Re: [libreoffice-users] LO corruption

Bill,

I apologise if I am about to tell you something you already know and 
have considered, but have you thought about code page errors? As I read 
your account I kept thinking how reminiscent it was of the problems I 
recently encountered where I had a particular spreadsheet that caused 
the GUI and many other things to go haywire (e.g. buttons and toolbars 
moving, column being rendered out-of-sync, ever growing lines, etc).

In the end I tracked it down to the use of the degrees sign (Alt-248 
from the keyboard or Alt+0176 from the character map on XP; It is 
flagged as U+00B0 'Degree Sign'), inserted into a spreadsheet by a 
Visual Foxpro Program using Code Page 1252, then rendered on a Linux box 
using LO. It did not matter how the symbol got into the file - imported, 
cut and past, CSV import - all hell broke loose.

If you remove the 'degrees' sign from the original file everything just 
worked. Insert the symbol, the problem appears again.

The aberrant characters appeared to be acting as a control character 
being randomly parsed by LO/OO causing all sorts of problems.

This may not be the problem in your instance but as I said this kept 
going through my mind as I read your thread.

Maybe it is something to consider - either the data or macros may have 
been created in an unusual codepage that is confusing LO. That is to say 
it is expecting X and being given Y, and baulking at the result.

I solved my problem by stripping all seen and unseen characters from the 
data by filtering them through text editors then reinserted in a clean 
file. This is how I noticed the degree sign changing to another character.

Cheers Simon

   Simon Cropper
   Website Administrator
   http://www.fossworkflowguides.com
   The fossWorkflow Guides
   (c) Simon Cropper CC-BY-SA 3.0 Australia
   http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/au/deed.en


On 05/08/11 11:57, Bill Gradwohl wrote:
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> About a week ago, I asked this list for help and got what I needed to
> further investigate a situation I'm having with calc.
>
> I've now determined that my problems are due to corruption of the calc
> sheet. Further, I believe its calc itself that's doing it.
>
> Case in point. My buttons were shrinking randomly, but in a somewhat
> predictable fashion. Random as in I couldn't be certain when it would
> happen, but predictable in that when it happened it was done in a
> reasonably consistent way.
>
> Using code that Andrew supplied, I dumped the shapes on each involved
> sheet expecting 4 items. The first sheet had 1524 shapes of which 1520
> had a control=null. The remaining 4 were my real buttons and were
> scattered among the debris.
>
> Common sense says I didn't manually create and somehow abandon 1520
> shapes. I had absolutely no code that tried to create or manipulate the
> buttons, so Sherlock Holmes would deduce that OO / LO did it. I only
> used the IDE to create these 4 buttons on the first sheet and then
> copied them to 20 other sheets using cut and paste within the IDE.
>
> The remaining sheets all had far lesser amounts of rubbish, but not one
> sheet had only the 4 buttons it was intended to have.
>
> I wrote code to "remove" the dead ends. It worked like a charm. I saved
> and reacquired the spreadsheet and then all the buttons were gone on all
> 21 sheets.
>
> I repeated the process several times all resulting in the same outcome.
>
> I also wrote code to reinflate my shrunken buttons to their required
> size. Again, the code worked perfectly and I traversed each sheet to
> make certain all was well. After a save and restart of LO, I get a bogus
> password error part way through loading the spreadsheet and the whole
> thing won't load. The spreadsheet is not password protected, so where
> did a password come from?
>
> On a damaged but working spreadsheet (shrunken buttons), if I move a
> sheet from one position to another, or attempt to delete a sheet, all is
> well during that session, but a save and LO reload fails, again with
> some internal bogus password error half way through the loading process.
>
> When LO was OO, I tried repeatedly to have knowledgeable people look at
> this sheet as it has developed numerous anomalies over the 6 years I've
> been developing and using it. It is a laboratory full of LO issues that
> need to be addressed as to how these things could have happened, but I
> could never get anyone's attention.
>
> I'm a professional programmer (operating system internals) and can smell
> logic errors in the application. The main line works well, but I suspect
> that bugs exist in the more obscure portions of the code base. Lets face
> it, it takes computer power to create 1520 dead end objects and I didn't
> write any such code.
>
> Every few months I suck out my 9000 lines of macro code and redevelop
> the spreadsheet shell it fits within to get rid of the accumulated
> rubbish. There are almost no "formulas" anywhere, as I just use the
> sheet as a convenient GUI. My macros do all the work.
>
> Why did I write this email? It was therapeutic for me, and I hope
> someone in LO calc development will take me up on my offer to supply and
> help debug strange occurrences as they occur.
>
> Short of that, I'm going to have to rewrite this as a web app with a
> compiled back end. It's a Point of Sale system used in my wife's
> restaurant and she needs something more reliable than the LO version.
>
> - --
> Bill Gradwohl
> Roatan, Honduras
> 504 9 899 2652
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