I was working last night, Scriv backed up as usual, but on opening that scene this morning, I found that all my closing quotation marks are now opening ones. I checked the rest of my manuscript and the problem has affected every scene and chapter, but for some reason not my research folder. Anyone else come across this? I can't very well do a Find and Replace job on it. Am I really going to have to go through the whole manuscript and correct the issue by hand?
Damn! No joy. I wish I knew how the hell it happened. To the best of my knowledge I didn't hit anything I shouldn't have. Just checked the project file for my short story collection and it's fine, so the problem is definitely restricted to my W.I.P. folder.
How bizarre (and upsetting.) Can you contact the company for advice? Can you go back to previous copies of your WIP folder? If so, do they also display this fault? If not, you could restore all your earlier work, and then just enter in what you were working on yesterday, either again by hand, or TRY to copy and paste?
Ach.... I'm not that annoyed @jannert, I'm more confuddled than anything. I'm in Jas's right now working from my net book, which only has the most recent back up. As you know I always try to keep an alternative back-up too, just to be sure, so I'll not know the state of play 'til I get home. I did quite a bit of weeding out and embellishing last night and I was really happy with some of it, so I'm just thankful the wording is intact... if that had been corrupted, I'd be sobbing into a pint right about now. If it's happened to me, it's bound to have happened to someone else. I'll have a trawl when I'm sans toddler.
Try asking the question on the Scrivener forum. I found something about closing quotes following em dashes, and something about German closing quotes looking like opening quotes but I don't have time to look properly for you. http://www.djgelner.com/2013/04/solving-scrivener-em-dash-smart-quote.html Sometimes when I have these kind of problems it is a failure to open the program properly. My only suggestion is to close Scrivener and reopen it.
Thanks @GingerCoffee. Unfortunately, I've shutdown and opened the program again already and it's still the same. I don't think what precedes the closing mark makes any odds as it seems to be doing it in every instance, regardless of what punctuation mark I've used, but if my prior save is affected also, I'll pose a question on the forum. Ta for hoking out the link for me.
I was nobbling with Jack about this earlier. We came to the same conclusion. Smart quotes are not usually determined by your wordprocessing programme, but by your overall system preferences. So ...this may not be a problem with Scrivener at all, but a glitch in your computer that happened during backup. Why not copy the text from one of the faulty documents, paste it into a new document, change the smart quotes to stupid quotes ...then change them back and see what happens. If that corrects the problem you will know your text isn't corrupted, but that particular file was. Individual files and or folders can get corrupted, and simply need to be replaced and rejuvenated. A pain in the arse, but at least you didn't lose any of your work. Jack said if you have the facility to 'show invisibles' or whatever the Scrivener word for that is, you can often find the solution to problems like this. If the backup has inadvertently inserted a space after each full stop, the programme might have interpreted that as 'oh, it's got to be a start quote here...'
I'm just in. I'll be honest; I'm so knackered I really don't trust myself with it right now. Food for thought though Jan. Thanks. I'm a bit useless when it comes to stuff like this. I'm going to leave it for now, and tackle it first thing in the morning when it's a bit cooler, and I'm not nearly falling down with exhaustion.
@jannert You think that's upsetting? A lot of my scene sections (on Scrivener) mysteriously lose all their text.
Oh flipping hell ...that would be incredibly INCREDIBLY upsetting. I hope you've kept hard copies so you can restore? Do you think this is a Scrivener glitch/fault? I've been considering getting Scrivener (I use Pages) but I'm not so sure now. I'd hate to lose stuff, or wake up to wee nightmares like Obsidian's.
Eek! Just what I didn't wanna hear. No actually, I take that back. Forewarned is forearmed, and all that. Good news this morning. Before I started faffing around with the file, I reread @jannert's last response again, and started to think more in terms of how the system might have affected the file, as opposed to Scrivenor. My project files get backed up to sd cards on my p.c. and net book, which are networked. Both have permanent slots are are NEVER used for anything else. The problem yesterday occurred when I opened the file on my net book, so I tried again this morning. Same deal. When I went to my p.c. and accessed the net book file over the network, it opened no problem but the quotation marks looked the same as yesterday, so I duplicated the p.c.'s back up file, substituted it and, voila... sorted. That seems to suggest that it was a read error or corruption on the part of my net book. At least if it happens again, I'll know what the craic is, but it's got me thinking, especially with what @123456789 had to say. If it was wasn't for the fact I keep dual back ups, (as opposed to one shared over the network via the net book) I'd be right royally screwed.
I'm glad you got this sorted and that it wasn't serious. This is the kind of thing that makes me keep stepped backups on several different media. In other words, I don't replace copies very often, I duplicate them BEFORE I start working on an edit, and keep the older version dated, intact and unaltered. That way I have an uncorrupted file on another bit of media if a newer one gets messed up. Yes it takes time, but so well worth it. If you constantly back up by 'replacing' your old copy with your new one, any file corruption will become permanent. Been there, done that ...again, rescued only by the fact I'd made a hard copy before 'backing up' in that instance. Folks who think I'm being paranoid will sing a different tune when they lose work because of a computer glitch. Which, eventually, they will. Saying computers will never glitch is like saying your washing machine will never break down. Oh yes it will... it may give you warning beforehand, or it may not.
That was my first thought... I've a head like a sieve, but that is me in general... I'm quicker to believe the fault lies with me, rather than with the hardware or software.
