Known Issues - Curl RTE 3.0.10

Contents

GUI and Graphics

Underline on trademark symbol on Linux

If an underline style is applied to a trademark symbol, the underline position may be offset relative to adjacent characters on certain Linux systems.

Letters in italics sometimes clipped

Any character has one bounding box that is appropriate for text layout and possibly a different bounding box that is appropriate for drawing. The Curl RTE uses the layout box in both cases. As a result, the first or last character in a line can sometimes be clipped slightly. The same effect is at times seen in most web browsers.

XP and ATI 3d Rage PRo card shows graphics scrambling

In rare cases graphics output may be garbled. This has for example been observed with the ATI 3d Rage Pro card under Windows XP. These problems can often be fixed by installing the latest drivers from the manufacturers web site.

Note on Language Support

The only languages fully supported and tested by the Curl RTE are U.S. English and Japanese. Most languages that read from left to right can be displayed and entered in a control in a Curl applet provided that the appropriate font is requested and is available on the system where the applet is running.

Tabbed Browsing

Issues with tabbed browsing in Firefox and IE 7

Tabbed browsing has issues viewing Curl applications in Firefox and IE 7. Specific issues include:

• If an applet opens a View, that View remains visible when the user switches to another tab, even though the Curl applet itself is no longer visible (it is covered by the content of the other tab).
• Closing a tab containing a Curl applet suspends the applet. However, that applet is not killed, and its resources are not entirely reclaimed, until the browser window itself is closed.
• The title in the browser window of a Curl applet disappears when a new tab is opened in Firefox.

Workaround: None. The browsers did not add support for notifying plugins when the user switches tabs.

Installer

Installer does not correctly detect DirectX version

The Surge® RTE requires Microsoft DirectX version 7.0 or later to properly implement the graphics APIs. The Surge RTE installer detects the installed version of DirectX. If it does not meet the minimum requirements, the user is advised to install the most recent version of DirectX and is directed to the Microsoft web site.

Curl, Inc. is aware of reports that on some machines running Microsoft Windows 98SE the Surge RTE installer fails to report an insufficiently modern version of DirectX. Our installer follows the Microsoft guidelines for detecting the correct version of DirectX, and to date we have been unable to reproduce this problem in our testing labs. Nevertheless, the workaround is simple: install the most recent version of DirectX before installing the Surge RTE.

Remedy: Install the most recent version of DirectX before installing the Surge RTE.

Must log out and log in again to see Linux start menu items

After installing the Surge RTE or the Surge Lab IDE on Linux, the Start Menu items for these products may not be visible.

Remedy: Log out and then log back in following the install.

Linux

Linux browser menu behavior when viewing applets (for release notes)

On Linux, certain web browser menus are disabled or nonfunctional when viewing Curl applets.

Mozilla: The "find" menu is not connected to Surge and does not cause anything to happen.

Epiphany: The "find" menu is not connected to Surge and does not cause anything to happen. Selecting "print" causes Epiphany to pop up a printer dialog; when you close it, Surge pops up its own dialog.

Konquerer: Quite a few menu items like "find", "print", etc., become disabled when viewing a curl applet.

Curl RTE on Fedora Core 3 over SSH

Recent versions of OpenSSH uses untrusted X11 cookies by default. This means you may experience errors when running Curl over SSH on Linux on Fedora Core 3. The earlier behaviour can be restored by setting ForwardX11Trusted yes in ssh_config. See the OpenSSH FAQ.

Keyboard Focus in Mozilla Address Bar under Linux

If you are running a Curl applet using Mozilla on Linux, you may find that once the keyboard focus has been given to a Curl applet it is difficult to get it back to the browser address bar. This appears to be a bug in some versions of Mozilla.

Using Mozilla under Linux, Applets may not Resize

If you are running a Curl applet in Mozilla on Linux, you may find that if you resize the browser window, the applet does not resize. This appears to be a bug in certain versions of Mozilla.

A workaround is to reload the applet when you have finished adjusting the window size.

Our Mozilla lacks Japanese resources

The Surge RTE on Linux will use a copy of the Mozilla browser which is included with the Surge RTE, when it needs to spawn a web-browser, if it can't find a suitable web-browser already installed on the machine. This copy of Mozilla only includes English resources, reguardless of what language the user might use.

Konqueror doesn't automatically notice new plugins

Each Surge user needs to manually invoke (by pressing the button) the Konqueror "Scan for new plugins" operation to force Konqueror to find the Surge plugin after Surge is installed. Otherwise, Konqueror does not find the Surge plugin and does not correctly display Curl applets.

Our installer is putting the plugin libraries in the right location. However, additions or removals of plugins are only noticed when a scan is done, either initiated by hand, or (on KDE) by "Scan for new plugin at KDE start up", which works as described. Note that it says KDE start up, not Konquerer start up.

Konqueror browser has issues running Surge plugin

Surge does not work correctly running under the Konqueror browser, due to the failure of the Konqueror executable to call "NPP_Destroy()" at the proper times. The effect is that reloading an applet creates a new instance rather than replacing the former instance. Eventually, a large number of Surge processes is created leading to an exception. The only workaround until Konqueror fixes their code is to shut down the Konqueror browser from time to time to clear out all Surge processes associated with that browser.

On Linux, Surge doesn't copy over Firefox profiles so user settings will be ignored

Surge RTE on Linux uses Mozilla based libraries to handle http: and https: URLs, and makes copies of the user's most recently used Mozilla profile to get various settings like Proxy servers to be used and client side certificates to use. However the Surge RTE does not copy over Firefox profiles, so Firefox users would need to run Mozilla to make changes to settings that would be seen by the Surge RTE.

