Crash opening OOo Mac(X11), OOo 1.1.4/win32 Writer documents

[Petrushka]

Hi, I've been using OpenOffice.org on a Mac under X11 for a while and would love to try out NeoOffice/J. Maybe you can help me do that ...

I've installed the release candidate and the patch, and it starts up just fine. This is under OS X 10.3.4. Some Writer documents it can open (e.g. some documents I created over a year ago in NeoOffice/J 0.7 or 0.8 or thereabouts).

But with most of my Writer documents, including one that I've been working on at home in OOo 1.1.4 for Windows, the following scenario happens: I try to open the document, the status bar showing the loading lights up very briefly then returns to the default state, the programme seems to hang for a few seconds, and then vanishes from the screen and Dock. The OS then asks me if I want to report the crash to Apple.

I was working on the same document in OOo for Mac/X11 earlier today, and the copy I've saved from that also crashes NeoOffice/J every time.

Since (a) they all work fine with OOo Mac/X11, I'm guessing the problem is not a problem with OpenOffice.org itself; and since (b) this happens with most of my documents, not just a few, I'm betting it may be related to my environment rather than a problem with NeoOffice/J. Have there been any other incidents resembling this? I haven't been able to find anything similar in Bugzilla or the trinity forums.

Some (possibly wild) speculations on what might be going wrong:

* Could USB Overdrive (which I use to manage a 3-button mouse with scroll wheel) be interfering? I see there have been problems in the past with scroll wheels.
* Many of my documents use non-Roman character sets - specifically, Basic Greek, Greek Extended, and Latin Extended-A. Likely to cause issues?
* Can't think of anything else.

[pluby]

First, you should try to install "Patch-1a" for Neo/J 1.1 RC from the following URL:

http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/patch.php

This patch fixed a few crashing bugs.

If "Patch-1a" does not stop the crashing, you should file a bug in Bugzilla and attach the following two items:

1. The Mac OS X crash log
2. The file that crashes.

Patrick

[Petrushka]

Hi Patrick, thanks for your fast reply. I had already installed the latest patch.

As I said, I suspect an environmental issue more than I suspect a bug in NeoOffice/J - which would mean it might not be easily reproducible. I'd prefer to wait a day or so and see if anyone has any similar issues before posting a bug. (Maybe that's not standard practice, but I don't know any better!)

Thanks again,
Petrushka

[ovvldc]

[Petrushka]

OK, I can now confirm it's not a problem that NeoOffice/J is having with these files: definitely an environmental issue. I've tried creating new documents in NeoOffice from scratch and it crashes at irregular intervals, depending on nothing that I can determine.

I don't *think* I have any outré apps running. Latest security updates are installed, so I would have thought that meant Java is up-to-date. Could 3rd-party kernel extensions be causing a problem? I tried "kextstat | grep -v apple" and I appear to have the following ones going:

[pluby]

Debugging with a crash log is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Why don't you file a bug and attach the crash log?

Patrick

[Petrushka]

Will do. Thanks for the advice.

[sardisson]

Even if it's something that's environmental, Patrick can probably tell you pretty quickly with a bug and crash log in Bugzilla Unsanity's APE engine comes to mind here....

Mostly, the rule of thumb is, if it's reapeatable and/or you know it works in OOo/X11, file it in bugzilla, attach a crash log and a sample document. Patrick will figure it out, often very quickly Sometimes we'll start with a fresh profile (move the ~/Library/NeoOfficeJ-1.1 folder aside) to check if some behvior is related to corrupt prefs, but if there's a crash, typically we go straight to bugzilla

Smokey

[Petrushka]

Well, the problem was tracked down to an incompatibility issue between ATSUI (not that I know what that is) and three ttf fonts designed for X11, called FreeSerif, FreeSans, and FreeMono (obtained from http://packages.debian.org/unstable/x11/ttf-freefont.html).

I've made NeoOffice crash one last time and sent a crash report to Apple, as Patrick suggested. Hopefully they'll fix the problem.

I find these fonts very useful - there are very few serif fonts in existence that contain the particular character sets I need (Roman, Greek, Greek Extended) in all four faces, and even fewer that are tolerably good-looking.

So, as a WORKAROUND: I'm going to try to convert these fonts to dfont format (legally - they're GNU GPL): then, with any luck, they won't elicit bugs in the OS ... touch wood.

I'll post back once I've tested them and put them somewhere online.

[pluby]

[Petrushka]

[pluby]

These functions are invoked by Neo/J every time text is drawn. What may surprise you is that the OOo code draws many fonts even if you aren't using that font in your document.

For example, clicking on the font list box in the toolbar causes the OOo code to draw a sizable number of the available fonts. If this doesn't crash Neo/J when you have the bad fonts installed, just scroll through the fonts until you get to where the bad fonts would be displayed and most likely Neo/J will crash since the fonts are being used to draw the font name.

Another example, and a very insidious one, is that the OOo code performs automatic font fallback. So, if you are using a font like Times New Roman and you type a Japanese character, Neo/J will find the first font that can display that character since Times New Roman cannot. In this case, one of the bad fonts may be the first font that it finds and, as a result, you will get the crash.

Does that make sense?

Patrick

[sardisson]

Hmm, I have those fonts installed (I got them from their original source, http://savannah.nongnu.org/download/freefont/, and a month or so ago rather than recently) and I'm not getting any crashes. And I've actually used the fonts in a couple of documents.

We should perhaps compare notes on versions of these fonts (it's very late now and I drove 10 hours today, so tomorrow for me...) and see if one of us has newer or older versions....

Smokey

[sardisson]

By the timestamp in the package name at debian and the downloads from ftp.gnu.org/savannah/files/freefont/, we should have identical fonts.

I noticed that there are some issues with the debian developmental versions of these fonts (namely some bad metrics issues mentioned in other threads in that list), if you're using those rather than the 20031008 ones.



Smokey

[Petrushka]

I'm away from the Mac until Monday. I'll try fiddling with different versions of the same fonts then and see what happens - I *thought* I was using the 20031008 version (that's what I have on the Windows setup at home) but it might be older. Hmmmm.