Weird StrongEd issue

I’m having an issue with StrongEd and a particular PDF file. The issue is that when !StrongEd is on the iconbar, this file opens in StrongEd instead of a PDF viewer. This happens even if there is a PDF viewer also on the iconbar.

It doesn’t affect the other PDF files that I’ve tried, although all of those were of RISC OS origin and the other was not. Note that neither Zap nor Edit are affected in this way — only StrongEd. When I quit StrongEd the file opens in whatever the current PDF viewer is — it makes no difference whether the viewer is !Pdf or !MuView nor whether it was started before or after StrongEd.

Pinebook Pro with RO 5.29 (Feb 2022) and the version of StrongEd supplied — I assume the latest stable version.

The file in question is the Inform Beginner’s Guide from: https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/compilers/inform6/manuals/IBG.pdf

There are a large number of PDF files out there so it may well be that others may trigger this problem.

Normal behaviour here, with StrongEd 4.79f13 (April 2023) and !PDF 3.02.1.24.1 on RISC OS 5.20 (21 Sep 2023) in The Netherlands (Tilburg, 5014 BB 29).

I was getting something similar when playing around with desktop shortcuts and trying to open help files, intermittently it would pass them to Armalyser or something else if that wasn’t loaded.

Been a while since I looked at that, but I couldn’t find anything specific causing it.

No problem here. It might be worth inspecting !StrEd_cfg.UserPrefs.Modes…
Check the patterns in “Rules Include” in whatever mode your file opens in.

And as they say on tv “to elimate suspicsion”: Obey <StrongED$Dir>.StartUp.ClaimFiles

Thanks, John!

I never thought to check the mode — it was opening in Inform mode. This was a mode created by Jeffrey Lee and avaialable on his website : https://www.phlamethrower.co.uk but he never created a ModeWhen file for it. So I created one using that for C mode as a template.

Now Inform expects its source files (on RISC OS) to be in a directory called Inform just as C expects them to be in a directory called C, so I edited the relevant line replacing C by Inform. When I looked at the “Rules Include” section I saw that this line started with a “*” whereas the lines in the “Rules Exclude” section started with “fff”. Deducing that the asterisk meant “all file types” I replaced it with “fff”. This fixed the problem—as it happened the PDF in question was in a directory called “Inform”.

Might be worth seeing what happens if you open a PDF in a directory called “C”…