Re: Nakakoji View

Mark Bernstein replies:
> I checked it this morning; I believe you're mistaken.
>
> Remember: the popup in Nakakoji View changes the template ONLY for
> the note you originally selected, *not* for all the notes you're
> exporting.

I fiddled with this some more just now and I figured out the origin of the
confusion. I never expected the popup to do anything but what Dr Bernstein says
it's supposed to do, and I can't see in A. Dent's original message where he
gives that impression either. We were using the popup to try to set the
template for the selected note, which had none defined, and the bug, as we saw
it, was that the view did not update, but just continued to display an error
message that the default template could not be found. As it turns out, it's
telling us to go set a default template and come back. This was confusing,
because why does it need a default template when I just want to see the
Nakakoji view of one selected note and nothing else?

If I define a default template for the document then the Nakakoji view, and its
template-setting popup, works as it is apparently supposed to. I can change the
template and the view indeed updates; you don't even need to press the update
button.

Because Dr Bernstein did not reproduce the conditions that exposed the bugs
when he tried it, he didn't see what we were seeing; not surprising. (The
condition is that no default template is defined.)

So now we can describe the bugs more precisely:

The Nakakoji view (or the text export window) doesn't work when no default text
export template is defined (or if the one defined is a file that can't be
found), even if there is one defined for the selected note. By "doesn't work" I
mean that it fails to display the Nakakoji view for the selected note, but
instead just informs us that it can't find the default template, which it does
not need;

If we invoke text export, which is equivalent to choosing Nakakoji view for the
whole document, we get a Nakakoji view window where this error message is
repeated for each note in the document (yes, hundreds or thousands of times).
We have to wait a long time for this window to appear. Since the purpose of the
message is just to tell us that no default template is defined, we only need to
see this once, if at all;

A bug going back to the first version of Tinderbox that I used (1.x?): the
default text and html templates are occasionally reset to random files on my
hard drive, often not even text files (right now the text export template for
one of my Tinderbox documents is the Tinderbox application itself!). The
program fails to check for sane values of these files before going ahead and
exporting, so you can get entire websites reduced to binary gibberish when this
happens.

Most of the issues I described above are very minor, almost cosmetic
problems, but I thought it might just barely be worth nailing down what I and
one or two others were experiencing as confusing bugs or program behaviors.
Received on Wed Jan 4 16:01:26 2006