Known Issues

[ last updated: April 23, 2012 ]

Bugs we're looking into

  1. My Library comment count doesn't reflect private reply comments. The My Library page is supposed to show the total number of comments there are on a document, but some of those comments may be private replies that you won't be able to see when you load the document. For most documents there aren't any (let alone many) private comments, so this is a low priority item for us at present.

Limitations

  1. RARE: Problems processing some Microsoft Word documents. 99+% of the time Word documents upload fine. Unfortunately, some documents fail to upload. There are two basic causes:

    1. There was a temporary glitch in our system; if you re-run the document it may be fine the second (or third) time. We haven't yet figured out what causes these glitches.
    2. Some documents can have basic encoding problems that keep NowComment from rendering them properly. If you try to upload a Word document 2-3 times and that document won't upload and another document, especially one from another source, will upload then you've probably encountered one of those rare encoding problems. If so, try editing the document to remove things like odd page layouts, unusual field codes, rare fonts, outline or master document formatting, and other aspects that aren't very important for online discussion and try uploading the revised document.

  2. Document Sharing and Group invitations. For now you have to add one person's email at a time (i.e. you can't copy-and-paste a list of addresses separated by commas in at this time). Note — once you create a Group you can share documents with everyone in the Group in one easy step by sharing with the Group rather than with individuals.

  3. "Unresponsive Script" errors. If your machine has a heavy processing load (or is just old and slow :->), or if you're using an older browser which executes JavaScript slowly, you may get an error message along the lines of "There is an unresponsive script...". You should click "Continue" to give the script more time to execute and all should be well. Upgrading to the newest version of your browser (see below) often makes these go away completely.

Browser Issues

  • Don't use one browser for copying and a different browser for pasting web content when creating a new document to upload. Odd problems can arise if, for example, you paste HTML content copied from a Safari window into a Chrome window. [See also next tip below re: Firefox].

  • Firefox doesn't copy rich text formatting. Use a browser other than Firefox to copy-and-paste HTML content from other websites when creating new NowComment documents; Firefox's default security settings are overly-aggressive and drop rich text formatting.

  • Newer versions of browsers generally work better. For both security and performance it's a good idea to upgrade to the newest version of your browser, but here are a few old versions we strongly suggest you upgrade from:
    1. Early version of Internet Explorer (IE 6 and earlier in particular) are notoriously buggy and problematic; you won't regret upgrading to a new version! Even the newer versions sometimes have trouble with features that all other browsers handle fine.
    2. There are some JavaScript bugs with Apple's OS X 10.4

  • Different browser handle Adobe Flash differently. Chrome, for example, integrates its own version of Flash, not necessarily the latest version. These differences can cause minor differences in browser behavior. For example, newer versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer don't play embedded videos on pages you land on unless you click the play button; other browsers begin playing the embedded video right away.

General Quirks

Unwanted white space between lines — NowComment inserts a line of white space after every carriage return. 99+% of the time this is what's desired. For the rare cases where you prefer to have lines of text together without white space between them (e.g. for lines of a mailing address, between the title and subtitle of a document) use line breaks instead of carriage returns. To insert a line break instead of a carriage return:

  • MS Word — end a line with "Shift+Enter" instead of just "Enter"
  • HTML — use <br /> instead of </p>.

Microsoft Word Quirks

  • Some types of bullet characters (squares and diamonds) show as filled-in circle bullet characters in unordered lists. Empty circles sometimes show as filled circles.
  • Ordered lists that in Word start with letters will render as starting with the corresponding numbers (1 instead of a, 2 instead of b, etc.)
  • Double underlines show as single underlines
  • An extra space is sometimes inserted when a hard hyphen is the last character immediately before a word wrap
  • There are some cases where single quote marks and double quote marks nested inside each other can lead to an extra space character at the end of the sentence (and the final punctuation mark connected to the following sentence. This too is a fairly unusual case.