Text files + styles = lost work?

[Albrecht]

Is there any way to recover styles applied to a text file?

Here's my problem:
I opened a plain text file using NWP and spent four days tagging it by assigning intricate style information to it (colors, font size, etc). Saved it regularly. When I was finally done after four days, I closed NWP. God was I upset when I opened the file again the next day, only to find that all my tagging had disappeared into thin air!

Now I understand that I myself may be to blame for acting on the assumption that NWP would save style information for a pure text file. But contrary to our 'beloved' (ehemm) MS Word, NWP never alerted me to the fact that upon saving in the original plain text format, all style information would be lost. I should have been offered the chance to save as RTF or whatever.

Now, since I spent so much time in tagging this text: is there any way to recover the lost information? From temporary files, or from a backup of temporary files (Time Machine…)?

Thank you for any help!
Albrecht

[martin]

Hello Albrecht,

First, I'm very sorry you lost so much work. NWP should always be doing whatever it can to help users safeguard against lost time and work. However, we do have a warning dialog in NWP that alerts the user to possible formatting loss when saving a plain text file:

warn.png (20.24 KiB) Viewed 4953 times

If I open up a plain text file, add some formatting (say a few words in bold), and try to save, NWP shows me the warning dialog.

I'm not sure why you didn't see the dialog. Are you using the latest version (1.4.1) of NWP? I know we didn't always have this safeguard.

As to recovering your work, I'm afraid I only have bad news. Even with NWP's autosave enabled, any backups of plain text files would also be saved as plain text. I'm really sorry about that. Perhaps we should change that policy, and make backups using our native file format, regardless of the document type.

[Albrecht]

Thanks Martin.
I guess I should probably blame myself. I didn't see this warning dialog - the only explanation I can come up with now is that I may have been too tired or too distracted. It does appear when I test it with a new text document.
Well well. Guess I won't make this mistake again…

[phspaelti]

Actually perhaps there is room for improvement here. If you open a ".txt" file and then apply formatting, Nisus gives you only the options you show in that box. But perhaps Nisus should also give the option to change the extension and save as .rtf as well. And perhaps that option should even be the default.

[martin]

Thanks for the suggestion- I'll file it as an enhancement request.