Archive browser and combining marks

[whyme]

I have a set of four Word documents. Three of the four open up just fine through the Archive Browser but the fourth grinds oXygen to a halt. It's faster for me to end the task, restart oXygen, and start from scratch. After several hours I was able to determine that U+0308 COMBINING DIARESIS was causing the problem in the fourth file, but this is puzzling, since I have that character numerous times in the other three Word files, which open up quite nicely. Has anyone run into this issue before?

[adrian]

Hello,

After several hours I was able to determine that U+0308 COMBINING DIARESIS was causing the problem in the fourth file, but this is puzzling, since I have that character numerous times in the other three Word files, which open up quite nicely. Has anyone run into this issue before?

U+0308 is a combining character which triggers the Special Characters support in Oxygen, when in Text mode. When you open such a document in Oxygen (with default options) you are prompted to Enable/Disable support for bidirectional text and special characters. When this support is enabled, the performance is affected significantly. Larger documents incur a more significant performance penalty. By default this support is disabled for files larger than 300KB, but performance can be acceptable for up to 800KB. Beyond 800K performance degrades to unusable levels, so it's recommended to keep the limit in place.

If you don't see an Enable dialog when opening the document, but performance degrades, you may have enabled the support at a previous time and selected the option "Do not show the dialog again", which remembers your choice and no longer asks.
To re-enable the dialog go to Options > Preferences, Editor > Open/Save and in the section "Support for Special Characters" select "Prompt for each document". Close and reopen the document and you should see the dialog. Pick "Disable" and check if it works as expected. Combining characters will definitely look weird without this support enabled, but the performance penalty may not be worth keeping it enabled.

I would also advise to check if you have removed the limit (fail-safe mechanism) for disabling this support for documents larger than a specified size (at most 800KB).
You can verify this in Options > Preferences, Editor > Open/Save. Make sure that the option 'Disable special characters support for documents larger than (characters)' is checked. Retry opening the document. If the file is larger than the limit oXygen displays a pop-up dialog warning you about the special characters support and you can continue without it.

Regards,
Adrian