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From: chas@gtss.UUCP (Charles Cleveland)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Setfont 1.1 to Pearl crashes Preferences
Message-ID: <117@gtss.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 20-May-87 11:51:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: gtss.117
Posted: Wed May 20 11:51:35 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 23-May-87 06:56:00 EDT
Reply-To: chas@gtss.UUCP (Charles Cleveland)
Distribution: world
Organization: Georgia Tech School of Physics
Lines: 68
Keywords: SetFont Pearl Preferences guru 1.2 bug

Hi guys and gals--
	Perhaps this is a well-known phenomenon, but not only did I not
know of it, I got bitten by it twice (Fool me once, shame on you; fool me
twice, shame on me).  Well I not only tracked it down again, I checked
it out on a (nearly) virgin copy of Workbench 1.2 without the assemblage
of PIPE:'s, morerows modified system-configurations, virtual disks,
and other garbage I usually have napping inside my machine, and which make
hunting down the source of a problem like this so much fun.  My system is
just a vanilla Amiga 1000 with Commodore's internal expansion to 512K, and
one external Commodore 3.5 drive, so at least I didn't have to worry to
much about add-ons.
	So try this experiment (comments are indented):
1) Have available a disk containing SetFont 1.1 (written with Andy Finkel's
help, sorry I can't remember the name of the other author) and a fonts
directory containing the necessary files for Pearl (namely, Pearl.font and
Pearl/8) or some other fixed width font of the same size.
    I would be interested in hearing about the results with other fonts
    whether of the same size or not, whether of fixed width or not, but I am
    trying to eliminate as many variables as possible.  If there is a later
    version of SetFont, I am unaware of it.  Perhaps the problem goes away.
1) Make a new copy of WB 1.2, boot up on it, and kill the startup-sequence
with ^D.  Use Preferences (don't worry, its OK) to select 80 characters
per line instead of 60.  Save you way out of Preferences.
    This may not be necessary, but was appropriate for the font with which I
    was testing (namely Pearl/8).
2) Reboot and kill the startup sequence again. 
3) Assign fonts: to the fonts directory on the other disk.
4) Run SetFont -->   name_of_other_disk:SetFont Pearl 8 -r
    I usually set the font in the rastport instead of the screen.  Then I
    open and close a window (which has title bar in the new font).  When the
    window closes the my original CLI window also has its title bar in the new
    font (poof!).  However this opening and closing of windows is not
    necessary to our experiment.
    If I set the font only in the screen, with 'SetFont Pearl 8 -s',
    Preferences *seems* to be OK, but I have not tested extensively.
5) Run Preferences.  Change something (perhaps unnecessary, try some
variations).  Save.  No guru?  Lucky you.  Try again.
    I think it sometimes works for a while but maybe I've got some variation
    in the way I do things.  By the way, as I think of it, I usually change
    something on the Printer page since that's what I was trying to do when
    Mr. Guru dropped by.
    Subjectively, it seemed that the inclination of the system to crash got
    worse as I tried to rerun Preferences after rebooting, modifying things
    to try to track down the problem.  There were times I couldn't even 
    Cancel my way out of Preferences without crashing.  I recopied Preferences
    and system-configuration from another disk, figuring they might be getting
    trashed, but the failures continued.  I disksalved the disk (twice).  
    I even powered off once.  Same problems.  I knew I had had the problem
    before but couldn't remember what caused it.  I had been through all this
    before--argh.  Finally I remembered, SetFont back to topaz 8 (This was
    on a disk that had just been disksalv'ed and I'm not sure if the disksalv
    was necessary.), and Preferences was well-behaved again.  Note that I ran
    SetFont twice and all was well (apparently).  So if SetFont garbaged
    things up, it ungarbaged them as well.
    Finally this morning I tried the nominal copy of WB 1.2.  The Guru I got
    this morning was
		81000009.265F48F1
    which, if I read my 1.2 includes right, is the exec error 'freeing memory
    already freed'.
    By the way, after the Preferences window closed, but before Guru time,
    I noticed this morning that my CLI window's title was back in Topaz.

	So is this a problem with SetFont, Pearl, Preferences or what?
-- 
Charles Cleveland		EDU:  chas@ss.physics.gatech.edu
Georgia Tech School of Physics	UUCP: ...!{akgua,allegra,amd,hplabs,ihnp4,
Atlanta, GA 30332			masscomp,ut-ngp,rlgvax,sb1,uf-cgrl,
					unmvax,ut-sally}!gatech!gtss!chas