Preview tab not loading HTML/CSS when developing custom sheet

Detailed Description of the Problem When reloading the Campaign Settings page, the HTML content is not present, just a metallic-gray window. If I change either the html or the css, even as little as adding a space, the un-styled HTML will appear. Getting the CSS to apply the the content shown can be very, very, very, very, very, very troublesome. This has been going on for months. It will sometimes go away after a reload and when it does it's quite stable as long as I don't reload the page again, but there simply isn't any telling. It gets into this state by doing a reload, which I may have to do to view repeating fields in the actual sheet. It's definitely nothing to do with the css as it affects the display of the HTML itself (at least at first) and when I save changes the changes are there in the real sheet. That's not much of a workaround however if doing fine detail work and it's 'stuck' like this.... I've been seeing this problem for a long time, I'm only posting this now because I've tried reloading over two dozen times to get the problem to go away with no luck. When doing some searching on the community forums, I see I'm not the only one. Steps to Reproduce the Problem Just reload the page enough times? To be honest this seems like it's becoming more the norm then the exception. I'm sorry to come across as a whiner, but the ability to customize character sheets is literally the *only* reason I'm a mentor level subscriber and, as I'm not as CSS master, this is dragging on. Quitting/restarting the browser did not help. Saving changes and reloading didn't help either. Description of Your Setup (Browser + Version, Operating System, etc.) Operating System Macintosh OS X 10.7.5 Screen Resolution 1680 x 1050 Web Browser Chrome 42.0.2311.90 Browser Size 1676 x 952 IP Address X.Y.250.174 Color Depth 24 Javascript Enabled Flash Version 17.0.-1 Cookies Enabled User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.90 Safari/537.36 I see that this problem goes back at least 7 months and for people with Windows OS, so I don't think it has anything to do with that portion of my setup...

My HTML always loads, but I get the unstyled HTML a lot (css seems to not apply). I then reopen the window and copy/paste both the HTML/CSS back in and wait a few seconds and then preview again. I often have to do this ~10 times before it actually works, but luckily once it works then it works until I save.

Sometimes , its the css. A missing coma, semi-colon, parentheses, etc, and the preview pane gives up the ghost, even if the system is smart enough to display the sheet (despite the error). I've suffered through the issue a lot, at well. A work around is to have the campaign opened in another tab. When you get it to where you want to look at it, save the custom sheet (wait for it to reload), and then hit the reload button on the open campaign. The changes should be loaded into the character sheet, after the reload. You'll have to open up a character journal, but ti works. This is how I check math and buttons that are being painful.

Coal Powered Puppet said: Sometimes , its the css. A missing coma, semi-colon, parentheses, etc, and the preview pane gives up the ghost, even if the system is smart enough to display the sheet (despite the error). I've suffered through the issue a lot, at well. I've seen that as well, but what I described above is with valid css that works after repeating the process like 10x. Reloading the campaign is MUCH slower than the preview tab.

Mark said: Coal Powered Puppet said: Sometimes , its the css. A missing coma, semi-colon, parentheses, etc, and the preview pane gives up the ghost, even if the system is smart enough to display the sheet (despite the error). I've suffered through the issue a lot, at well. I've seen that as well, but what I described above is with valid css that works after repeating the process like 10x. Reloading the campaign is MUCH slower than the preview tab. What Mark said is exactly right. I've done what both of you suggest. Maybe I'm having a run of bad luck, but it's just not working for me right now and I have a good chunk of time to work on my sheet now . In fact I've been doing your 'workarounds' for months. I think this is long enough and now I'm posting this to the Bug Reports forum. As I said above, it's NOT new, it's been known for at least 7 months based on the other bug report I've seen. If it's a known bug and it's being tracked to be worked on as time allows that's perfectly fine. BUT, it IS a bug. Also, I have to point out if the preview pane is being affected by an out of place character in exactly the same way, how could you ever know if the system is being affected by THAT or this weird unidentified bug ? That's a even worse situation to be stuck in.

Does this happen usually in conjunction with using the inspector tool? Or is it any time at all?

Steve K. said: Does this happen usually in conjunction with using the inspector tool? Or is it any time at all? In my experience using the inspector tool is not related. I've tried it with and without. I often have to hit F11 to go full screen and then hit it again to go back to normal mode to show the HTML/CSS parts after using the inspector tool. F11 x2 seems to be the fastest way to force it to work. The Preview panel always shows, just doesn't seem to have the CSS applied.

It sounds like you're running out of memory. Scrolling/opening the tools and closing them will cause the page to reload into memory and that's why sometimes it fixes it. Next time it's happening to you can you open Window -> Task Manager and take a look at what that tab is doing to your Memory/CPU?

I don't use the Inspector tool, at least not with the Preview tab. I tried using cmd-opt-I x 2 similar to Mark's suggestion (using a mac, see <a href="https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/shortcu" rel="nofollow">https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/shortcu</a>... Didn't make any difference, but I'll try hammering at it and see what happens. Again, I echo Mark's comments, the HTML is not there, but is easy to get it to show up (changing either CSS or HTML pane in almost any way causes the HTML to appear in the Preview pane, but without CSS). It's almost like a timing thing... Thanks Steve.

Steve K. said: It sounds like you're running out of memory. Scrolling/opening the tools and closing them will cause the page to reload into memory and that's why sometimes it fixes it. Next time it's happening to you can you open Window -&gt; Task Manager and take a look at what that tab is doing to your Memory/CPU? I am not. I have 16GB of memory and CPU usage is around 5-10%. F11 doesn't fix the preview tab. It only fixes the HTML/CSS window that don't show after I open the inspector. The preview tab can't be fixed ones it doesn't load CSS without mass refreshes.

For giggles, I tried this in Safari. It worked perfectly fine, first time. Safari was running concurrently with Chrome. Went back to Chrome and the problem was still there. Tried reloading multiple times, but no luck yet.

I spent a couple of hours experimenting with Chrome and Safari -- Chrome just won't seem to work with the Preview tab (I'm reloading, but I've tried stopping/starting the browser as well). Safari works better and doesn't seem to fail to Preview as often (though it still does. I had to reload several times and then... voila). Stopping/starting Safari seemed to help. Unfortunately, Safari doesn't render quite the same as Chrome and elements end up in slightly different places. I just can't seem to find a pattern here.

Chrome will show the styled preview after many refreshes. Or you can get lucky and it'll show it on the first time.

Yeah, that happened to me once this weekend. Then I saved after a few hours.... I just sat reloading &gt; 60 times (I counted). This was for the Chrome version at the top of the thread. I guess I'm not so lucky. :-(

So after some more experience reloading doesn't ever seem to fix it. It usually fixes in 2 cases for me: Closing the tab and reopening. Sometimes I copy/paste the HTML/CSS in, other times I go straight to preview. Straight to preview is almost always entirely blank though. Launching the campaign and then do step #1 It's finnicky, but after ~5 mins I can consistently get the preview to work.

Thanks, I'll definitely try that. Actually, I was just about to, and I saved a change first. Then, after it came back, I went straight to Preview and it was there. That's pretty unusual, but I'm going to run with it while I can.... I'll report back here what happens when I try your procedure. Thanks, Mark.