I have CD2018 on my Desktop and laptop, both running Windows 10 64 bit and up to date. Whenever I click on the Text Menu (on the menu bar) CD freezes and then closes. This happens on both PCs so I don't think it's something on my system.
Anyone?
OK, everyone. I think I solved the issue. It was a combo of Ronny's and Eskimo's suggestions that worked. I reset the workspace to default and imported each custom element one at a time and thus was able to determine it was a toolbar that was causing the crash (I don't know which one). Then I reset the menu bar as Ronny suggested and the issue disappeared. Confusing because I'd imported the menu element from the custom workspace without an issue but the crash happened after importing the toolbars, even though the issue was with the menu bar. I guess there was a connection somewhere between them that didn't agree.
It all seems to be working now. Thanks to everyone who chimed in.
Thanks for sharing the outcome, PJ. I'm glad it worked out satisfactorily for you!
A CorelDRAW workspace (*.cdws) file is a zip archive with other content inside it. One of the things in there is a workspace.xml file that keeps track of a LOT of stuff associated with the workspace.
I sorta-kinda understand a little bit of what is going on in some parts of that file. As an example, here is a section where it defines what items are present on the "View" part of the Menu Bar:
(The text in green is comments that I have added myself; not originally present in the file.)
I suspect that it might be possible that, when importing parts of a workspace, CorelDRAW isn't always able to make sure that everything is consistent, and that something in one part of that file somehow "steps on the toes" of something in another part of the file.
That is largely speculation on my part, with some anecdotal evidence to support it.
I opened the CDWS in 7-zip and you're right—there's a whole mess of stuff in there! You're like me, I think. I love poking around in that kind of stuff to figure out how things work. How did you figure out what each entry above did?
PJ said:How did you figure out what each entry above did?
I started looking at the workspace.xml file when I became frustrated trying to do something fairly simple using CorelDRAW's regular workspace customization, and it was NOT working. That had to do with the Status Bar, which is fairly important to me.
Figuring that out got me more comfortable with manually editing workspace.xml. I was interested in removing a lot of commands-I-seldom-use from some of the context menus to make them less cluttered, and found that it was easier to do that manually than through the regular workspace customization route.
The section I showed in the screenshot upthread shows a menu where I know the identify of everything, and that is sort of an exception. I only know the IDs of a modest fraction of the things in that file - usually cases where I identified the ID of a Command, Toolbar, Menu, etc. because I wanted to do something with it.
When it comes to figuring out what the GUID is for a given command, here's one way to do it by using CorelDRAW's regular workspace customization, then looking at workspace.xml.
Similarly, if one wanted to identify a Toolbar or Menu, one could use the same sort of approach using a Command for which the GUID is known.
You might imagine that, once some puzzle pieces are in place, some of the other pieces nearby are easy to figure out.
One can also access some of the GUID information using macros. I haven't written anything myself to do that, but I've used macros that others have shared, and they were useful tools for figuring some of that out.
Thanks for all the info! I may do a little experimenting as well.
I might never have gone there were it not for the trouble I was having with the drag-and-drop workspace customization of the Status Bar.
I really, REALLY like to have "Object Information" and "Object Details" on my Status Bar, in that order. On that particular day, the workspace customization was simply not working for me. CorelDRAW said that I had multiple copies of the Commands on the Status Bar, but I couldn't see any of them!
I have really come to like having shorter context menus, too. It doesn't require manual editing of workspace.xml to accomplish that, but a decent text editor makes it easier to remove the same seldom-used Command from multiple menus.
I think I might have said this before
COREL NEED TO WRITE A DEBUGGER FOR WORKSPACE FILES