No charge for March and v12.999 Adobe Acrobat bug

It has been far too long since I’ve written an update. Time just seems to slip away nowadays. To illustrate, I started writing the draft for this message on the 8th of February and am only now able to come back and finish it.

The good news is that I have been able to spend a lot of time with my daughter and that we three have been able to get past the sleepless nights and get an okay daily schedule going. My daughter will start going to day care in the coming week and that should give me more time to work on the sheet. Until now I have been able to keep up with answering messages and doing the very basics administrative needs for patron-rewards and my website, but I haven’t had time to touch the code of the sheet.

This should all change very soon and I plan to make the sheet fully compatible with everything that was missed over the last few months (or perhaps I should say year) before the end of March.

However, I have been taking your money without producing anything new and I feel bad for doing so. I had wrongly thought I would have time to do some more in February, but two people trying to work from home with a new-born in the house was more challenging and less productive than we had expected.

Thus, I have decided to pause my Patreon billing for March 2021. This means that everybody who is a paying subscriber before the 1st of March will not be charged for the month of March.

Just to clarify, as this has led to some angry emails in the past: people who join during March will still be charged for their pledge, because that is how Patreon works and I can’t change that. I think this is fair because you still get access to all the content immediately and otherwise you could join, get the content, and leave without paying anything. You can already do that on my website, where the sheets are available for free!

Don’t worry, I will still work on stuff during March. I am just not asking any money for it!

Because I am very good at putting stuff off to the very last moment and I work better with a deadline, I have decided that if I can’t finish this before April, I won’t charge for April either!

With ‘finish this’ I mean: get the sheet compatible with the bulk of the missed official content (not Unearthed Arcana). There might still be a couple of things that won’t fit/work, because of complexity issues with newly introduced rules. This is not a disclaimer to get out of a promise, but rather a way to pre-emptively stop the messages of people who feel betrayed that I wasn’t able to implement support for their one beloved item or optional rule in time.

Then something completely different. A recent update for Adobe Acrobat (version 21.001.20135 from Feb 9th 2021) has broken the way the progress bar is called in v12.999 of MPMB's Character Record Sheet. The bug causes the sheet to stop responding whenever the progress bar is incremented. Thus, the sheet will seem completely useless as basically all its automation stops working. I doubt many of you have experienced this, as you are all probably using v13 and v13 is unaffected by this bug.

I have filed a bug report with Adobe about this. Somebody from Adobe has responded that they are looking into it. However, my experience is that it can take them a long time to fix stuff like this. Last time I filed a similar bug report, it took 6 months for a fix to be implemented.

Unfortunately, this Adobe Acrobat bug will also prevent anybody who is using Adobe Acrobat v21.001.20135 or newer from importing existing characters from v12.999 to v13. I'm working on implementing a fix for that, but it will only be available in the next version of the sheet (v13.0.6).

On top of that, some people have contacted me about this bug also causing problems on Mac for v13. Again, with version 21.001.20135 (or newer) of Adobe Acrobat. I don't have access to a Mac to test this and so far it is unclear when (and if) this bug pops up.

If you are unsure if this bug is affecting you, here is how you can check:

1) Lookup the version number of your Adobe Acrobat DC (Reader / Pro / Standard) installation under Help >> About Adobe Acrobat DC… and check if it starts with “21” or “2021”

2) Enable Adobe Acrobat to display JavaScript errors by going to Edit >> Preferences >> JavaScript and checking the box for Show console on errors and messages. Then open a PDF that you expect is buggy and do something that causes the progress bar to show (pick a feat or change race for example).

3) The JavaScript Debugger window should now open and you can read an error starting with “GeneralError: Operation failed. Thermometer.value:”.

If you experience this progress bar bug and are not working with v12 (v12.999 or earlier), please let me know!