Domino Designer (and Notes Sametime) breaks in version V10, this is why and how to fix it.


There is a horrible bug in V10 (maybe V9FP10 too).

In Designer open a form, close a form and everything breaks, font changes, XPages no longer works etc.





A short video showing the error. Domino Designer V10 errors.webmDomino Designer V10 errors.webm

As a Sametime user you may see this error :


as Adam Osborne is having:

Many have not been having this error, but others are having the issues.

In search for the cause
Over the past many frustrating months I have been changing different settings, doing upgrades and downgrades, uninstalls, NICE, doing a fresh Notes install, install to different folder... to fix the issue

You name it ...I have tried it.

Then finally ....I tried a brand new Win 10 install.

By routine I installed some OpenSource software first, Greenshot, LibreOffice, 7-Zip and few others from ninite.com.

Installed Notes...issue still there. Mailed with IBM Support again, could such software have any influence? No.. was the answer.

Just in case...I wanted to make sure myself. So made a brand new Windows 10 install again and immediately installed Notes. BINGO!

It worked .... no issues!! :-)

So I started installing the OpenSource software one by one to find the cause. After installing LibreOffice 6.2 the Notes issue was back. I tried uninstallling LibreOffice...and the issue was gone again.

So clearly LibreOffice was the cause for the issue somehow...why? ..that is not very clear.

Notes have a history with LibreOffice/OpenOffice in form of the embedded office suit in version 8.5 called Symhony

Symphony was IBM's take on Office products, but was stopped and removed from the Notes Client again. IBM later donated source code to Apache and became part of OpenOffice.

LibreOffice was later forked of OpenOffice and became very popular with over 200 million users in 2018 .

Whether there are "leftovers" ...code ...in the Notes client from when Symphony was part of the client that interfer...I don't know...but it seems one place to search first for the cause

I also know LibreOffice has done some changes in regards to handling of Fonts in version 6

The Workaround

So if you have this error the first thing to try is to uninstall LibreOffice (and OpenOffice)..... this works for some ...and suddenly all problems are gone.

However if your Notes and Windows install are "not that fresh" ...uninstalling LibreOffice will no longer do the trick.

It only worked for me on the fresh Win 10 install

But uninstalling LibreOffice is only a very short term fix, the real issues needs to be fixed.

HELP ME!

All I ask you to do is put some pressure on IBM/HCL to:

- Firstly acknowledge there is this issue, "the can't reproduce it" (it is simple install LibreOffice 6.2)
- Get IBM/HCL going to find the "actual" cause, and fix it. My case at IBM is TS001932332

Until now I have been doing all the work ..IBM/HCL haven't really done anything ....but maybe stall the case

Some of my related Tweets are :
https://twitter.com/jezzper/status/1100012782265815040
https://twitter.com/jezzper/status/1098173114570235906


Posted on 04/26/2019 11:15:54 AM CEDT