Black on black formatting error

[jhecht]

I've been working on an article on two computers, shifting between my desktop using NWPro 3.2.1 and a laptop running NWExpress 4.2.1, with the file stored in iCloud. This morning I opened the file on my laptop and found that something had imposed a black background on my working draft, which was black type with some type highlighted in yellow to identify notes, so all I could see was solid black except for the notes, which showed black type on the yellow highlighting. The laptop shows the file in its original format, with a plain white background except for the yellow highlights. However, the non-highlighted text was invisible unless I did a SELECT ALL to show it.

Doing a Save as to .doc format on the desktop recovered the text and left the highlighting, but it took quite a while to figure that out. Later I managed to find the controls to remove the black background in the rtf, but I have yet to find a way to get rid of the black box surrounding the recovered text. The black background did not show up on the laptop.

What seems to have happened is that the desktop and laptop interpreted my rtf file differently, and somehow the desktop interpreted the whole file as having a black background and black type, which from my view is a serious bug rather than a feature. Is there any way to prevent this from happening? I prefer working in Nisus and shifting to the laptop when my office gets unpleasantly hot, but something that generates an unwanted black background for black type is unacceptable.

Thanks,

[martin]

That sounds very strange, and it's certainly unexpected. You should not see such formatting changes when passing documents between Macs, or even between Nisus Writer Express and Nisus Writer Pro.

Is there a possibility that you used any other software to open or process the file? One of the most common issues is double-clicking an RTF file in the Finder, perhaps accidentally. The Finder defaults to opening the document in an app like TextEdit, which has poor support for formatting.

Would you be able to share one of the black-on-black files with us for testing? It might give us some clues. At the least we can help you resolve any remaining issues, like removing the mysterious "black box".

If you can send us a file, it would be helpful to have a specimen that's nearest in time to the introduction of the unwanted formatting. Ideally we can see a copy of the file right after the event, before you try to fix anything. For example, if you're working on your desktop Mac and everything looks great, but then you go to your laptop and reopening the file shows the black coloring, that's the file we want to see. Ideally you would archive the file on your laptop before you edit or save it. Thanks for your help!

[jhecht]

Thanks for the quick response. This morning I saved a couple of copies and fiddled around with a third, but they now all have reverted to the version without the black on black type. That includes the copies that I carefully avoided from changing. At this point all I have are a couple of screen shots that show small sections of the copy I was fiddling with to get my files back into readable form. They show a black box around normal black on white type with a yellow highlighted zone as well.

I don't know what caused the change back to normal. The black on black seemed stable for a while this morning, but at some point it changed back and I can't recreate it. I had been having problems with Firefox on my desktop that forced me to restore an old version of Firefox with TimeMachine and create a new profile in Firefox on Saturday, but that shouldn't have involved Nisus. That's all I can think of, unless something weird was happening in iCloud that I didn't notice.

- Jeff

[martin]

Thanks for the screenshots Jeff. I'm not sure what caused the black-on-black text, but maybe it has something to do with Dark Mode. Do you use Dark Mode or automatic appearance mode switching? That could be a factor.

As for the black box in your screenshot, that looks like a document section border, or maybe paragraph borders. You can edit those using the Page Borders and Paragraph Borders palettes respectively. It's highly unlikely Dark Mode has anything to do with introducing those features. So I'd still suspect that some other software edited your files to introduce the unwanted formatting.

[jhecht]

Martin -
Weirdly, I just found the black on black page on my laptop, which I had not checked because it first showed up on my desktop. I am attaching a version that is was hosted on my iCloud account, which I was using so I could work on the same file from a room cooler than my attic office was over the weekend. I also copied it to the desktop on my laptop, so it won't get messed up by other things done on my desktop to the iCloud version.

It's still a mystery how the file got changed to this form. It was written black on white, which a some notes highlighted in yellow. Over the weekend I was using the laptop to make digital copies of old reel to reel tapes with Audacity, so it's possible I clicked on something while this file was in Nisus Express.

These are working notes that include copyrighted material I was using as references, so please don't leave the whole file posted openly, although you could leave a screenshot of a partial page.

Thanks,
Jeff

[martin]

I just downloaded your file Jeff– thank you! I deleted it from these forums immediately. Anything you post here is public for the whole world to see, so it's not a good idea to submit sensitive documents. If you need to send us private materials please use the menu Help > Send Feedback or a direct email:


I'll post tomorrow morning when I'm back to working, after I've had a chance to review your file.

[martin]

I just emailed you back directly, but I'll post my reply here too, in case anyone else is curious or encounters this problem:

I've taken a look at your file and I see nothing abnormal about it. The black borders/boxes simply don't show over here on my Mac. I also see no evidence of any page or paragraph border formatting.

The document content was also last saved by Nisus Writer. If other apps or software did intervene then any evidence of that must have been wiped out, i.e. by resaving the file in Nisus Writer.

So, your experience is unfortunately a complete mystery to me.

For now I think the best we can do is to monitor the problem and be ready the next time it occurs. If you see the problem again, please immediately close the problematic document (i.e. without editing or saving it in Nisus Writer again), zip the file, and send it to us for inspection. Thanks!

