Apparent serious bug in 2.1

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rsutc
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Apparent serious bug in 2.1

Post by rsutc »

Among many other things, I create my calculus examinations in Nisus. This means many MathType equations are pasted into these documents. Pro version 2.1 does not display any of these equations; it replaces them with odd characters, or nothing at all. I have checked this out carefully, running 2.1 from both my applications partition and from the applications folder on the system partition, and on more than one machine. None of the files in question are corrupt. 2.0.7 displays them correctly with all the equations intact, but the identical file is more or less garbage in 2.1. I have tried re-upgrading a 2.0.7 file but no joy. It's the upgrade that is broken. At this point my only solution is reverting, which works, but loses me whatever goodies I didn't look for in 2.1 because editing one of my midterms was practically the first thing I tried. BTW, I am also on contract to a major publisher to write a programming text, and it has many equations in it so I really need this, or cannot use Nisus.

Also, my normal workflow for this is
- start in Scrivener
- compile to rtf
- finish in Nisus
- I will of course have to produce Latex. Is there a plan to have this available in Nisus, or should I be content with MMD from Scrivener and then convert to Latex with a separate utility without involving Nisus in the workflow?

Rick
Vanceone
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Re: Apparent serious bug in 2.1

Post by Vanceone »

Latex itself is not available in Nisus. But never fear, I think I found a solution for you. Nisus, the company, wrote a wonderful feature called "Linkback" that a few applications have adopted. One of those applications is called "LatexIt", which so happens to be a Latex Equation editor. Here's the link.

It links closely with Nisus. I've not explored it extensively, but you can write your equation in Latex in LatexIt, have it process it, copy, and just paste into Nisus. Any changes you make to your equation from that point on automatically flow into Nisus.

you can also, using the services menu when you right-click on an equation in Nisus, get LatexIt to automatically typeset it for you.

I hope this helps.
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martin
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Re: Apparent serious bug in 2.1

Post by martin »

Hello Rick,

I’m sorry you had trouble with your MathType equations in the recently released version of Nisus Writer Pro (NWP). I can confirm the problem, and can offer you an explanation and potential solution.

The problem is that your equations images are in the old Mac PICT image format. This format has been deprecated by Apple for some time. Unfortunately a recent bug in OSX will cause PICT images to appear incorrectly for 64-bit apps. Now that NWP 2.1 is 64-bit, it is affected by the problem. We’ve reported it to Apple, but I fear it will never be fixed, since PICT is considered a legacy technology.

The good news is that recent versions of MathType have been updated to switch away from PICT images. I’m not sure when the change occurred, but recent versions now produce PDF images, which are not affected by this bug. The way to fix your files is to open the old PICT image in MathType and then reinsert them into your NWP document as PDF images.

I hope that helps. Please let me know if you have any more troubles or questions.
Vanceone
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Re: Apparent serious bug in 2.1

Post by Vanceone »

Martin, since I was just playing with Linkback, is there a bug in Nisus where double clicking on a link back enabled piece of content is not launching the original app? I've tried with OmniGraffle and LatexIt and I cannot edit the original in the original app. LatexIt passes it's changes through, but OmniGraffle is not cooperating (plus i cannot paste text from Nisus into it and it be recognized as Linkback; not sure if that is Nisus or Omni there)
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martin
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Re: Apparent serious bug in 2.1

Post by martin »

Vanceone wrote:Martin, since I was just playing with Linkback, is there a bug in Nisus where double clicking on a link back enabled piece of content is not launching the original app? I've tried with OmniGraffle and LatexIt and I cannot edit the original in the original app. LatexIt passes it's changes through, but OmniGraffle is not cooperating
Which version of OmniGraffle are you using exactly? Also, is it from the Mac App Store or direct?
(plus i cannot paste text from Nisus into it and it be recognized as Linkback; not sure if that is Nisus or Omni there)
NWP is not a LinkBack provider. Any text you copy from NWP is not LinkBack enabled and will not be updated automatically. I'd file a feature request, but I'm not sure it makes too much sense, since I assume you're copying arbitrary chunks from within a single document. How would that get tracked? I suppose NWP could add a bookmark or something to the original text in the document, but it's the kind of thing that could easily go missing (or spread, or be truncated) during editing if the user wasn't clear on the situation.
Vanceone
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Re: Apparent serious bug in 2.1

Post by Vanceone »

I'm using Omnigraffle 6, direct (not from the app store). Linkback itself seems to work in Omnigraffle; other things update.

Didn't know that about Nisus not being a link back provider. Makes sense; but maybe a field code like for an index entry could work too. A coloration of text that is link backed.

