Binder filename bug, disappearing text

[shorn]

Beta 0.1.2b
Severity: high, but probably easily fixed.

It is (still) possible 1) to rename a binder file with a . (period) in the name, or 2) to try to rename a binder file with a . in the name.

In most cases the program will say you can't change the name (to one with a .). In some cases you can (e.g., you can change "Start" to "Start vol.1")

However, in both cases, the same thing happens. if you close and then reopen the project, all binder files where you changed or tried to change the name to one with a period, the file will appear to be empty and those missing words will no longer be be part of your word count.

(If this happens to you, don't panic, the text is not lost, just inaccessible to Scrivener.)

If you look at the .scriv package contents you can see what is happening.

When you create a binder file named "Start", inside the .scriv package Start.rtfd and Start_notes.rtf files are created. (Inside the Start.rtfd package you will find a TXT.rtf file that actually contains your text.)

If you try to rename the "Start" binder file to "Start.1", the program will say that this is not permitted. But, inside the .scriv package, the Start.rtfd package will have been changed into a Start.1 folder (which still contains the TXT.rtf file).

When you close and reopen the project, Scrivenir will try to read all the .rtfd packages, but won't find the ones that have been turned into folders.

Somehow the program still knows that you have a file called "Start" (for example) and any synopsis and notes are still there.

It gets even stranger if you then add some text to your now empty "Start" binder file. When you save, the correct Start.rtfd package is recreated inside the .scriv package. The Start.1 folder continues to exist, however, and still contains the TXT.rtf file with the lost text.

I hope this all makes sense. It is reproducible every time.

(I discovered this when I did a Fix Statistics prior to exporting my draft to submit to Nanowrimo. I had recently renamed a file called "Diary" to "Diary vol.1". Imagine my panic when I had apparently lost 3500 words. Luckily I had a backup, because I had not yet figured out what was happening.)

[amberv]

Perhaps you should have Scrivener treat titles as something separate than the literal file name for the document. Something like serial numbers on the file system. Sure, that makes identifying documents a little more difficult, but then you are given total control over what your documents are named in the user interface. I suppose you could mask "evil" characters like the period and the colon, but how would Scrivener know which masked characters are supposed to represent evil characters, or the masked characters themselves.

[KB]

Thanks - I will fix this for the next beta.

AmberV - I considered your idea when first starting out. Behind the scenes, each document has a unique ID (just a number), and I considered using this as the file title rather than the actual title for the exact reasons you give. Indeed, this is the way that Ulysses does it. In the end, I decided upon the current implementation both for transparency and portability. That is, users can always peek inside the .scriv file and know exactly what is what. And on top of that, dragging from the binder into Finder is easier, because it's just a matter of copying an RTFD file across.

That said, I _may_ reconsider this. I will look into it.

Thanks,
Keith

[KB]

UPDATE: Rather nicely, it seems that I've already fixed this for the next beta. Periods _are_ allowed, but they don't cause the same problems any more. I've been doing a few things in this area, and one of the things I have already done has fixed it. What was happening was that the RTFD file extension was getting lost. I've tried it on 1.2b and the bug is there every time, but I can't recreate it on 1.3b (which should be out in about a week or so).
Thanks,
Keith