Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2010 1:30 pm Post subject: Serious Problem with Images Disappearing--Help!
I've noticed that from time to time images would disappear in NeoOffice Writer, but this has never been a serious problem for me up until now.
I've got approximately 60 pages thesis that liberally uses OOLaTex to render equations. OOLaTex has its own quirks, but now all the equations show up as broken images now. I can, if necessary, go through the entire document re-render the equations--OOLaTex still has the LaTex commands embedded--but this would take days. I don't think this is OOLaTex, since I've seen this symptom before in Writer with other images and OOLaTex macros don't get invoked until one needs to render them--these are just images as far as Writer is concerned.
I've uploaded one page from my document, and a significant portion of my document looks like this now. I would very greatly appreciate some way of fixing this. This seems like a bug in Writer.
There are no images or objects in your .odt file. There are placeholders for them which is what you see on screen but I looked inside the .odt file and those placeholders do not reference an embedded or linked image or object file.
Did you create the .odt file yourself or did you get it from another person? If you got it from another person, then it is possible that the other person linked to external image or object files and they did not send the linked files to you.
If you created the file yourself, then another possible cause is that you inserted links to external files instead of embedding the files and then deleted the files that your .odt file links to.
Does either possible cause sound like it might have happened in your case?
If neither case sounds likely, is there any steps that we can do to try to reproduce this problem? Since the images or objects were apparently not saved in your .odt file, we will need to work with you to find the steps that trigger this problem so that we can reproduce it on our machines. Once we can do that, then we can work on fixing it.
If neither case sounds likely, is there any steps that we can do to try to reproduce this problem? Since the images or objects were apparently not saved in your .odt file, we will need to work with you to find the steps that trigger this problem so that we can reproduce it on our machines. Once we can do that, then we can work on fixing it.
After thinking about this for the last half hour, I have thought of one other possible cause: NeoOffice to running out of memory or disk space while saving the .odt file's embedded images and that is causing the images to not get saved in the .odt file.
To see if lack of memory or disk is causing the problem, can you try to remember when was the last time you saved an .odt file which lost its images after saving. Then, launch the /Applications/Utilities/Console application and copy all of the messages that are in the log window from within 30 minutes before and after the time that you saved that .odt file in this forum topic.
If lack of memory or disk is the cause of this problem, there should be lots of messages in the Console window when you saved the .odt file.
I'm not sure I can reproduce this on demand. This has happened with other images before, but like I said I just "dealt with it" and re-imported these images.
I had not worked on this document since 6 January and everything was fine then. When I opened it again this is what I saw.
This is my document from start to finish and I never got it from anyone. These LaTex rendered EMF images definitely were there and I can't see how I could have run out of memory. I am nowhere near that.
I do have "Time Machine" and can look back at older versions to try to find one that doesn't have this problem. I also use Mercurial to revision control also, but this version has quite a few changes since the last committed version, so I wouldn't want to go back to that version.
I will see what I can dig up, but these images were definitely there and now they're not.
Well, the last save point in "Time Machine" was from 2 January and it is rendering properly.
I attached a sample of the same page for your perusal.
I'm reluctant to send the entire document through the bulletin board. Would a comparison of the two complete documents possibly give you enough information to diagnose what happened?
This is my document from start to finish and I never got it from anyone. These LaTex rendered EMF images definitely were there and I can't see how I could have run out of memory. I am nowhere near that.
We have definitely seen some bugs when saving EMF images in NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org code so I suspect that there is a bug that is causing the OpenOffice.org EMF export code to fail.
The difficult part is we now have to figure out how to reproduce it. So, can you help me see if this bug is related to any of other known EMF bugs that we thought we had fixed by answering the following questions?:
1. Do you keep your documents open for more than 2 days? If so, do you remember if this bug happened when you saved the file that had been open for more than 2 days?
2. Do you save your documents to a folder on your machine's main volume or to a different volume? If you save to a different volume, can you Control-click on the volume's icon on your Desktop, select the Get Info menu in the popup menu that appears, and in the window that appears, tell us what is shown in Format field?
Oddly enough, I have also had issues with EMF this weekend. In this case, they are draw wrong in Impress in presentation mode, but not in editing mode (go figure). If you are interested I can upload the presentation later this week, after I have actually given it
Best wishes,
Oscar _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Oddly enough, I have also had issues with EMF this weekend. In this case, they are draw wrong in Impress in presentation mode, but not in editing mode (go figure). If you are interested I can upload the presentation later this week, after I have actually given it
This is not the same issue (it sounds like your issue is a font kerning issue) but I can look at it once you attach your document.
The difficult part is we now have to figure out how to reproduce it. So, can you help me see if this bug is related to any of other known EMF bugs that we thought we had fixed by answering the following questions?:
1. Do you keep your documents open for more than 2 days? If so, do you remember if this bug happened when you saved the file that had been open for more than 2 days?
