Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 and ME, as well as systems with MS Office 2000 installed, all come with version 3.0 of the "riched20.dll" library. This is the library which KeyNote uses to drive the rich text editor. Unfortunately, Microsoft introduced a lot of changes to that library between version 2 (which KeyNote normally uses) and version 3. Amid these changes, much compatibility was lost. As a result, some of KeyNote's features may not work predictably on the systems listed above.
The main problem that was noted by many users was that text formatting (e.g. font styles) were not preserved across sessions: if you saved and then reopened a file, all font formatting would be lost. Also, text formatting was lost when certain program functions were used, e.g. when
toggling the "word wrap" option, or when changing tab-related settings.
QUICK FIX:
1. Press F5 to open the Options dialog box.
2. In the tree panel, click the "Advanced" node.
3. Click the "Enable Rich Edit version 3.0 fixes" checkbox. The option should be CHECKED (enabled).
4. Click OK to close the Options dialog box.
5. Restart KeyNote or reload current file for the changes to take effect.
Note: Enabling this setting slightly decreases the efficiency of the rich text editor. Do not enable it if you do not experience the problems outlined above.
EXPLANATION and other workarounds:
I spent more than one sleepless night trying to overcome these incompatibilites. At present, there is no support for RTF 3.0 in Delphi, and even with such support I could not test the program under these conditions. Therefore, much guesswork was involved in coming up with the fixes.
To date, most of the incompatibilities have been worked around. Font styles are no longer lost after you reopen the file; nor are they lost when you toggle the WordWrap option.
To protect your file against the loss of formatting, do one of the following BEFORE you change any tab-related settings in the "Options" dialog box:
a) turn the Auto Save feature OFF (to make sure the file will not be saved automatically in the "broken" state. After you have changed the settings, reload the file.
b) close the file before changing the settings, then reopen the file.
(This procedure is no longer necessary if you have enabled the
"RichEdit 3.0 Fixes" option, as described above.)
One other possible solution is this: Microsoft prohibits software authors from distributing the riched2.dll file (and for a good reason, because each system has its own version) - but if you can find a Windows machine with a compatible riched2.dll version 2.0 (not 3.0), you can just copy it to KEYNOTE's DIRECTORY (**NOT** to the system directory!) and KeyNote will use it instead. Despite MS's ban, you should be able to find copies riched2.dll on the Internet, but because different versions have the same file name, it may be hard to figure out if any particular copy is ight for your system. But if you managed that, the whole problem would immediately go away (and other apps would still be using the 3.0 version if they need it).
Originally, there was a problem with printing from the richedit control via the page setup dialog: you'd always get two or three additional blank pages at the end of the prinout. I had no idea how to fix that and why it was happening.
There is now a "Safe print" option which you can turn on in the Options dialog, "Advanced" page. With "Safe print" OFF, the rich text is first filtered through the older version of the richedit control, which fixes the problem with surplus pages, but causes loss of certain formatting attributes which the older richedit version did not support (e.g. highlighting, paragraph spacing, the "disabled"-looking font style and a few others).
With SafePrint turned ON, the printing is done directly from the richedit control, so you get all the "advanced" formatting attributes, but the page setup dialog is simply bypassed, and all settings you make there are ignored. For now, this is the best I can do.
* When working with files from network drives, you may receive the following message while saving the .KNT file: Folder monitoring has been disabled due to the following error: Win32 error. Code: 2." The file, however, is saved correctly and no obvious error in fact occurs. If you encounter this problem, open the Options dialog box, click the "Advanced" tab, and CHECK the "Disable folder monitor" checkbox. The folder monitoring function is used to detect if another application has modified the file which is currently open in KeyNote (in such a case, KeyNote prompts you to reload the file from disk). However, folder monitoring oly works with files on the local disk, not across a network. Disabling it will eliminate the faux error message, but KeyNote will no longer be able to detect file changes.
* When KeyNote is set to remain "always on top" ("View" menu), the font selection drop-down box becomes inaccessible (disabled) on some systems. I cannot reproduce this problem on Windows 95, and I have really no idea why it happens.
* When a note uses a character set other than the system default, it may not be possible to use the Find and Replace functions, because the text in the Find and Replace dialog boxes is not displayed correctly. Since specifying te character set for the dialog boxes does NOT solve the problem, I have currently no idea what to do about this.
* It seems that if you add (or possibly move) some nodes in the tree, and then change the tree layout (from horizonal to vertical, or the other way around), then the new nodes lose their original position. This does not (seem to) affect the nodes that were created earlier.
Unfortunately, this is not something that KeyNote does on its own. The bug lies depper in the logic of the Windows control that displays the tree. In a later release, I will replace this control with another, more flexible tree - but for now I'm afraid there's not much I can do.
There is a workaround for the problem, however. I think changing the layout of the tree note isn't something that's done very often. When you want to change the layout, save the file first *and reload it*. Just close the file and reopen it, or simply select the file from the "Recent files" menu. After you have reloaded the file, change the tree layout. This way, all nodes should stay where they were. You should probably save the file at this point and reload it again, at least if you intend to make any further changes to the tree.
* On some systems you may receive an "Error code: 2" message while saving the .KNT file. (The message can also report: "Win32 Error. Code 2. The system cannot find the file specified".) The file, however, is saved correctly and no obvious error in fact occurs. If you encounter this problem, open the Options dialog box, click the "Advanced" tab, and CHECK the "Disable folder monitor" checkbox. The folder monitoring function is used to detect if another application has modified the file which is currently open in KeyNote (in such a case, KeyNote prompts you to reload the file from disk). Apparently, the folder monitoring is incompatible with some versions or configurations of Windows, and it certainly does not work across a network. Disabling it will eliminate the faux error message, but KeyNote will no longer be able to detect file changes.
* On Windows NT and Windows 2000 systems, KeyNote may crash if the "One instance only" option is checked and you try to start KeyNote more than once. This works fine on WIndows 95 and 98 systems, and since I can't reproduce the error, it won't be easy to fix. For now, please just uncheck the "One instance only" checkbox if you are running KeyNote on Windows NT or Windows 2000.
FIXED - at least, I think so. Please let me know if you experience any other problems in this regard.
* Saving the notes file clears the Undo bufer; operations cannot be undone after the file was saved (manually or automatically). This is not done by design, but it's a "feature" of the RichEdit control. At this time, I have no idea how to work aroound it.
* When exporting notes in RTF format, each note (and each node in a tree) is exported to a separate file. You cannot export (or print, or email) all notes, or all tree nodes, as a single RTF document. This may be corrected in the future - it is possible, but the required process is rather ugly.
NOTE: It is now possible to export a single tree node as a text or an RTF file. Right-click the node and select the "Export" command.
* You may receive an "Invalid pointer operation" error when shutting down KeyNote. This happens at the very last stage of closing the program too late to use the debugger, so the problem is very hard to fix. Also, this does not affect the integrity of the data file - when the error occurs, the file has already been safely saved to disk.
This problem has been fixed, as far as I am able to tell. If the error still occurs, please email me!
* There is no spell-checker. This requires much more work and time than I can spend on KeyNote.
* There is no RTF-to-HTML conversion. I'm working on it, but it's a *really* hairy issue.
* Support for printing is minimal. If you need more, export your notes to RTF files and print from another application, such as Word or WordPad.
