Text not appearing - how to investigate

[simono]

Hi - I am an application developer. Users of my app tell me that no text appears in reports displayed on-screen, when run under Wine (e.g Ubuntu 12.4 64 bit version, Wine version 1.7.4). Text appears in plenty of other places in the app - just not in reports. I initially assumed that it would be very easy to find out where the problem is, but it hasn't worked out that way. I put together a few debugging/test versions of my app to try to narrow down where the problem lies. I can, for example, confirm that the coordinates are correct by outputting a simple rectangle on-screen, and that appears where it should. But if I try outputting text into the rectangle area, using any of the normal Win32 APIs (TextOut, ExtTextOut or DrawText - even with stripped-down, 'bare minimum' options), nothing appears. The only exception to this is that if I call GetCharacterPlacement with the GCP_LIGATE option, and use the resulting GCP_RESULTS structure to position the text output, using ExtTextOut, everything comes out perfectly. But I can't use this to solve the problem generally.

The problem occurs whatever font is selected, with whatever size or colour. I use the same APIs elsewhere in the program and they work fine. So something is clearly different. I thought it might to be related to my text alignment option (TA_BASELINE), but I tried other alignments and they didn't work either. I'm guessing that it is some feature of the DC that is not supported by Wine, but I haven't found it yet. Has anyone come across anything like this? I can pursue all the obvious approaches to locating the problem, but I don't want to spend a lot of time on this and there is a lot of code involved. If anyone can suggest anything that could save me time, that would be much appreciated.

Apologies if this is posted in the wrong place. If so, please tell me where I should be posting it.

[dimesio]

You should probably file a bug for this in bugzilla and attach your testcases to it.

[simono]

Yes. The problem is that the code at present is much too large to post. I'd need to distill down what is causing the problem. Which is what I was hoping to avoid, as I don't have a lot of time right now. But it looks like that's going to be the only way.

[oiaohm]

simono

Apologies if this is posted in the wrong place. If so, please tell me where I should be posting it.

Any time you don't have a clue what to do next this is what the forum is for. So you did post in the right place.

http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#get_log Basically we could look at debug log it might be helpful. But even if it is you still need to open up a bug in bugzilla to get developers to fix it.

Particular things of interest in the debugging log will be the fixme: particular stubs. http://wine-wiki.org/index.php/Stubs_Pa ... _Explained

simono also if this is a win32 application please do try a wineprefix created with WINEARCH=win32. There are sometimes odd bugs that turn up in win64 bit prefixes alone.

Yes we do have approaches that we use on closed source programs They will most likely be larger than making a test case from a program you have source code access on. Like WINEDEBUG=+relay,+seh,+tid debuging in wine can generate many hundreds of megs of data sort out.

simono we will look over a normal log and tell you anything we see as particularly odd.

simono also 1.7.6 is out. Yes I know wine release cycle is fast.