Lost again.

Date: 13 October 2010 16:20:41

Well, I think I may have discovered why I apparently lost some of chapter 3 two weeks ago. Yesterday I was going great guns with chapter 4, when the whole thing seized up, some lines from the end of Psalm 18 (which is as far as I had written) started to disappear and instead I got a load of 'ruled lines'. Also the scroll bar was broken - I could scroll down to the end of the chapter but then it would get stuck and not scroll up again. Tried closing, reopening, restoring from backup, restarting the computer - nothing worked. Eventually I just saved what I'd got and went off to sulk, hoping it would have magically fixed itself by today.

It hadn't. So I took the safest but least favoured option, which was to export the whole lot, by copying and pasting a chapter at a time, into a completely different word processor than I normally use (couldn't export by a better method as my usual word processor doesn't offer an export to the new one, and if I tried a two stage process going via one it does offer, it just turned all the punctuation into something else).

So now I have to learn a new word processing programme, which looks far more complex that AppleWorks, but which does have the advantage of being compatible with other people's programmes. As I am not quite ready to let go of my beloved AppleWorks yet, I also did the copy and paste thing with the original document into separate AppleWorks files for each chapter. Amazingly, when I did this with Chapter 4 it restored what I had started with! So maybe it's just one file that got corrupted, but I don't trust AppleWorks any more now (its find and exchange function broke years ago) so I will just have to bite the bullet (in a pacifist sort of way) and learn NeoOffice. Bummer.