RPrescott Posted January 2, 2014 Report Share Posted January 2, 2014 I am new to Storyist myself and decided to import a project I started a long, long time ago that was stored in text files. Since a lot of it was out of sequence and I wasn't sure about the final book layout I decided to import each section as it's own Manuscript. I read in the manual that things can be dragged around and readjusted, so I figured this would give me the most flexibility when putting things together. It turns out this is NOT a good idea! When I started to move things around, the program lost data and moved chapters from one manuscript to another, even though I was just trying to resort the order of manuscripts on the left hand side. I kept manual backups as well as the in-program ones, so nothing was actually lost. The biggest problem came when I tried to do some writing using the iPad app. I synced my story files (one was a new story that had about 10 manuscripts in, since I followed the same routine) and tried to add a new manuscript to the imported story. Once I created the new manual, I started typing away and was up to about 10 pages of text before taking a break. I synced back up to my Dropbox, put the iPad to sleep and took a break. When I opened it back up, the new manuscript and that part of the story was gone! Even worse, the new story I was writing was missing all of the other manuscripts and was showing all the text as one chapter. This story I did not edit on the iPad, I only opened it to look at how it was configured, which was exactly as it was on my Mac. When I reopened it after the sync, I was horrified. I tried restoring automatic backups with no luck, and when I got back to my MacBook (which I left at work), that story was missing all the new writing (some of the manuscripts were also missing, but I didn't troubleshoot that any more since I was going to restore a backup anyway). I did a search for new names I had come up with in the story and got no results, so I am sure the text is gone. This is not a terrrible thing, since most of it was going to change anyway as I decided to rewrite that portion of the story (a discussion between two characters) with a different character. When I got back to my laptop, I replaced the Dropbox version of both stories with my manual backup from before I stut it down and all was good. I am now going to change the formatting on both stories to have ONE manuscript and for now, assign a different chapter to each of the sections until I sort out how they are going to flow. Hopefully moving chapters around will not turn out to be an issue. Not the place for it, but my intial feedback (after 1 week of use) is that I LOVE the program and will purchase the Mac vesion tomorrow (running Demo right now). I'll just be extra diligent about backups and copies until I fully understand the program. Going to travel for business next week and will be using the iPad version to write while traveling. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RPrescott Posted January 2, 2014 Author Report Share Posted January 2, 2014 Update. I found the text that I added to the imported story on my iPad. It turns out that it was saved as a section in the orginal manuscript and not the one I 'remember' adding it to. When I did the search I must have typed the name incorrectly. Once I found the added text all my searches worked correctly when I tried again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
marguerite Posted January 2, 2014 Report Share Posted January 2, 2014 I see Steve is already on the case regarding the wandering text, which is good, because I don't have a clue how that happened. It's certainly not normal behavior. But I will just note that multiple manuscripts work best when you want to keep the text separate but share characters, plot, or other information. To drag things around, they need to be in the same manuscript, as you discovered. Welcome to the forums! Best, Marguerite Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RPrescott Posted January 2, 2014 Author Report Share Posted January 2, 2014 Thanks for the post! I'm going to learn to write one way or another, and using Storyist has alreayd been a good start so far. The book I imported was actually started 27 years ago.... sad. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RPrescott Posted January 4, 2014 Author Report Share Posted January 4, 2014 Here's a strange twist. I had another issue last night when I saved some changes in the iPad version. The copy on my Mac got messed up after I did a sync and opened it. I fixed the problem and ignored it until the morning. This morning I reallized that I still had the demo version running on my Mac, so I purchased the legal copy and then tried to reproduce the issue I had last night and couldn't. I pulled out the old version of the story that had given me troubles before and prompted my posts here, and then tried to reproduce those problems. And couldn't. I just did a bunch of things between the Mac and iPad versions of the software and everything worked just fine, exactly as I read that it is supposed to. Then something came to mind: I had downloaded a previous version of Storyist some time ago planning to try it out, but never did. This time when I wanted to download a demo version, I went into the OS settings and removed the old application settings and such. When I downloaded the new version, it opened just fine in demo mode and I never thought about it again. There is a possibillity that this is what caused the problems I was having and it was fixed by entering the serial number of the software! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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