Scrolling Problems in Writer

Johnnycakes79 · Newbie Joined: 17 Oct 2007 Posts: 4

Hi there,

After an openoffice vacation of about a year I reinstalled the latest version a week ago and have been confounded by a scrolling problem in Writer which is really annoying me.

When I open a document, the cursor is by default at the top. Fine. But if I use my mouse wheel to scroll down through the document, the page jumps back to the position of the cursor.

If I move the cursor to the middle of some random page in the document and scroll (using the mouse wheel) away from that position I'm whipped back to it automatically and annoyingly.

Has anyone encountered a similar problem? Is it supposed to happen? Can someone give me a sane explanation of why such an annoyance would be programmed into an otherwise cool application.

FYI I'm running XP SP2 (I know I'm sorry) and OO 2.3.0 - thanks for any help/suggestions.

Regards,
J.

Bhikkhu Pesala · Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 4:02 am Post subject:

Yes. It is supposed to happen. Scrolling with the mouse-wheel is the same as scrolling with the scroll bar. It does not change the current edit position. To change the edit position, you must click in the document after scrolling.
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Johnnycakes79 · Newbie Joined: 17 Oct 2007 Posts: 4

Yes, I understand this but I don't want to change the current edit position I just want to be able to "review" the document by scrolling up and down ... as I can in Word ... the cursor position can and will remain the same.

I've found an old thread at : http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=35701&highlight=scrolling+jumps

Here a few people point out the same problem... but with no resolution.

Any more ideas folks?

Bhikkhu Pesala · Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 5:26 am Post subject:

I'm not able to reproduce the problem. Unless I touch hte keyboard, the view on the document does not change. If you're loading a very large document, there may be an initial delay while it is rendered for the screen. During this short period the screen refreshes. Perhaps that causes the problem, or perhaps timed autosave does. Are you selecting text while scrolling or just scrolling to view later parts of the document?

Try, Tools, Options, Load/Save, Load user specific settings with the document. That will position the cursor where it was when you closed the document. Very useful for editing. Also, try my Quickmark Macros. After setting a quickmark at any point, you can relocate the cursor quickly. It does not add a bookmark to the document.
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JohnV · Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 6:03 am Post subject:

Confirming that I don't get this behavior. If you simply lift your finger from the mouse wheel and the view changes then something is wrong.

OOo2.3 under W2K & Win98.

huwg · Super User Joined: 14 Feb 2007 Posts: 892

The thread that Johnnycakes79 links back to (Minor annoyance, but...), in turn links back to OO jumping after select and mouse scroll. This is obviously a difficult problem to reproduce.

Not a likely cause, but, is it an optical mouse? I've had more than one of these go crazy and activate without being touched. Ditto laptop touchpads.

Is there an "active" element on the computer's desktop which is causing the OS to issue a redraw command?

What is Tools > Options... > OOo > View > Graphics output > Use hardware acceleration set to?

Johnnycakes79 · Newbie Joined: 17 Oct 2007 Posts: 4

Unless I'm going to the wrong place I don't have a "Graphics output > Use hardware acceleration" under "Tools > Options... > OOo > View".

Let me explain once more. If I open a new document in writer I see the top half of a page with the cursor at the start of the first line blinking away happily.

If I then using the (optical) mouse wheel scroll down to the bottom of the page within a second the page scrolls automatically to the top again. The same thing happens if I use the scroll bar at the side.

When I get a moment I'll make a screen-capture video of what happens but there's no more I can say. This is what's happening and from the thread link I've posted before others have encountered this before.

J.

huwg · Super User Joined: 14 Feb 2007 Posts: 892

Bhikkhu Pesala · Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 7:03 am Post subject:

huwg · Super User Joined: 14 Feb 2007 Posts: 892

BillP · Super User Joined: 07 Jan 2006 Posts: 2531

Johnnycakes79 · Newbie Joined: 17 Oct 2007 Posts: 4

BillP, you - my good man - are, as we say back home, a LEGEND! No more stupid-ass auto-scroll-jumping for me! Thanks a lot buddy. Send me your postal address and I'll send you a crate of Guinness!

Woohoo!
J.

tabeck · Newbie Joined: 18 Oct 2007 Posts: 3

I got the exact same issue and fixed it by deactivating the EuroOffice_Dictionary extension.
Looks like a side effect in this extension.

cyhawk · Newbie Joined: 29 Nov 2007 Posts: 4 Location: Hungary

Hi!

I'm an EuroOffice developer, and I'm writing to tell you more about this issue.

You are right that the problem was caused by EuroOffice Dictionary, and we are sorry about it. It appears, that OpenOffice.org had a bug that was exposed by EuroOffice Dictionary, and it caused this behavior. This bug probably explains the problem described in that old thread (the was no EuroOffice Dictionary at the time Smile

).

As you can see the bug was quickly fixed by OpenOffice.org developers, but unfortunately the fix will only be integrated in 2.4.

Luckily however we have recently found a workaround for the problem. In a couple of days we will release a new version that includes this workaround. We hope you will give it one more chance!

BTW I have used oooforum.org all the time while trying to find out how to do stuff in a Python extension. Thanks for the great resource!

cyhawk · Newbie Joined: 29 Nov 2007 Posts: 4 Location: Hungary

The bug has been fixed in verson 1.2.