Microsoft Internet Explorer

IE can get a hung applet when trying to run html source as curl

When running Internet Explorer on Windows, if a non-Curl file has a .curl extension, the page may hang. IE respects the file extension of .curl over the MIME type, so the page is sent to the Surge plugin. Surge is unequipped to handle, e.g., text/html or other non-Curl pages / MIME types.

Workaround: Do not use the .curl file extension unless the file really contains Curl content.

Embedded curl fails to print on IE 5.0

Microsoft® Internet Explorer version 5.0 will not print Curl applets that are embedded in a Web page.

To solve this problem, upgrade your version of Microsoft® Internet Explorer. Download the latest version from the Microsoft Web site.

.curl links that open in IE fail with anchors

A link from a Curl applet to another Curl applet via a file URL that contains an anchor string will not behave properly in Microsoft Internet Explorer.

An example of this type of link is:

{link {url "file:///c:/my-directory/document.curl#destination"} Click here!}

Internet Explorer will link to "document.curl" but will not scroll to the anchor, "#destination".

Security warning when starting surge on Vista with IE 7 in protected mode

If you install the Curl RTE or Curl Lab on Microsoft's Vista with the process ieuser.exe running, when you try to load a Curl applet, you will get a security warning indicating that:

"A website wants to open web content using this program on your computer...."

To workaround this problem, you can:

• make sure that ieuser.exe is not running when you install the Curl RTE, or,
• reboot after installing the Curl RTE

ctrl+N and ctrl+T commands are doubled in Firefox

Some acclerator commands in Firefox are executed twice when a Curl applet is loaded, for example, using ctrl+T, ctrl+N and ctrl+H for New Tab, New Window, History.

Changing security level in IE 7 with curl applet loaded causes IE 7 to crash

If you change the system security level in Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 with a Curl applet loaded in IE 7, IE 7 will crash.

Mixed Locales

Fonts

There are three font aliases in Surge. These are "serif", "sans-serif" and "monospace". The RTE uses the working locale to map these font aliases to a particular font family name.

If an attempt is made to display Japanese string when the working locale is English the alias could resolve to a font that does not contain the Japanese characters. Such characters will render incorrectly, usually as a small rectangle. This will only occur if the host locale is "ja" and the working locale is "en".

OCC

curl://occ always opens in default browser

On Windows, OCC applets ("curl://occ/...") open in the default browser even when the Url is entered in the address field of a browser which is not the default.

Simultaneous "occ-install-or-update"

Only one OCC applet can be installed or updated at a time. If the user browses to a second OCC applet while the first is installing or updating, the second (and any subsequent OCC install or update) will fail until the first OCC applet install or update completes. The user will have to reload the page of the second OCC applet.

The 'occ-install-or-update" command returns a four state status code, In the situation above, the third state ("allowed?") will be false, as described in the documentation of "occ-install-or-update". The applet can be designed to detect this situation if desired, and display a dialog, show a message or try again after waiting a few seconds.

The user only has to "reload" if the "occ-install-or-update" needs to be done, and the applet handled the "failure" above by doing nothing. The applet could, for example, have a button that can be pressed to reattempt the update.

W98: one minute pause before disconnected occ loading

On Windows 98 the Surge® RTE may take 60 seconds to recognize that it is disconnected from the network before loading the local copy of an OCC applet.

The Surge RTE, when attempting to load an OCC (Occasionally Connected Computing) applet, first checks to determine whether the client PC can reach the server that hosts the applet over the network. If it cannot, it transparently loads a local copy of the applet instead. On Windows 98, the check to determine whether the client PC has network access to the server hosting the applet takes 60 seconds to fail. On other versions of Windows, the check takes a few seconds.

The only known workaround is to use Windows XP or Windows 2000 as the client operating system.

Operational Issues

Crash when 127.0.0.1 is denied

Do not deny connections to ip address 127.0.0.1 in your firewall. The Surge RTE and Surge Lab IDE rely on this loopback address for internal purposes. These products will not function if access to ports on this address are blocked.

Network socket limits

When running Curl RTE on Microsoft Windows 98, you can run out of network sockets due to a low limit on the number of sockets in the OS. This would show up as applets not finishing loading, or as errors about running out of network resources. To fix this, using regedit, you can create a new registry entry of type String at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VxD\MSTCP\MaxConnections with a value of 256.

Sound

Driver Au8830 fails during install or shutdown on NT

If you are running the Surge software platform on the Windows NT, you may encounter the following error meassage: "SURGE.EXE - Cancel Timeout. The driver \Driver\Au8830 failed to complete a cancelled I/O request in the allotted time."

This indicates that you may need to update your audio driver. This information can be found at http://www.3dsoundsurge.com/drivers/Vortex2/.

If you encounter this problem after updating your audio driver, contact our support team at support@curl.com.

Audio on NT only works for "curl and nothing else" or "everything but curl"

In Windows® NT, if a sound source is playing when you start the Surge Runtime Environment, sound from applets written in the Curl content language will not play until you close the original sound source and restart the Surge runtime environment.

The Surge Control Panel

The Surge Control Panel is available by right clicking on the Surge icon in the system tray, then clicking Show Surge Control Panel. If the icon is not visible, you may raise the Control Panel via the Windows® Start menu.

Control Panel: No syntactic validity checking for hosts and directories

Privileged hostnames in the Control Panel are not validated.

There is no semantic validity checking for hostnames you enter as privileged locations in the Surge Control Panel. Also, the preceding http:// is assumed, so you should not enter it.

There is syntactic validity checking, to the extent that location names containing spaces are rejected.

Difficult to edit in trusted location of Control Panel

You cannot edit a Privileged Location in the Surge Control Panel. To change an entry, first remove it (by clicking the revoke privilege link) and then add the desired entry.