Known Bugs in Gmaj

The following anomalies in Gmaj's display and behavior have been observed, but not yet resolved. Some of these are intermittent, and some may depend on your computer platform and/or version of Java.

If you experience any of these (or similar) problems, it may help to switch to a different version of Java. For example, the first bug listed below (phantom repeats) seems to have been introduced with Sun's J2SE 1.4.x series, so you may be better off with 1.3.x or 1.5.x. You can also try switching to a different vendor's implementation, but then you are on your own, as we develop and test Gmaj using Sun's official API and SDK. Currently Gmaj does not rely on any features beyond Java 1.3, in order to preserve version flexibility for our users.

Note that anomalies that depend on the Java version could be due to bugs in Java itself, but could also be bugs in Gmaj that only "matter" with certain implementations of Java. In either case, however, with further investigation it may be possible to work around the problem in future releases of Gmaj.

• Phantom repeats.  After zooming in on a small region, the "repeats" panel sometimes shows a spurious extra bar superimposed on the legitimate features across the entire width of the window, or the features may disappear entirely.

• Missing zoom box and crosshairs.  With some datasets (large ones especially) the lines for the zoom rectangle and crosshairs may not display. It still zooms OK though, if you just pretend the lines are there. Update: This appears to have been fixed in Java 1.5.

• Can't copy text from dialog messages in applet.  In applet mode, you may not be able to select and copy text from pop-up message boxes to the system clipboard for pasting elsewhere. This is apparently due to a bug in Java; hopefully Sun will fix it eventually.

• Patchy rendering of mark circle and/or red segments.  When using the Large Fonts option with Mark Color Varies, the red circle and plot segments may not appear as solid as they should. This is because Mark Color Varies is implemented using Java's XOR drawing mode, and the thick lines are built up from several thin ones, so whenever two red pixels overlap they turn white again. Fixing this will likely involve a custom implementation of Mark Color Varies that doesn't use XOR. In the meantime, switching to Mark Always Red when using Large Fonts should solve the problem (except that it will be invisible against red underlays).

• Memory leak when closing or rebuilding windows.  When windows are closed or rebuilt (e.g. when loading data via File - Open, switching to Large Fonts, or even just displaying dialog boxes), not all of the memory they were using is being reclaimed, so Gmaj will gradually run out and have to be restarted. How quickly this happens will depend on how much memory you have allocated to Java with the -Xmx switch, and the size of your dataset.

If you encounter any bugs not listed here, please report them to . It would be helpful if you can include the version of Gmaj you are using (i.e., the JarDate line from the Help - About message), your computer platform and version of Java, copies of the data files you were trying to view, and a description of exactly what you were doing when the problem occurred. This will help us to reproduce the problem so we can track it down and fix it. Non-bug suggestions and feedback are also welcome.

Thank you for using Gmaj, and helping us to make it better.