Yes, I sometimes keep them open for some time. I cannot answer when this actually happened, during save or not. But, I suspect that it had. Since it was a complete surprise to me when I opened this document after a couple week hiatus, that the math symbols were gone. I think I would have noticed this.
pluby wrote:
2. Do you save your documents to a folder on your machine's main volume or to a different volume? If you save to a different volume, can you Control-click on the volume's icon on your Desktop, select the Get Info menu in the popup menu that appears, and in the window that appears, tell us what is shown in Format field?
I do not save to a separate volume, just to my machine's main volume. I note that the size difference between the previous "good" version and the "bad" version is about 200K, though that may be a result of the different content.
As far as recovering, I have two choices:
1) Trying to re-render all the images. If I click on the image the OOLaTex macros seem to have retained the LaTex so I can simply go through every image and tediously re-render each.
2) Compare the "good" and "bad" versions and try to modify the "good" version to restore the content that I authored in the couple of days since Time Machine backed it up. I may lose some changes to the mathematical formulas, though.
I'm willing to help find this bug, though. I there anything else I can do to help you?
Yes, I sometimes keep them open for some time. I cannot answer when this actually happened, during save or not. But, I suspect that it had. Since it was a complete surprise to me when I opened this document after a couple week hiatus, that the math symbols were gone. I think I would have noticed this.
This is what I suspect is happening: every day, Mac OS X sweeps through your temporary folders and deletes any files that are more than 72 hours old. If you kept an .od* file open in NeoOffice or OpenOffice.org and Mac OS X deleted any of the temporary files that either application has open, you could no longer save your .od* file.
We fixed this OpenOffice.org bug in NeoOffice 3.0.1 by creating a new, empty temporary file during the save process if we detect that our temporary files have been deleted by Mac OS X.
My theory is that NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org code is some data in the EMF temporary files that it creates and so our fix for that other bug is allowing NeoOffice to ignore the fact that Mac OS X deleted those temporary EMF files.
gpas wrote:
1) Trying to re-render all the images. If I click on the image the OOLaTex macros seem to have retained the LaTex so I can simply go through every image and tediously re-render each.
I wonder if OOLaTex does something special that is needed to trigger this bug. Would you be able to list the steps (and give the URL for OOLaTex) that I need to do to rerender on of the images in your sample document? Then I can see what temporary files are created. This will hopefully tell me whether or not Mac OS X's temporary file deletion process is the cause.
I wonder if OOLaTex does something special that is needed to trigger this bug. Would you be able to list the steps (and give the URL for OOLaTex) that I need to do to rerender on of the images in your sample document? Then I can see what temporary files are created. This will hopefully tell me whether or not Mac OS X's temporary file deletion process is the cause.
You need to first install MacTex from http://www.tug.org/mactex/2009/ -- I'm still using the 2008 distribution, but this shouldn't be a problem. Note: This is a large distribution!
After installation, simply select the broken image, click on the "Equation" button and a dialog will show up showing the LaTex commands and various controls. Be sure to select "emf" instead of "png" from the pull down and then click the "Latex" button and it should re-render.
I started just trying to re-render the LaTex images and a bunch of my figures started disappearing.
This is kind of frustrating. When I try to fix one thing, another breaks. I only had this file open for minutes, so there is obviously some other problem.
I started just trying to re-render the LaTex images and a bunch of my figures started disappearing.
This is kind of frustrating. When I try to fix one thing, another breaks. I only had this file open for minutes, so there is obviously some other problem.
Is it possible that there is a bug in the OOLaTex macros? It sounds like OOLaTex is iterating through each of your images, not just the current one.
From your original post, my understanding was that NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org code was destroying the images. However, if the OOLaTex macros are destroying those images, then that is a bug in the OOLaTex code that the OOLaTex authors must debug and fix.
Is it possible that there is a bug in the OOLaTex macros? It sounds like OOLaTex is iterating through each of your images, not just the current one.
From your original post, my understanding was that NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org code was destroying the images. However, if the OOLaTex macros are destroying those images, then that is a bug in the OOLaTex code that the OOLaTex authors must debug and fix.
After reading your list of items that need to be installed to run OOoLatex (second gigabytes of files and lots of custom fonts), it is pretty clear the OOoLatex is not a trivial macro and is really a full application built to run on top of NeoOffice or OpenOffice.org.
Nevertheless, I took a look at the OOoLatex extension and it is very clear that the OOoLatex code is storing is Latex in your .odt file and then dynamically generating EMF from that Latex using their own Latex-to-EMF converter tool. They are not using any NeoOffice or OpenOfffice.org code to convert the Latex to EMF.
So, unfortunately, the bad news is that since OOoLatex generates EMF images using its own tool, this appears to be a bug in OOoLatex's Latex-to-EMF converter tool. That is not something that we can fix so I would highly recommend that you do the following:
1. Make sure that you are using the latest OOoLatex macro. Their site shows the latest version as OOoLatex-4.0.0-beta-2. Since they are still in beta, it would not be suprising if there are still significant bugs in their latest version.
2. If their latest version does not fix the issue, file a bug with OOoLatex. They are the only people to that reasonably support their code. If you post a link to the OOoLatex bug that you file so that we can watch any discussion.
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