"Disappearing page break" flaw?

[jtranter]

I'm having problems with RTF files, which I originally thought were due to a problem with Nisus. Now I think it may be NeoOffice. Here are my two recent messages to the Nisus forum that explain the problem, I hope:
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Post 1

Nisis Pro inserted page breaks: are they kosher?

There seems to be a problem with Nisus page breaks.

I use a Macbook Air 2009
Running Mac OS X v.10.6.3 Snow Leopard
with all recommended updates at 2010-05-16

In Nisus Pro v1.4.1
Create and save as RTF a file with page breaks, using
Menu>Insert>Page Break

In NeoOffice v3.1.1. Patch 0
open the RTF file: all the page breaks have disappeared.
In NeoOffice, insert all the page breaks again, using
Menu>Insert>Manual Break... >Page Break
Save as RTF.

Open this file in Nisus: the page breaks are all there.
In Nisus, save this file as RTF.

NeoOffice: open this RTF file and all the page breaks have disappeared.

Is Nisus Right? Is NeoOffice right? They can’t both be right, surely.

John Tranter

-----------------------------------

Post 2

Mea culpa. Using Mac OS X 10.6.3:

Further to my unfair RTF save and open test, here are the results of creating a file in Nisus Pro, creating three page breaks, saving in RTF, and:

opening as RTF and saving again as RTF in:

Text Edit and in
Mellel and in
Nisus:

open the files again in all three word processors and ...

All the page breaks show properly in all three word processors.

So it seems to be NeoOffice that loses the page breaks:

not Nisus,
not Text Edit, and
not Mellel.

But as I am not sure what is happening, I may well be wrong.

John Tranter

[pluby]

Can you attach a sample RTF file that we can use to try and reproduce what you see? I don't have Nisus but I can definitely look inside an RTF file to see how Nisus puts page breaks in files.

You can attach a file to a post using the steps in this forum topic.

Patrick

[jtranter]

Sample Nisus file attached with two page breaks. Thanks for your prompt reply!

[pluby]

I can reproduce this problem in both NeoOffice 3.1.1 and OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 so NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org RTF import code is failing to detect the page breaks.

Fortunately, I did find a workaround for this OpenOffice.org bug. I noticed that if I resave your RTF file without any changes in the TextEdit application and then open the resaved RTF file in NeoOffice, the page breaks appear.

When I looked into the RTF files before and after resaving, I found that Nisus saves page breaks differently than TextEdit does. Apparently, NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org code can detect TextEdit's method of saving page breaks but it cannot detect Nisus'.

Does my workaround for this OpenOffice.org bug work for you? I realize it is not ideal, but our very limited donations only fund one developer (me) so we limits the scope of the NeoOffice project to keeping a native, stable version of OpenOffice.org running on Mac OS X. As a result, fixing OpenOffice.org file import bugs is not something we are able to fix.

If you are interested in seeing this fixed in a future version of NeoOffice, you can file a bug in the OpenOffice.org issue tracker to get it on the radar of the core OpenOffice.org developers and if they fix the bug, the new behavior will get included in a future release of NeoOffice:

http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/pre_submission.html

Note: our advice is to not mention NeoOffice as mentioning NeoOffice may cause OpenOffice.org volunteers to accidentally close it without actually reviewing your bug.

Patrick

[jtranter]

Many thanks for your trouble. I have created sample RTF files in Bean, TextEdit, Mellel and Nisus Pro, each containing a page break. Each file was then loaded and saved by OpenOffice Writer 3.2, as an RTF file.
I've written about this issue to the OpenOffice people and attached those files. (No mention of NeoOffice.) I hope it can be fixed this way. Otherwise, I'll live with it.

Thanks for your response.

John Tranter