What Happens When You Report a Bug in Verso

Your file becomes a test. It stays there forever.

July 2026

You send a bug report to most software companies and you get a thank-you. Maybe a ticket number. Then nothing, and six months later the same thing is still broken.

I want to describe what actually happens to yours, because the process changed this year, and the change was forced on me by getting it wrong repeatedly.

The Short Version

If you send me a file that breaks, that file goes into the test suite. Permanently. Every release from then on has to open it, save it, and open it again without damaging it. There are 706 of these tests now. They all run before anything ships.

That is the whole system. It sounds obvious written down. It took me a while to get there.

What I Used to Do Instead

I used to fix the bug, open the app, check it looked right, and close the report.

Reasonable. Also wrong, and I have the data now. Every fix in June and July that I verified only by looking at it came back. One of them came back twice. Meanwhile every fix anchored to an actual file from an actual person held, and not one of those has bounced.

The reason is not mysterious. My Mac is not your Mac. One bug turned out to depend on the macOS version. Another depended on a footer having four spaces in it, which mine did not. When I check something by eye, I am checking my machine, my file, my settings. That is one sample.

So the rule now is that a bug with a file attached does not get closed until the file is in the suite and a test locks the fix. “I checked and it works” is evidence. It is not proof.

A Real Example

Nick writes long documents in Word and sends me detailed reports. Genuinely detailed. He once sent eleven separate things in one email, numbered, with the version each one appeared in.

One of them: headers in RTF files lost their formatting when you saved and reopened.

The interesting part is what it turned out to be. Verso was writing the header correctly. Word opened those same files and showed the header perfectly. The text was sitting in the file the whole time. It was Verso itself that threw it away on the way back in, because the system component that reads RTF quietly discards headers, and I had never checked whether it did.

So for months, Verso saved your header, and Verso was the only app that could not read it back.

The fix is a few lines. The test guarding it is the more interesting bit: one part of it deliberately asserts that Apple’s reader still drops headers. If Apple ever fixes that, my test fails and tells me to go and delete my workaround. A test that breaks when the world improves is a strange thing to write. It beats carrying a workaround for a problem that stopped existing.

The Bugs Nobody Reports

Here is the part I did not expect.

A few days ago I went looking for a shape rather than a symptom. Verso’s colour picker had a bug that came back three times across three releases, and eventually I fixed the actual cause: two different parts of the app were both claiming ownership of the same shared macOS panel, and whichever spoke last won.

Once I knew the shape, I went looking for it elsewhere. I found two more. Neither had ever been reported by anyone.

The first: Format, Font, Show Fonts. If you had never opened Settings, that menu item did nothing at all. If you had opened Settings once, it silently changed your default font preference while you believed you were formatting the words you had selected.

The second: the Welcome screen had a “show this on launch” checkbox, and Settings had a menu for the same thing. The two disagreed about what the setting meant. Choose “open a blank document” in Settings and the checkbox still showed as ticked, and the moment you touched it, your choice was gone.

Both are the sort of thing you would live with for a year. Not because they are minor. Because the symptom is unspeakable. “The setting I picked changed by itself” sounds like you misremembered it. So you shrug, set it again, and get on with your day.

That is the argument for hunting by shape instead of waiting for reports. The bugs that generate reports are the ones people can put into words.

What This Does Not Fix

I should be straight about the limits.

A tester called Mikko opened Verso for the first time this month and hit a spinning beachball within ten minutes. He had to force quit. He could not tell me what he had been doing, which is entirely fair, because nobody narrates their own afternoon.

I still have not fixed it. I cannot reproduce it, and 706 tests are no help against something I cannot make happen. What I did instead was make the next one legible. Verso now records when it stops responding, for how long, and what it was doing at the time, and Help, Save Diagnostics puts that into a file you can email me. It contains no document content. Only what the app was up to.

That is not a fix. It is an admission that I need better evidence, written in code.

So Send Me the File

If Verso mangles your document, the single most useful thing you can do is send me the document. Not a description of it. The file.

A screenshot tells me what it looks like. The file tells me why. And unlike a screenshot, the file can be re-checked automatically on every release for as long as Verso exists.