Find not working on document

[tarakananda]

We have occasional problems with Powerfind, where it will not find anything on a page, words which are obviously there in plain site. This time it is happening in a document which has text copied from an email. It has been saved as an RTF. The version of Nisus is 2.0.4, and the system is 10.8.3.

Any suggestions?

[credneb]

Not sure if this is related to your problem, but Nisus may be lost in "space."

I have found that when Nisus is open in one Apple "space" and other applications are open in other spaces, the menu bar may show Nisus as the active application, and Nisus docs may be open and visible, but Nisus does not respond to commands (including Find, Open and Save (as)) in the instance of Nisus seen in the space you are looking at. Instead, it responds in the space (1, 2, 3....) assigned to Nisus. So the Open dlg is displayed in a space you cannot see without opening Spaces and clicking on that space -- i.e., Nisus is visible in 2 spaces, but responds to commands in only one of them. This happens _without_ dragging a Nisus doc from one space to another within Spaces.

I have never nailed down the steps that make this happen, but it is some combination of tabbing and clicking on Nisus in the dock to return to Nisus from some other application that confuses either Nisus or OSX.

Quitting Nisus always resolves the problem. Of course, if you have made changes you want to save before quitting, and Nisus seems not to be responding, you still need to find your way back to Nisus to save the changes before quitting.

It's a pain, but works. Don't know if the problem is with Nisus, OSX, Spaces, or some combination thereof. And can't reliably replicate the steps that make this happen. It seems to be random.

Cliff

[xiamenese]

Do either of you use Nisus in "Full Screen"? When you enter Full Screen, a new space is created for the Full Screen rendering of the current document, while if you have more than one document open, the other(s) remain unexpanded in the original space. Might it not be that using Full Screen on one document confuses NWP as to which space and therefore which document the Find dialog is meant to be active on?

Just a thought.

Mark

[credneb]

Re: full screen

For my part, no.

I suspect the problem is more Nisus-related than OSX or Spaces because sometimes Nisus macros get confused and work on a non-active document. But this, too, is random and I have not figured out any specific actions that always precede it happening.

Nisus is also the only program I have noticed getting lost as described.

[tarakananda]

We always use a single space, and we are not using full screen.

[xiamenese]

OK, that rules that out. So it's over to Martin et al.

Mark

[phspaelti]

I can't quite imagine "can't find anything".

First question: you are not doing a "Attribute Sensitive" search?

(If no) Second question: you start with a blank find box and then use "." (AnyTextCharacter), and this finds nothing?

Does this problem persist after a restart? On all files or only certain ones

A screen shot showing the find box and relevant parts of the file (behind it) might be useful…

[xiamenese]

Not sure if this is related to your problem, but Nisus may be lost in "space."

I have found that when Nisus is open in one Apple "space" and other applications are open in other spaces, the menu bar may show Nisus as the active application, and Nisus docs may be open and visible, but Nisus does not respond to commands (including Find, Open and Save (as)) in the instance of Nisus seen in the space you are looking at. Instead, it responds in the space (1, 2, 3....) assigned to Nisus. So the Open dlg is displayed in a space you cannot see without opening Spaces and clicking on that space -- i.e., Nisus is visible in 2 spaces, but responds to commands in only one of them. This happens _without_ dragging a Nisus doc from one space to another within Spaces.

I have never nailed down the steps that make this happen, but it is some combination of tabbing and clicking on Nisus in the dock to return to Nisus from some other application that confuses either Nisus or OSX.

Ah, I've been experiencing this one.

Open Nisus in one space — I often have other apps running in that space too — and work on document.
Move spaces to run another app.
Close that app and click the Nisus icon in the dock.
The Nisus menu bar appears in this new space; it doesn't take you back to the space where Nisus was already open, and "Open" is greyed out in the File menu ... I haven't tried using "Open recent" in this new instance of Nisus, even though neither it nor "New" are greyed out.
Choose "Quit" from the menu. The new instance quits.
Go back to the original space, Nisus is still running normally there.

It seems that if you are in a new space, rather than taking you back to the one where it's already running, NWP tries to open a new instance of the program, but the new instance doesn't have full access to the menu entries.

I suspect part of the problem lies with 10.8.3. In 10.7.x, and I think in 10.8.1, if you established a number of spaces to be always open, you could set which space you wanted a particular app to open in. That was very useful, I found. But with 10.8.3 — I can't remember if it was also the case with 10.8.2, that option has been removed from the dock system. So in general, apps that were already set up to open in a particular space, still open in that space — I have different desktop images in each which allows me to know where I am — while others just open in whatever space you happen to be in. It seems that Nisus falls between these two ... It opens initially in the space that was set earlier, but now under 10.8.3, when you click on the icon in the dock, it tries to open like an app which doesn't have an assigned space.

Can I point out that this is clear to me, as I run an absolutely minimalist desktop, free of all icons except for any documents I store there temporarily before moving them to where I want them, and my dock on boot-up only has Finder above the bar, and below the bar the folders for Applications, Documents, Downloads and Trash. So any application whose icon appears in the dock is running. All others don't appear in the dock.

Mark

[credneb]

Your experience is the same as mine, but this computer is running 10.6.8 still. I also noticed the same on another running 10.7.x. Haven't gotten around to installing 10.8.

My setup is also quite minimalist, although the programs I use frequently are in the dock.

Nice (?) to hear someone else has noticed the same thing.

Cliff

[xiamenese]

But actually, it's not just NWP. I've just booted up, opened GyazMail, changed spaces and noticed that the menu bar on each of my empty spaces — 2, 3 and 4 — was the GyazMail menu, not the Finder menu. So obviously there is something flaky in the kingdom of spaces itself, which is impacting NWP seriously.

Mark

[martin]

NWP doesn't explicitly try to adjust the OSX space/desktop it's assigned to, or working in. Because of that I'm included this think this is a more general problem with OSX, which is validated by Mark's evidence that the same problem affects GyazMail. I'll try to reproduce the issue, and if that's successful we can report it to Apple.

As for the original problem:

We have occasional problems with Powerfind, where it will not find anything on a page, words which are obviously there in plain site

My first suggestion with these kinds of problems is to make absolutely sure all find options are as you want them. As Philip mentioned, make sure you do not have the "attribute sensitive" option turned on, then check "whole word" and "ignore case". If that checks out, Philip's suggestion to try and match any characters using the ".+" regex is a good idea, just to see what will be matched.

Let us know if you can reproduce this in a particular document. If so, we'd be very happy to have a look and see what the problem might be.