This indicates to me that you had use the Constructor on this form before. We’ll return to this point in a moment.
I know about this issue. It happens with any Panorama dialog sheet that is resizable. It’s quite annoying, but I haven’t been able to figure out what the problem is. For now the only solution is to resize the dialog first, then edit the text.
Although I’ve known about this for a long time, I never entered it into the issue tracker, so now I’ve done that.
This is what I would expect if the objects already on the form were created with the Constructor. When objects are created with the Constructor, a special tag is applied to them. When you run the Constructor again, all objects with this tag are removed. This is why you can run the Constructor over and over again, varying the specifications each time.
I just verified that I am able to create objects manually, then run the Constructor, and the manually created objects aren’t disturbed.
There is one case where all objects are removed – if the first line of the template is the <zapform>
tag. But I assume you would know if you had done that.
You have to read the documentation page closely, but it is mentioned. See Using Two Templates in a Single Form on the Automatic Form Construction page. The quick version is that you need to temporarily create a second form, create the second group of objects in that form, then copy the objects back to your original form.
You could also use the blueprint dialog to remove the tag that indicates that each object was created with the constructor, but since you’d have to do that individually for each object, that would be very tedious.
Yep, that’s exactly what should happen. The duplicate still contains objects with the tag indicating that the objects were created with the Constructor.