Text formatting problems - still

[okulo]

I’ve been using GarageSale for more years than I can remember but I do remember that with the first version I had problems formatting text. Back then, support was via a Yahoo group and although I got a quick response, the problem was not resolved and I have experienced all kinds of text weirdness in every version since.

It doesn’t happen all the time and sometimes just by opening a new document and starting again the problem will go away.

The recent problems have included text not appearing at the insertion point, carriage returns not being recognised, text appearing in what looks like Times New Roman when Arial is selected, text typed or pasted in the middle of text not picking up the font, a paragraph of text disappearing when return was hit to move to the next line, in a style that has photos on the left, it is impossible to type on the right - this has happened a few times; sometimes it is even impossible to click the insertion point at the end of a paragraph already on the right - having done so and tried typing several times, I eventually found all the repeated typing stacked up under the photos.

The behaviour of text styles is very unpredictable and even when I have looked at the HTML, I cannot understand why a body of text will change font without any code. That said, I should stress that I never edited any of the HTML .

The only constants are that I have always been using a Mac but on various operating systems and models of desktop and MacBook Pro and at least in the last five years or so, I have only used one design, Carbon.

Most of the time, I just put up with it but today, I just lost a whole paragraph of typed (not pasted) text and hitting undo didn’t bring it back so I was quite annoyed.

I can see that others have posted about this in the past but because the problem seems to be erratic, it isn’t easy to reproduce but I’d have hoped that by this stage, problems like this would have been ironed out. I’ve been trying to encourage my girlfriend to use GarageSale but to be honest, it feels like I would be making a rod for my own back.

[rlmartin]

I have issues where the size will drop to the next lower size when editing a listing and sometimes it will change color. The GS team told someone else that issues with text can come from copy and paste from other sources. They recommended only typing in GS to keep from introducing problems.

[okulo]

Thanks for the reply but I have had problems when typing. The lost paragraph I mentioned which happened yesterday was from creating a new document, placing photos and typing straight into GarageSale - no copying and pasting.

That said, I am a graphic designer with about thirty years experience so text formatting is something I have been dealing with for a long time and when I first started dabbling in web design about twenty years ago, I soon realised that I had to strip away everything but the raw text to avoid unpredictable results. Thankfully, an app called Plain Clip came along and it has sat in my Dock ever since - it strips away all formatting from whatever is in the clipboard by a single click (the app never opens - it just does it) and I use it habitually whenever I copy and paste text. So, even though I have problems when typing straight into GarageSale, there should not be a problem copying and pasting raw text.