Digital Workshop

Some how I have duplicated everything on a page in my publication and cannot get rid of the duplicates. When I select one of the items, its duplicate is also selected. When I delete an object, its dulicate also disappears from the object list. I can see it on the layout of the page, but it is gone from the object list.

These don't seem to be phantom objects in the list since the duplicates appear during preview and on publication, but only one set seems to work. For example, I have a button used to advance through the frames of a multi-frame object. In preview and publication, the button causes one of the multi-frames to advance while the other remains static causing weird overlays.

Any ideas how this might have happened and how to remove the offending duplicates?

Attached is a gif of the object list for the page. The duplicates seem to be the ones in the red box since they appear over the active objects in the preview.

Tom, you have the same problem as me.

It happens every now and then and initially freaked me out, but it is possible to sort it out by careful deletion of one of the objects in the duplicate pairs in the objects pannel. All functionallity returned.

Good luck!

Peter

Tom

I have been experiemcing this on and off for several years, possibly even goig back to version 281, but definitiely in version 4 ... and 5.

I can't be definite about this, but my occurrences of this seem to be related to things like copying/moving chapters or groups of pages to a different pub.

I have particularly encountered it when I've decided to break a large pub into 2+ separate pubs. If I create new but EMPTY pubs and drag, copy or move groups of pages to the new location, this almost invariably occurs.

My secret to successfully avoiding this issue (which is actually more annoying than serious) is this: Use SAVE AS to create as many copies of the pub as you think you will need. It's probably not necessary, but I usually save them to new folders.

After I rename the pub title in the Organiser and confirm that the name matches the imp file name, I DELETE all the unwanted chapters/pages, leaving me with the new pub with no unwanted duplicate objects.

I do not know why this works. My technique might not work for you, but it has consistently worked for me.

HTH

Thanks. I did somehow pick the right ones to delete and now everything is back to normal ... or as normal as it ever gets around here. Now I send the pub off to be proofed and then I am finally done with it.

I also had that with earlier versions, don't think latest did that. I solved it by re-booting more often. Maybe just superstitious but it appeared to stop any of that nonsense.

I have this problem several times with Opus Pro 5.5.

I haven't detected a pattern, or set of actions that I can associate with the actual creation of the problem, mainly because the problem appears at a later time.

For instance, I was testing a large pub that I considered final, and it suddenly started behaving irradically; features that were solid, and
worked fine, before, failed.

Since this has happened several times, I immediately serached for duplicate objects, and found several pages with objects that had been duplicated four times.

I've learned to delete the objects beginning at the bottom of the list, and it seems to work fine, after that.

I submitted an example of this problem to DW many months ago, and they acknowledged that the imp was corrupt, but they didn't have an answer, or a fix for the problem.

This is a serious problem, especially if you create large pubs. As I said, I was in the verge of releasing a large pub, and the pub failed because of the mysteriously created duplicate object. It's just not practical to spend day after day testing, and retesting a pub to ensure that the file has not been corrupted, again, with duplicate objects.

At a minimum, Opus should not be allowed to create identically-named objects on the same page; it's just not good practice. At the moment, I can manually create a duplicate simply by Duplicating, or Copy/Paste, and then Renaming the object to the same name.

It would be helpful if Opus could list duplicate objects on a page.

Steve Hawley

Hi Steve,
Welcome to the club.
I have one large pub (made with XE 5.0) that has this problem, along with other (well discussed) text input issues that seem to occur in some large pubs -- so much so that future development on it is impractical, if not impossible.
The worst thing is, I don't seem to get these problems with some pubs until I've invested a lot of development time into them.
The pub mentioned above cannot be edited reliably in XE v5.14 or v5.5.
Many hundreds of hours went into it, but at least I can use it as a prototype -- so it isn't a total loss.

I am in the process of rebuilding it from scratch in XE 5.5 -- any more similar problems and I will stop using Opus except for prototyping.

cheers
Paul

Hi Paul,

Swell....

My story is about the same as yours. I created a large pub in Presenter 4.5. I purchased Pro 5.5, and converted my pub to that version.

That was a major mistake. I'd already committed many hours to the Pro version before I discovered the shrot comings.

I considered my original pub 90% complete, but the conversion to Pro set me back several weeks. I spent many hours troubleshooting several problems; things that worked fine in Presenter, simply do not work in
Pro; that's a fact.

