Text Box tool - part of the text disappears upon editing

[october sun]

I have been experiencing this off and on:
- I create a text box
- I write text in the text box
- I edit the text.
- sometimes when I go back to edit, when I double-click into the box, a portion of the box background along with the text in that area is not visible but I see the page behind.
- when I go out of the text box, all appears again
- from this point on, I cannot see the given portion of the text box while in edit mode.
- occasionally, the area of invisibility will increase
- the area of invisibility is sometimes on the bottom, sometimes on the right, and sometimes both bottom and right.

- Jeremy

[David.P]

I can confirm that I've seen this issue as well. While the text in the text box is invisible, it still can be edited.

It feels as if it was a something like a memory leak, because after a restart of PDF-XChange Editor the effect usually disappears.

Regards
David

[Will - Tracker Supp]

Hi guys,

We're aware of the issue, but it's quite hard to troubleshoot because it goes away as soon as the Editor is restarted. If possible, if anyone has this issue, please leave the Editor running in that state and contact us at support@pdf-xchange.com directly. I've asked the devs for confirmation, but I suspect that we'll need a remote session on affected PC, which cannot be setup here on the forums.

Thanks,

[David.P]

Thanks for the information Will,

maybe something like a memory dump (or other diagnostic function) could be included in the help menu of PDF-XChange Editor in order for the developers to be able to see what actually happened on the end-user's computer, in cases like the one on hand?

Cheers
David

[Will - Tracker Supp]

Hi David,

It's definitely not a memory leak - memory leaks are a very specific thing; when an application suffers a memory leak, it's because they do not correctly deallocate memory and the system RAM usage will continue to climb until no more RAM is available for use.

I believe that this is related to the TMP folder, as another potential solution (if/when restarting doesn't help) is to clear the %temp% folder (the '%' symbols denote an environment variable in Windows). However, quite what that issue is, is beyond me and would definitely require one of the devs.

Cheers,

[David.P]

Thanks for the explanation Will, I will keep that in mind when the issue reappears.

Cheers
David

[Will - Tracker Supp]

[David.P]

It just happened to me again, see screenshot:


The text box can be moved, rotated or copied to another page and even to another freshly opened document and keeps its strange behavior (note that the cutout does not rotate):


I can even close and re-open the file, and the text box is still broken. Also, any other text box that is added afterwards also has a cutout...

I'm afraid that, being at work, I can't grant access via remote session. I will, if the issue happens to me at home. However, I attach the file where I copied the broken text box to (corresponding to the second screenshot).

Below is a screenshot of PDF-XChange Editor's current temp files. I can't seem to make a copy of the files because they are protected.


Cheers
David

[Will - Tracker Supp]

Hi David,

Thanks for all that - I see the annotations in the document you sent just fine, as I suspected I would. It doesn't actually 'hurt' the annotation, it just messes with the display of the annotation. Sending the *.tmp files wouldn't actually help, as it's not their content, it's simply the amount of them present. You can either delete the *.tmp files in the PDFXEdit folder (you will need to close the Editor for this), or simply clean the temp folder:
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/softw ... s-3273110/
**The process is the same for Win 8, 8.1, 10

To be honest, it's good practice to do this regularly anyway, as it can slow down the entire system when this gets full. That's just a friendly tip and is not to say that "well you should be cleaning this out, so it's not our problem" - I don't mean that at all, as this definitely shouldn't be happening and I'm confident that we can fix it, we just need to identify it.

Cheers,

[David.P]

Thanks Will, yes I clean out my temp files regularly.

My take on this is that it could be some kind of graphics bug, similar to the recent highlight search results bug. Anyway, I'll keep an eye on it.

Cheers
David

[Will - Tracker Supp]

Thanks David

For any others watching this topic, please do let us know if and when you're suffering the same problem, as we're keen to see this resolved once and for all.

Thanks,

[David.P]

Hi all,

the problem can also happen to Callout boxes, as can be seen from below screenshots. The screenshots are made during dragging of the Callout box with the mouse.

Again I think this is a graphics subsystem issue. As can be seen, not only are there parts of the Callout boxes missing, the dragging copies of the Callout boxes also overlap each other, and parts of the content of the background copy shines through to the holes of the foreground copy of the box.



By the way, the white areas that overlap the Callout boxes during dragging are zoom invariant as can be seen from the next two screenshots. In other words, these white areas are the same form and size (inside the viewport of the document pane) no matter what zoom the document is viewed. The white areas therefore are sort of "frozen" to the viewport.



Once they appear, the white, or blank areas are also "document invariant", i.e. if you open a new document, this document will have the same blank areas. Further, the blank areas also appear on every page of every document. The following screenshot shows the entire viewport of the document pane while dragging a giant Callout box in order to see all of these "blank areas".

Regards
David

[Will - Tracker Supp]

Hi David,

That actually looks a little different than I was thinking. The developers have said that they're trying to reproduce this, but haven't been able to yet. They've also said that a remote session won't help here, so we're pretty limited in our ability to troubleshoot. Are you able to indentify any potential steps to reproduce the problem?

Thanks,

[David.P]

Hi Will,

all I can say that it began this morning shortly after booting and starting to work on a 400-pages scan-based and OCR'ed PDF with lots of comments, internal hyperlinks and bookmarks.

If I start a parallel session with PDF-XChange Editor Portable without shutting down the main PDF-XChange Editor session, there is no sign of that issue in the portable session.

I will keep an eye on the issue and come back with any eventual additional information.

Cheers
David
---
PS: Ah! I just have added a (large) comment text box to that document and have "wiped" the complete page with it -- and now the issue with the Callout box (i.e. the blank areas) is gone as well!