[jhecht]

The fact that you can't see the black-on-black effect I see on my laptop (MacBookAir), and I can't see it on my desktop (MacMini) tell me that there must be some differences between the machines. (I have not intentionally done anything to change "Appearance" settings, and don't have time to compare those on the two machines side by side at the moment to see what differences might exist.) But I want to ask a few other questions first.

Did you see the black on black effect in the screen shots I attached?

Did you try opening the files on a Mac running NW Express 4.2.1 (which was on the MacBook Air laptop that shows the effect to me) and Mojave 10.14.6, which is on both my Macs? My Desktop MacMini is running NWPro 3.2.1.

Could differences in the fonts installed on the two machines cause such a distance?

I copied text from other documents (some of them PDFs) into the original Nisus Writer document? Could that have caused the problem? I highlighted most or all of the copied text, and only the highlighted text avoided the black on black effect.

Thanks,
Jeff

[martin]

You don't have to compare all your settings Jeff. You'll only need to check this on the problematic Mac:

1. Open Nisus Writer's Appearance preferences.
2. At the bottom under "Colors" select the "Document Views" category.
3. Check the colors for "Draft background" and "Page color" to verify that they are not black.

We do have separate color settings for Dark and Light modes, so please verify whichever modes you use.

[jhecht]

I am attaching screenshots that show what I saw. The PNG version of the Mini screenshot would not load because it was too large, so I converted it to JPG format.

Neither machine has a preference for Dark modes, which I do not remember using in Nisus. I think I tried it in Firefox. I do use an app called f.lux to dim my desktop screen at night, because I find bright screens hard to read.

When I followed your instructions I found both Draft Background and Page color show white rectangles, as shown for draft background on both.

Am I missing something or is this still a complete mystery? I'm wondering if I might have picked up something odd when I copied text from PDF files into the Nisus PDF? I tried to highlight all the copies with yellow to mark them as notes from other source. I think the black-on-black effect only affected things I had typed into Nisus, but it's hard to be sure that's how I arranged things.

Thanks for your help,
Jeff

[adryan]

G'day, Martin, Jeff et al

Could transparency (especially in the case of PNGs) have played a part somewhere in the sequence of events?

Just an idea I thought I'd toss in. Feel free to toss it back out if you don't think it's of any use….

Cheers,
Adrian

[Vanceone]

I too would suspect something with dark mode, somehow. I see that your appearance settings are set to mirror the system preferences. One the one hand, your menu bar is light which suggests "light" mode. On the other hand, if something is corrupted a bit with the system dark mode, maybe that is impacting Nisus in a weird way.

Try setting the "Appearance" from "use system appearance" to "Light mode". You can also try checking the "Text areas always use light mode" checkbox too, see if that has any impact.

I use Dark mode almost exclusively; but it does have disconcerting impacts: namely, Nisus is no longer WYSIWYG. Your kind of problem--where the appearance of the screen does not match the PDF or printed output -- is almost certainly a culprit of some sort of display setting, and the "dark mode" settings would appear to be the culprit, at least to me.

This might especially be the case if somehow your system is set to "auto" for dark mode, in which case the system is meant to change between light and dark mode based on time of day. If that got messed up, then the system might be changing underneath you, and Nisus is faithfully following the system settings that are reported to it.

If you turn off Nisus' following of the system settings, it might cure your issue. "Light mode" is much more WYSIWYG, so I use the "Text areas are always in Light mode" setting, even though I like the menus, etc in black.

[martin]

Your settings look to be in order Jeff. But Vanceone's suggestion to toggle some of the appearance mode options is a good one. Please let us know if explicitly choosing "Light Mode" or checkmarking "Text editing areas always use Light Mode" helps.

One other question: if you switch your problematic document to Page View, does that fix the coloring? Or does Page View have the same problem?

[jhecht]

I tried Vanceone's suggestion to try toggling the Appearance in the General group of System Preferences and it worked. Clicking on Dark turned the black type on black background to white type on black background. Clicking on Light turned it back to black type on white background. Somehow Nisus had gotten confused, but no other apps I was running on the Air laptop were confused. Once that fixed Nisus, I no longer had problem documents to try on page view.

I will add that it's very hard to tell which of Dark and Light is highlighted in General Preferences in Mojave. All that changes is a very thin, very light line that I could not see until I switched it back and forth. I may never have changed that preference on the Air laptop, so that may be why Nisus was essentially stuck between Dark and Light.

Thanks to all for your help.

[martin]

That's really bizarre. Even if light/dark mode activation was somehow broken on your Mac or Nisus Writer, I would expect it to be fully in effect or not at all. I don't know why only your background color would be wrong. I would expect you to see white text on a black background if Dark Mode were incorrectly engaged.

None of this explains the thick black borders shown in your earlier screenshots.

Well I'm glad that you found a way to fix the broken coloring. Hopefully that fix holds. If not, you might let me know if there seems to be any proximate event(s) that re-trigger the problem.