I intended to use this pub as a protoype for other pubs, but, I won't do that now because the software is unstable.

DW tech support did provide me with a version 5.51 that resolved one of my initial problems, but other problems, such as this 'duplicate object' issue, and a screen display problem, have been ignored.

=========

Anyway.... 'work around' seems to be the unofficial motto...

Regarding the 'duplicate object' issue... I spent some time with it today trying to duplicate the problem, but I didn't have any luck; (I think it
will be serendipitous to discover the specific cause(s)).

However, I did discover an interesting consequence of the problem, that might be helpful.

I opened a copy of my publication (with known duplicate objects).

Then I opened the Resource Manager, and Cleared all of the resources.

Then I reviewed the resources by chapter, and all the resources are properly cleared except for the pages that have the duplicate objects.

It doesn't solve any problem, but it is a simple way of to detect and correct pages that have duplicate objects.

My pub has over 500 pages, and I could locate the offendeing pages in a
matter of minutes.

Good luck...

Steve Hawley

Please be assured we are trying to pin this problem down but it is very intermittent and difficult to reproduce which makes it very difficult to find and fix the problem.

As has already been suggested it is possible to identify the ghosts and delete the spurious entries. I recommend you save regularly when doing this and also try completely resetting the computer, deleting autobackups or old backup versions.

In the meantime, our apologies for the inconvenience.

Paul Harris

Hi Paul Harris,

It's good to know that tech support is working on the problem.

When I wubmitted the problem several months ago, I was left with the impression that this probelm was just a one-time anomaly; just a 'corrupt imp'. Needless to say, I was surprised when it happened again, and that other users have had the same experience, for years, so it appears.

As a programmer, I realize how difficult it is to fix these kinds of intermittent problems. It's always helpful to know the sequence of steps that led to a failure; it is half of the battle.

Hopefully, other users can provide clues as to the circumstances, etc,
that cause this problem.

Thanks for the feedback !

Steve Hawley

Count me in as someone to whom this has happened. It just happened to me. I'll go through and delete the duplicate objects, saving after every few, and then after I have been doing that for a while, my cursor starts going flashing like crazy, and I know Opus is duplicating objects. So, I have to shut down without saving. My pub, on which I have worked 30+ hours, is ridiculously hard to work with now because the duplication of objects just keeps happening in this fashion. My backups aren't good anymore, either. They keep doing the same duplicating.

I've become very wary of doing any cutting, or pasting..... I double-check everything I do, and save my work constantly, which, obviously
negatively affects my productivity....

Hopefully, DW will be able to resolve this issue.

Do you have a large publication ? Mine is several hunderd pages; I have a feeling that this problem may not be apparent in smaller works.

Good luck,

Steve Hawley

Steve,

We do have large publications here, but if you would like to send us your publication we would be happy to try and make it go wrong.

Cd maybe the best way to send it to us if it is very large.

To test properly we would need all the resources.

Regards

Brenden Knifton

Hi,
Yes it is a large publication.It is a help cue card system, so it is mainly text. Maybe 100 pages or so at this point - it is however, a pub that will continue to grow as needs arise. It is for that reason that I am looking into other options for doing my cue cards, maybe a help authoring program. What really upsets me is that once I find a program, and spend money to buy it, I'll have to do many hours of free work getting everything changed over to the help format, because I can't charge the client - it's definitely not his fault that Opus keeps duplicating objects.

I have found copying and pasting to be a problem with Opus, in other areas. One minor yet consistent problem is when I copy a text object with a scrollbar to another page, the scrollbar on the new page is "invisible" (for lack of a better word), and I have to delete the scrollbar, then add it again. Like I said, that's minor compared to this duplication issue.

I've also pretty much given up on working with layers. Copying and pasting amongst layers and using galleries in conjunction with layers doesn't exactly work for me, either.

You know the old saying "Misery loves company"? I have never found that to be true. It doesn't make me feel better that others have the same problem. In fact, it makes me feel worse to know that others are experiencing the same frustrating and money-eating issues as I am.

Good luck to you, also; I hope things improve for you.

Mike

Hi mbain,

(Smile).... misery does love company... so does 'frustration'...

In this case, it's good to know that I'm not the only one experiencing
these problems. At least I know that it isn't my system...

There is hardly anything more frutrating than not being able to
depend on the integrity of the software.

Good luck !

Steve Hawley