XMetaL error: strManipulateSpanStyleInformation

[Penthesilea]

This error happens every day after several hours of work.
Symptoms:

• Progressive degradation of system performance
• After error occurs, rapid degradation often w/ data loss

Only resolution is using task mgr to shut down all programs and reboot.  Then my system is fine until the cycle gradually repeats itself.

This has all the symptoms of a memory leak.  Has anyone else seen this?

Thanks,
Brittany

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[ghkrause]

Which software version do you use on what kind of computer system?

I can only report that XMEE 5.1 sometimes takes 2 to 10 minutes to start on our XP and W2K PCs. Typically it starts right away.

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[Derek Read]

I've found that this error most likely will only appear when working with DITA documents, so I'm assuming that is what you are doing. This would indicate an issue with our DITA functionality and not another custom customization.

If you could let us know the following that will be very helpful:

• XMetaL Author Enterprise version from Help > About dialog: (5.5.0.219?)
• Windows version and major service pack: (XP SP3?)
• Windows language: (English?)
• Do you know if your company has modified XMetaL Author in any way, including any of the DITA functionality specifically?
• Is the error always the same? “strManipulateSpanStyleInformation”

Once I figure out what this part of our code does (the part that is raising the “strManipulateSpanStyleInformation” error) I should be able to help you narrow down what the task is that is triggering this. Ultimately what I'm looking for is information on what steps you are actually performing when this occurs so that we can try to reproduce the issue here.

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[Derek Read]

The code that might raise an error containing this “message” (not much of a message I realize) is involved primarily with pasting from MS Word into DITA documents. Do you do a lot of pasting from Word?

If you are running an older version of XMetaL Author Enterprise (earlier than 5.5) you may wish to upgrade to 5.5 to see if that helps resolve the problem.

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[Penthesilea]

Yes, we are using DITA topics.  I'm doing a lot of cutting/pasting from html files viewed in IE. 

XMetaL Author Enterprise version from Help > Version#: 5.0.10.162
Windows version and major service pack: XP SP3
Windows language: English
Do you know if your company has modified XMetaL Author in any way, including any of the DITA functionality specifically?  Yes, it has been modified to work w/ Documentum Webtop Connector.  We have also modified the XSLs if that matters.
Is the error always the same? “strManipulateSpanStyleInformation”  Yes, it is always the same error message.

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[Derek Read]

There is an old issue in the 5.0 releases that might be related to what you are seeing. That issue only  occurs when you have Internet Explorer 7 installed (you do not need to actually be using it as your browser).

We worked around this problem and released a fix in our 5.1 release. I cannot say for certain if upgrading will correct the issue, but if you do have IE7 installed and are unable to revert to IE6 (I'm assuming going back to IE6 is an unlikely option) then it would be best to upgrade to a newer version of XMetaL Author Enterprise if possible. Our current XMetaL Author Enterprise release is 5.5.

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[ScottG]

I am also getting this error message. I am using:

XMetal Author Enterprise version 5.5.0.219, recently installed
Windows 7 Enterprise,English
Internet Explorer version 8.0.7600.16385

This error doesn't seem to be affecting system performance, but it is a nuisance. It occurs after I have been copying from Word 2010 and pasting into XMetal after a couple of hours or so. Once the error message pops up, it will pop up every time I paste something from Word to XMetal. Rebooting the computer will cause the message to go away for awhile, then it inevitably returns.  I'm not certain, but it seems the error is sometimes triggered when I am pasting several times in quick succession, for example when I am running down a table  and quickly pasting the same text as I cursor down a column.

Since I am running XMetal version 5.5 and IE version 8, I was curious what the solution might be and if anyone else has been running into this problem lately.

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[Derek Read]

We have a few reports now (through XMetaL Support) reporting this but are so far unable to reproduce the problem in house so do not have a workaround for it. The issue is affecting versions 5.5 up to and including 6.0.2 (which makes sense as this part of our code is unchanged between these versions). It might affect earlier releases as well but I don't think anybody has reported that.

Unfortunately, until we can reproduce the issue here, there isn't anything I can suggest. We really do want to reproduce this (so it can be resolved) as it seems like it would be annoying to have this message popping up. However, from what I understand the transformation from Word / HTML into DITA (and subsequent paste into XMetaL) actually succeeds so this is an annoyance rather than a serious problem. Can you confirm that?

The Esc key should dismiss such dialogs (if you are looking for a way to continue to quickly paste your content). We could brute force modify the code so that it does not display this error (not actually fix the error but simply not display it as a very short term fix) but I would want to confirm that it does not seem to matter whether it is appearing or not — ie: when the error appears you seem to be getting the same results as when it is not displayed.

We are using MSXML and IE to perform one stage of the transformation of Word/HTML into DITA. Looking at our code I see that it is likely that it is this area that is failing for some people. If you could let us know which version(s) of MSXML you have installed that may be helpful in tracking down the problem. In most cases it should be listed as an entry in the “Programs and Features” list accessible via the Control Panel (this is called “Add or Remove Programs” in XP).

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