Incorrect Formatting On Upgraded Books

[J4PC]

Describe the feature / change

In recent times I often observed that some books signed in older versions had completely broken their formatting.
Here is an example:

What is especially interesting is that the book was once fine and now has a text shadow which is normally impossible in books and also some text is know in the wrong colour.

I had my suspicion that this was caused by the changes made in 1.21.6 to the book UI and sure enough after a bit of testing I noticed that if you had used "§r" in a book before 1.21.6 and then upgraded to a newer version the formatting breaks.

This is especially heartbreaking because a lot of books on the server were written before 1.21.6 and now a lot of text and formating is broken - there are some cases where the text is more difficult to readable because it is now incorrectly white and only the shadow hints at the text.

I reported this bug on the bugtracker (https://report.bugs.mojang.com/servicedesk/customer/portal/2/MC-305739) but I don't have high hopes, with the lack of care Mojang in recent times treated the book formatting system (Sadly the formatting codes couldn't even stand as a parity issue https://report.bugs.mojang.com/servicedesk/customer/portal/2/MC-305384). The chance they fix a bug that relates to a deprecated feature is very slim and even if, the priority of such a thing would be very low.

So maybe Scribble could fix this bug - this would be very helpful for preserving formatting in books. I don't know what in the code causes this bug and if the information of the formatting is still there just incorrectly displayed. If that is the case I imagine Scribble could maybe "refresh" the book in some way because in newly singed books after 1.21.6 this bug doesn't appere again and is to my knowledge is limited to the 1.21.6 upgrade.

I believe this would be an essential addition to Scribble so Scribble doesn't only help you create formatting but also helps to keep it.

[chrrs]

Oh wow, I try to test parity with vanilla every so often, but I've never seen it be this bad. Are those older books also written using Scribble, or did they use another mod? For this exact reason, Scribble actually never uses &r to reset, and instead resets to &0. Vanilla draws books in a weird way (line-by-line, without considering formatting codes) and &r is basically completely broken because of it (see also #19). As of right now though, Scribble doesn't touch reset codes that already exist, which is something I think can definitely be changed.

I also mentioned this a bit in #103, but I'm definitely considering adding a more future proof server component to Scribble so that books ideally use proper text components instead of formatting codes. Part of this would be optionally migrating existing books probably. Since text components are the "right way" to do this, they won't have an issue with upgrading.

[J4PC]

To be clear, I believe this is a vanilla bug and not caused by Scribble. But maybe you notice it more with Scribble because you format more with Scribble. I actually wrote the book that has the bug the most prominently with Scribble. I attached the file for it; it is a legacy file because "back then" the format was still .book (but GitHub doesn't let me upload a .book file so I needed to zip it).

Fabulöse Frequenzen - 7th Edition.zip
This book wasn't written with Scribble, but maybe I copy pasted passages from a previous edition of the book that wasn't written with Scribble: but over half a year later i cant be sure of that.

For the Bug tracker i created a showcase world that shows the problem, and in this world you can also see that the formatting information isn't lost; it's just not updated properly. For example, you create the book in 1.21.5 but don't sign it. Then put it in a lectern. After that you update to 1.21.11 (or any other version after 1.21.5) and open the lectern. You can see that the formatting is broken. But when you take the book out of the lectern it fixes itself, provided it wasn't signed. This can be see in with the lectern that stand in the middle.

MC-305739 Showcase.zip

Also, I am quite sure that the book shown in the second example image in the original report, with the white text, was not written in Scribble. But it would be nice if Scribble also could fix the formatting in those books.

[Juyas]

We had this issue on a lot of books as well.
As it turned out, Minecraft has "updated" its font rendering, interpreting the "§r" no longer as reset to plain black in books... for whatever reason. It seems to render text shadowed like in chat...

Replacing the "§r" with "§0" in all books fixed those issues for 98% of books - a few exceptions caused weird color bugs, probably in cases, where bugs of the old rendering have been used to display specific styles.

[chrrs]

Looked into this a bit, I was actually wrong, Scribble already replaces all &r with &0 when opening books, so for unwritten books this should already be fixed (I couldn't recreate it with the "Fabulöse Frequenzen - 7th Edition.zip" file for example - Scribble fixes this automatically).

Fixing books that have already been written can only be done by the server, so this is definitely a server-side only thing unfortunately, which will probably be some time before that gets implemented.

[Juyas]

Fixing books that have already been written can only be done by the server, so this is definitely a server-side only thing unfortunately, which will probably be some time before that gets implemented.

Unfortunately, I believe its considered expected behavior for "§r" now, because its the client-side replacement of the renderer causing this and therefore wont be fixed on server-side. You can only do some dirty fixing by replacing the color codes yourself @J4PC in the items data.

I personally did some dirty code in a mini-plugin as mentioned before, that works most of the time.
If you wanna do that yourself, just include that in a command (bukkit/paper api):

ItemStack newBook = itemInMainHand.clone();
BookMeta meta = (BookMeta) newBook.getItemMeta();
List<String> pages = meta.getPages();
pages = pages.stream().map( page -> page.replace( "§r", "§0" ) ).toList();
meta.setPages( pages );
newBook.setItemMeta( meta );
player.getInventory().addItem( newBook );

[chrrs]

Yes, that's what I meant. It's a vanilla thing, though it's not triggerable in vanilla, since you can't use colors in vanilla. The best we can do on the client is to change how it looks only with Scribble installed (which is not how I'd want to do it, since I want Scribble to match vanilla ideally, and not be required on everyone's client). To properly fix this, we'd need to do something on the server (basically the mod version of what your plugin would do).