A week ago I converted the AppleWorks version of a novel into RTF format and re-opened it in NISUS Writer. I'd heard some good things about this product and my intent was to convert all my writing projects. The conversion was not perfect so I spent a lot of time reformatting for NISUS. Then, in NISUS, I spent a week making final changes in preperation to sending the novel to my agent.
Imagine my suprise when I opened the file last night to discover that all my formatting had disappeared and certain symbols like quotes and apostrophes had been replaced with "???", making a global replace impossible. Not only that but when I attempted to save the file NISUS refused saying that it couldn't save under the current encoding.
I'd appreciate any suggestions on how to recover from this disaster and any thoughts on how this could have happened.
I'm sorry you experience difficulties with Nisus Writer Express.
I'm sorry also, that I've got no advice for you. But this seems like the exact same problem that another user was running. We've got an engineer looking into how the code chooses the file type.
When did you first notice the problem? How did you last save (eg: Save As, autosave, etc) right before the problem occurred? Answers to these questions might help us track down the origin of the problem.
Write On!
Mark Hurvitz
VP for Communications *RETIRED*
Nisus Software Inc.
This is the only document I've had this problem with. It was a straight conversions from an AppleWorks document. I think I saved the document as an rtf in AppleWorks and then opened it up in Nisus. However, I might have done a clipboard paste instead — I just don't remember — but that seems unlikely since I know enough to realize that might be a little dangerous. Here are some clues that might help the engineer:
After I noticed the lack of formatting and all the "???" symbols, I looked at the icon. Although doing a command-I revealed it to be a Nisus Writer document, the icon was blank — no Nisus icon.
At first the program would not save and told me it couldn't save using this encoding. However, I started doing a manual replace of some of the '???' symbols and eventually the document would save. After the save the Nisus document icon reappeared.
This makes me think that I somehow introduced symbols that Nisus didn't recognize, and this made it think it was dealing with some unknown language. When I had replaced some of the unknown symbols, it decided I must be back in English, but in the meantime some damage had been done.
If I were the engineer, I'd look at the symbol translation algorithms between AppleWorks rtf and Nisus and I'd look at the paste algorithm, especially concerning what the defaults are in case unknown symbols are detected. This may be just as simple as augmenting the symbol list or making the defaults more intelligent.
hharris wrote:I'd appreciate any suggestions on how to recover from this disaster and any thoughts on how this could have happened.
I hope you didn't delete the original AW document. While I have found NWE to be stable and reliable for me, I make daily backups (via CRON job) of all my college papers to a different hard drive.
