Unwanted diamonds...

[florrain]

Dear Don,

Thanks for your detailed message! If I understand well your explanation of diamonds, they should definitely NOT appear when I make a change in a style, or in the style set, of an open document. There is something definitely wrong there.

And diamonds cannot be disregarded. Suppose that, after some change in the styles, all the styles in my document become afflicted with diamonds (this often happens to me). Now suppose that I make some change to character style C, from the character style palette. The change will not be reflected in my document, because it no longer contains instances of style C, but only instances of style diamond-C! This kind of thing is VERY annoying.

As to the large number of styles I have, the reason is that the document I am writing is very technical and must use several different fonts and a quite a few different paragraph formats that occur repeatedly. If I create a new style B2 that is close to style B1, I want to have both style names next to each other in the long style list. And the introduction of a new style might require a rearrangement of the keyboard equivalents. Or sometimes I'll want to change the name of a particular style. Such things often happen when one is working on this sort of document.

By the way, the sample document you sent me back seemed at first not to exhibit the problems in question. God knows why! But, playing further with it, it started exhibiting the same problems again. God knows why...

I have become convinced that somehow my style sets have become corrupted. The problems I describe seem not to occur when I use Mellel's default style set. However the perspective of having to recreate my style sets from scratch is not too enticing...

I have used complex style sets in Word for fifteen years and never encountered ANY problem with Word styles. I prefer Mellel, but I may have to abandon it. Meanwhile I'll get by by reapplying my style set to my document (with "Match by style name") every time the diamonds reappear (often).

Should this problem be escalated to the Redlers?

florrain

[ozean]

I think they should definitely look into this – as I wrote, I also have a few documents that exhibit similar behaviour. And (I think) I have understood how styles, style sets, changes of styles, preservation etc. work – the diamonds appear when I have not modified any styles at all, just writing and editing text in the affected documents is enough to produce diamonds.

[donb]

I have become convinced that somehow my style sets have become corrupted. The problems I describe seem not to occur when I use Mellel's default style set. However the perspective of having to recreate my style sets from scratch is not too enticing...

This is probably not as difficult as it might seem. First of all, Mellel picks up its style information from the document you have on screen. You can ditch all your style sets (they are located in User/Library/Application Support/Mellel/Style Set folder. Mellel will simply reconstruct your file sets as you open files, using the information embedded in the files.

It does seem as if there is some corruption in your Mellel system, since I have never encountered this phenomenon before apart from your case.

It is probably a good idea to make a zipped duplicate of the entire Mellel folder in the Application Support section mentioned above. It can simply live there comfortably alongside the unzipped one. That way, if any corruption should occur in future while you are using Mellel, you can replace some or all of that folder and get back to an uncorrupted state. (Most computer users are unaware of this provision which Apple does not usually mention).

Don

[florrain]

Thank you, ozean kaj Don, for your last posts. It is indeed a good idea to conserve a spare, uncorrupted copy of my styles. I'll write to the Redlers and we'll see what they think about all this.

florrain

[petrus]

I would be very interested to hear what they say about this. I have recently encountered the same problem. I have five style sets, with no more than eight character or paragraph styles each.

[florrain]

Dear Don,

This is probably not as difficult as it might seem. First of all, Mellel picks up its style information from the document you have on screen. You can ditch all your style sets (they are located in User/Library/Application Support/Mellel/Style Set folder. Mellel will simply reconstruct your file sets as you open files, using the information embedded in the files.


I have tried this, but after I open my document and change, say a keyboard equivalent, the diamonds are back again! Aargh! I suppose the Redlers will find a solution. This might be caused some kind of very obscure bug, or oversight, in Mellel.

florrain

[euanmckay]

I get the same diamonds, and was getting frustrated reapplying styles. However, I found that when I quit and restart Mellel, they're gone. Seems to be something transient in my case.

[Flo]

Without having read this entire thread: What seems to be the exact same problem just happened to me a few days ago with my favourite style set, after using it over a year without any problems. When choosing a paragraph style, Mellel did not assign the associated character style within the style set, but created a document character style (with a diamond).

This has helped (up to now): Via the "Edit style set" dialogue, I just duplicated the seemingly "corrupt" style set. Then I switched to that duplicated style set by selecting it via the style set menu, using the option "Match by style name". I've no clue why this error occured, and I've no clue why duplicating the style set helped. But it did...

[Bensch]

Hi!

Has anyone succeeded in resolving the styles problem? I'm experiencing it, too, exactly as described here (the diamonds appear when I have not modified any styles at all, just writing and editing text in the affected documents is enough to produce diamonds and whenever I change a style in the style window, then each and every style that is used in my document appears with a diamond).

I've been using the same style set for a long time now w/o any probs...

Bensch

[Bensch]

I just renamed the same style in the same document using Mellel 2.5, 2.6.1 and 2.7b15.

Mellel 2.5: everything works like it should.
Mellel 2.6.1: all other styles used in the document (that is: not all of the styles present in the style set) appear with a diamond.
Mellel 2.7b15: the same

So I guess it's definitly a bug introduced after v2.5 (v2.6 brought new features concerning styles…) and not yet resolved in the upcoming version.

Has anyone informed the Redlers?

Bensch

[ozean]

Bensch, have you tried the fixed proposed by Flo?

This has helped (up to now): Via the "Edit style set" dialogue, I just duplicated the seemingly "corrupt" style set. Then I switched to that duplicated style set by selecting it via the style set menu, using the option "Match by style name". I've no clue why this error occured, and I've no clue why duplicating the style set helped. But it did...

I am not sure right now if I have reported this yet, but I will if I encounter this behavior again. It would be great if you could report it anyway (it is probably best to include a zipped sample document and a zipped copy of your ~/Library/Application Support/Mellel folder in your bug report mail).

[Bensch]

Yeah, I have done that, too. It definitly helps as long as I don't make changes to one of the styles. Then I changed the main font of one style, and all the styles used in the document suddenly appear with a diamond.

So I guess it's definitely something to report.

Thanks for your help!

Bensch

[Flo]

Another rare but typical instance of ‹unwanted diamonds›/‹corrupt› style sets I’d like to share. But before I do so, just let me state that Mellel’s feature so switch style sets 'matching by name' is truly great. It enables me to change the entire layout with just two clicks. I make heavy use of this, primarily working with one set for print, one for writing and another one for experimenting with the layout.

This is what I did: I just added one new paragraph style and one new character style to my ‹main› style set.
(I then associated the new character style to the new paragraph style. The new styles were created by copying an existing style and then changing the settings. Then I copied (drag and drop) these two new styles to the two other variations of this style set (all corresponding styles whithin these sets are named identically). While doing all this, 3 other documents that use this very style set were open. I also used the new styles as format for one auto-title.)

This happened when I used the new paragraph style: Mellel created a new document character style (with diamonds). After a while – literally: after a while – all styles that were somewhere used in the document appeared additionally as document styles, indicating that the text was formatted with these document styles.
(I don’t know why this happened and can’t recall what I did – not much except for closing the other three documents that were open. What I did was to associate the new paragraph style to one of the other character styles to see if this changes anything. But that did not help, and then all the unwanted document styles appeared.)

This solved the problem again: duplicating the ‹corrupt› style set and applying the new copy.

UPDATE: I just switched back to the original (seemingly ‹corrupt›) style set. But: The diamonds are gone, the problem ‹just› disappeard.