Trouble with large author or institution field contents

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smarcopolo
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Joined: Mon Jul 29, 2019 9:30 am

Trouble with large author or institution field contents

Post by smarcopolo »

I have recently stumbled upon an anomaly that repeatedly caused crashes of Bookends 14.1.6 running on macOS Ventura 13.1. Posting this in case anyone else has come upon the same problem.

If the right display panel was closed, there was no problem. If the right panel was open when selecting a reference with a particularly large number of authors or institutions (DOI 10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.011102) Bookends would immediately close. Apparently the same problem has been reported when the contents of the Notes field are especially large.

Bookends 14.1.7 provides a workaround that prevents the crashes. Thank you to Jon for addressing this issue within a few hours on a Saturday afternoon! Remarkably responsive support!

The problem is apparently related to an Apple API used for the editable fields in the right display panel. It is less problematic if the right panel is wide, and did not occur if I used the center button of the display panel to display only Notes without all of the other bibliographic information about the reference. In 14.1.7 while editing the Notes field under the Main button the right panel would sometime blank. Selecting another reference and returning to the Notes field restored the display and allowed continuation of editing in the Notes field.
Jon
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Re: Trouble with large author or institution field contents

Post by Jon »

This is a cosmetic issue when editing reference fields that are enormously tall. It's due to a bug in the Apple APIs that calculate field bounds, and is most evident when the edit pane is very narrow. In the next update we'll mitigate this by limiting edit field heights. They will still be able to be quite tall, but not unlimited in height. And all content will of course be available via scrolling.

Jon
Sonny Software
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