[Libreoffice-bugs] [Bug 118550] EDITING: Manage Styles Dialogue (F11) became unusable.

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=118550

--- Comment #4 from Albrecht Müller <albrecht.mueller at astrail.de> ---
(In reply to V Stuart Foote from comment #3)

> > Where does LibreOffice get this "last known working state" from? How can I
> > tell LibreOffice to restore exactly the state I saved into
> > libreoffice-profile.zip?
> 
> Good question, I've not poked at it that much. Prefer to just rebuild my
> profile and customizations, YMMV.

I hoped that I could simply restore the previous state of the profile.
Unfortunately I did not find an operation that allows me to restore the profile
from the .zip. Just unpacking the .zip will not restore registry entries. I do
not expect that LibreOffice will handle resulting inconsistencies gracefully.

Therefore I think I have to accept that I lost my profile information and have
to follow your way. Hopefully I will be able to restore some of the lost data
from the .zip.

> > For now I cannot restore the profile from the backup in the .zip-file. So I
> > cannot reproduce the problem any more.
> > 
> > After the creation of the .zip I compared its content with the user
> > directory. There were a lot of differences. Therefore I did not try to
> > simply unpack the .zip file into the user directory.
> 
> Deleting the "clean" profile, and simply unpacking the .zip of the "old"
> broken profile is the means to restore the old profile--each attempt--at
> resolving the issue with the Styles (F11) content panel in the Sidebar.  

That's exactly what I try to avoid as I fear this action may worsen the damage.
After the generation of the .zip I compared it to the original profile
directory and I think I found substantial differences. This was no surprise.
The complete information that allows to restore the state of LibreOffice may
contain registry information. The user may have redefined path information, and
there may be other information on places I do not know about.

> There is a lot of junk that builds up over time in the user profile--so your
> choice about trying to tease out what is causing the problem, or of
> rebuilding the profile and customizations.

Of course: The backup directory seems to contain many versions of the same
file. At least one of them has more than 100 versions. I was not aware
LibreOffice keeps this kind of backups - I thought it would keep just one
backup file. Unfortunately all versions got the same timestamp so I cannot
easily find out when these backups were generated. I also found a number of
.pack-files. These seem to contain some compressed content. As I do not have
any tool that's able to unpack them I cannot assess if they contain relevant
content.

> Given that it is happening on the F11 Styles panel, suggests there is a
> broken Paragraph style defined. Although I guess it could be any of
> Paragraph, Character, Frame, Page, List or new Table style defined that is
> no longer valid.

Sounds plausible. I imported styles from some other, older document. I think
the preview checkbox was activated. So the dialogue may open, tries to render
the styles, gets an uncaught exception due to some bad style and disappears.
Assuming this hypothesis is correct an easy fix would have been to find out the
location where LibreOffice stores the state of the checkbox and to turn it off.
So the dialogue would not use a bad style for rendering => no exception =>
dialogue remains on screen.

I have a fundamental problem here. LibreOffice tries to handle user profiles as
single monolithic entities in a way that might be appropriate if a user profile
affects only a few preference settings that you can easily rebuild by hand. In
fact user profiles are pretty complex things and you can invest any amount of
time into creating one: Write macros, design consistent document styles, create
autocorrect entries for hard to find UTF-8 codes, write autotext entries and
more. If you are in "Safe Mode" you may destroy all this work with a few clicks
of the mouse.

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