this as duplicate to issue 17171.

I'm not a developer but only oooqa-member, so I cannot tell you anything about
the Target Milestone decisions.

Please write your comments to issue 17171, not here. If it is important for you,
you can vote for that issue.

*** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 17171 ***
Comment 4 Regina Henschel 2005-10-04 21:11:22 UTC
closing duplicate