ELAN freezes when typing over

Posted by sarkipo at 2011-08-16 10:08

Hello Han, I'm running into a problem I haven't seen before: While editing annotation's content, if I type something to replace currently selected character(s), sometimes (not always) ELAN freezes permanently (need to end the javaw process and restart ELAN). It happened several times now in 4.1.1 and 4.1.2, both in Annotation mode and in Transcription mode. I can't tell for sure the exact conditions concerning particular characters etc., maybe it happens mostly with non-ASCII characters like IPA extensions, diacritics and modifiers. On some of these occasions, the javaw process kept consuming more and more memory, on others it didn't. I could send you the eaf if you need it. Thanks and best, Sasha

Re: ELAN freezes when typing over

Posted by hasloe at 2011-08-16 15:39

Hello Sasha,

Peculiar. I tried to reproduce the problem but so far I've not been able to. Is this only occurring when you have some text selected when you start typing?
It is strange and I have no explanation. You can send me the file, sure, then I'll see if I can reproduce it with that file.

-Han

Re: ELAN freezes when typing over

Posted by eric at 2011-08-17 18:36

Hi Sasha, in which operating system version does this happen and with which version of ELAN? Sounds a bit like an input method problem to me - does the problem happen exactly when you mark and then overtype text and if the marked (or the replaced/overtyped?) text contains combined characters or characters otherwise composed by typing multiple keys? If so, does it matter whether the character in question would first appear and then be modified while you press further keys, as opposed to first having to type all keys before the character appears at once? In theory, it could also be the case that some keyboard related dialog tries to interact with you but is blocked or hidden behind something else.

Note that the above are all guesses and intuitions about input methods in general, I actually have no idea whether this can be related to your specific ELAN problem. Still it could give some inspiration for approaches for testing and reproducing the issue.

Re: Re: ELAN freezes when typing over

Posted by sarkipo at 2011-08-18 19:47

eric-2011-08-17 18:36:02

Hi Sasha, in which operating system version does this happen and with which version of ELAN? Sounds a bit like an input method problem to me - does the problem happen exactly when you mark and then overtype text and if the marked (or the replaced/overtyped?) text contains combined characters or characters otherwise composed by typing multiple keys? If so, does it matter whether the character in question would first appear and then be modified while you press further keys, as opposed to first having to type all keys before the character appears at once? In theory, it could also be the case that some keyboard related dialog tries to interact with you but is blocked or hidden behind something else. Note that the above are all guesses and intuitions about input methods in general, I actually have no idea whether this can be related to your specific ELAN problem. Still it could give some inspiration for approaches for testing and reproducing the issue.

Hi Han, Hi Eric,

I've got a Panasonic laptop with Windows 7 Pro SP1 (64 bit), with ELAN 4.1.2 (first happened with 4.1.1). I'm using Keyman 6.2 to enter IPA and other characters.
It happens when I have some characters selected, perhaps usually one. Looks like it doesn't matter what I'm typing in, could be just plain ASCII. The selected characters that trigger this probably tend to be non-ASCII (the last time it happened with U+02D0 (triangular colon)), but not necessarily combined characters, often a single character. Also, it usually happens when I'm editing an annotation created earlier so it should not matter with how many keystrokes that particular character was composed.
I don't think there are any dialog boxes hidden behind, at least they do not show on Alt-Tab or when I kill Java.

One more glitch that you probably know about (probably unrelated) is that various navigation keys continue to work when you edit an annotation inline. So, for instance, if I've got an inline edit box open, Keyman keystrokes that involve Alt would also pass the focus to the menu; Shift+Space both plays the current selection and puts a space at the cursor, and so on. This is not very convenient; thus, I'm unable to use just the Space bar to start/stop playing since it works every time I'm starting a new word in the annotation.

I'll send the file to Han off-list.

Thanks for your ideas,
Sasha