I would assume that most situations where you are taking text and linking it into another app would be all the text in the document.
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martin
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Re: Apparent serious bug in 2.1

Post by martin »

Vanceone wrote:I'm using Omnigraffle 6, direct (not from the app store). Linkback itself seems to work in Omnigraffle; other things update.
Hrm, I just gave it a try in OmniGraffle 6.1.4 direct and it worked just fine. Here's what I did:
1. New OmniGraffle document.
2. Made some shapes and text boxes.
3. Select All and then Copy.
4. Switch to NWP and Paste. An inline image was inserted showing all the copied OmniGraffle content.
5. Returned to OmniGraffle, closed the original document and discarded it.
6. Returned to NWP and double-clicked the inserted image.
7. OmniGraffle was automatically activated and a new document with the content was opened, with a title that indicated LinkBack was active.
8. I edited the shapes and text in OmniGraffle.
9. I switched back to NWP and the inline image had automatically updated itself to take into account all the changes I made in step 8.

I also have no trouble if OmniGraffle is not running when I double-click the inserted image. OmniGraffle is launched automatically as needed. Can you please be more specific as to what you tried and what failed exactly?
Didn't know that about Nisus not being a link back provider. Makes sense; but maybe a field code like for an index entry could work too. A coloration of text that is link backed.

I would assume that most situations where you are taking text and linking it into another app would be all the text in the document.
I think you're right that in most situations the whole NWP document would be LinkBack'd. It's an interesting idea, and possibly something we could implement, though I haven't seen any other requests for it. I wonder if there are even any LinkBack enabled applications that support hosting LinkBack text content in that way? I suppose NWP could be the first.
rsutc
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Re: Apparent serious bug in 2.1

Post by rsutc »

The good news is that recent versions of MathType have been updated to switch away from PICT images. I’m not sure when the change occurred, but recent versions now produce PDF images, which are not affected by this bug. The way to fix your files is to open the old PICT image in MathType and then reinsert them into your NWP document as PDF images.
On the contrary, this is very bad, no extremely bad news indeed. I have hundreds of files with such images, and in many cases a file may contain thirty to sixty equations. Given what you say, I need a program to batch convert the images in those files. Re-doing thousands of them image by image is simply not a solution. Are they stored in a manner that, say, GraphicConverter can grab the whole collection and transform them? Have you got a utility that can go through a Nisus document and do the conversion? There has to be a better way than what you describe.

Rick
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phspaelti
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Re: Apparent serious bug in 2.1

Post by phspaelti »

rsutc wrote:On the contrary, this is very bad, no extremely bad news indeed. I have hundreds of files with such images, and in many cases a file may contain thirty to sixty equations. Given what you say, I need a program to batch convert the images in those files. Re-doing thousands of them image by image is simply not a solution. Are they stored in a manner that, say, GraphicConverter can grab the whole collection and transform them? Have you got a utility that can go through a Nisus document and do the conversion? There has to be a better way than what you describe.
I am pretty sure it should be possible to write a macro to help with this conversion, either by selecting them one at a time and passing them to Graphic Converter (for smaller amounts), or to save them all to a folder, and then replacing them with the converted ones after they have been batch converted. If you need any help on how to do this let me know. If you want to post a small sample file here, I could take a look.

Sorry for your troubles. I have to say, that math formulas are unfortunately a week-spot for Nisus.
philip
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martin
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Re: Apparent serious bug in 2.1

Post by martin »

rsutc wrote:Are they stored in a manner that, say, GraphicConverter can grab the whole collection and transform them?
GraphicConverter will not help, not unless it's an older 32-bit version. The PICT rendering bug is in OSX itself, so all 64-bit apps are affected, including GraphicConverter. I also tried Apple's command line "sips" tool, but it failed to even process the PICTs.

Any solid solution will probably need to involve MathType, since it can read the raw equation information from comments/metadata stored in the PICTs; it does not rely on the PICT image itself. That is how it can reliably extract the original equation and re-save it using a modern/viable image format.
rsutc
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Re: Apparent serious bug in 2.1

Post by rsutc »

OK, I have uploaded a typical file.

I have looked into this some more, and discovered the following:
The version of Math Type I have is capable of reading the PICT files when I double clock on them in Nisus, of saving them as PDF, and then one can copy and paste into Nisus as the now PDF. So it is possible to do, but as you can see in the attached partial file, completely impractical, as almost every question has an equation.
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Math124M1Spring2013P.rtf
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rsutc
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Re: Apparent serious bug in 2.1

Post by rsutc »

I should add that I can obviously install an older version of Graphic Converter, but I'm not sure I can get it to read the equations from a Nisus file--tucked away in a resource fork no doubt.
Rick
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