Ovation Pro missing left-side tools

I’ve encountered this once before, and I remember some discussion on how to fix it. However I’ve forgotten the details.
Ovation Pro normally has a button bar across the top of the main window and a tool window down the left side. Today the tool window is not visible. I’ve restarted both RISC OS and Ovation Pro – no change.
If I open a new document, the toolbar is present. If I then open the document I want to work on, the toolbar disappears from both windows. If I click in the empty document it gets a toolbar. When I click in the existing document, there’s no toolbar.

OK, I’ve now found a solution, but I’ll still post this, as it could help someone else.

Save the document as DDL, close the original, open the DDL version and save over the original.

The downside is that this loses some view options, and the print settings.

Are you using any multiple desktop programs? These sometimes causes tool windows to end up on the wrong desktop.

Are you using any multiple desktop programs?

I’m not. I think I can recall from previous discussions that the offset coordinates between the main and tool windows get corrupted, meaning the tool window ends up lost in space off-screen – or in one case, behind the main window.

One way that often fixes this problem is to open the Application choices (Adjust click on the Ovation Pro iconbar icon), go to the View settings and un-tick and re-tick the options for Attach toolbox (and Attach the info palette) if needed. Then try moving the window and see if the toolbox re-attaches itself.

Pressing F12 and return should bring back on screen anything which is meant to be there.

Ovation Pro stores the X and Y offsets of the toolbox, for some reason these occasionally get corrupted to large values, hence toolbox lost off screen. Gavin Crawford’s solution is the correct one.

Speaking as an application developer, should I feel slightly reassured that an eminent developer still has known but intractable bugs hidden in a major application?

There are always bugs.

We just categorise the ones that don’t blow up (and cause data loss) as annoyances or quirks that will be looked at “at some later time” that may or may not ever happen…

…because users would prefer fancy new feature rather than fixing a bug that doesn’t affect them, and time is finite.