Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!coherent!dplatt
From: dplatt@coherent.com (Dave Platt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: WriteNow vs. Easy Access on the Mac II
Message-ID: <1575@coherent.com>
Date: 24 Feb 88 19:11:10 GMT
Distribution: comp
Organization: Coherent Thought Inc., Palo Alto CA
Lines: 48
Keywords: WriteNow Easy Access font key scrambled

For the last few weeks, my wife has had substantial problems while
running WriteNow (version 1.07) on our Mac II system.  The problems
would begin whenever a WriteNow document exceeded about 7 pages in
length, and after she had been editing for more than about 10
minutes.  All of a sudden, whenever she hit the "i" key, WriteNow
would insert a burst of "i i i i i i i", occasionally interspersed with
square-block ("missing") characters.  When selected, the entire burst
of garbage behaved as if it were one single character.

The only way we could find around this problem was to save the document,
Quit from WriteNow, relaunch, and reopen the document.  This would
cause the problem to go away for some period of time;  it would
reappear after varying lengths of time.  The speed with which the
problem reappeared seemed to depend on the size of the document;  once
the document exceeded 25 pages, WriteNow would run for only about 5
minutes before glitching in this way.

The problem does not seem to depend on the presence of MultiFinder (it
occurs even when running under the single-task environment).  I tried
removing all of my nonstandard INITs;  the problem still occurred.

I've spoken with the folks at T/Maker several times during the past month
or so.  They suggested:

-  Running the "WN Version Installer" to add a 4-byte resource to the
   WriteNow application;  this avoids certain problems with MultiFinder
   (e.g. system crashes when WriteNow is launched under MultiFinder).
   Didn't help this problem;  installing the VERS resource did, however,
   permit a different copy of WriteNow (same version) to work under
   MultiFinder on my Mac SE at work.
      
-  Running with the screen set to two-color mode, rather than 256-color
   mode.  Didn't help.

I called them again today, described the symptom again, and was told
that the "Easy Access" INIT (part of the standard system) has been
seen to cause this exact symptom, down to the key affected ("i").

So, I'm going to try removing Easy Access from my configuration, and see
if the problem goes away.  I'll post a note in a few days and let y'all
know whether getting rid of Easy Access has fixed the problem.


-- 

Dave Platt
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