5 replies to this topic

[Ellen]

Hi. I searched the forums for this issue, hopefully I didn't miss it.

In the last two days I've noticed some odd glitches in a manuscript. Today in particular, I'm finding random sections of text in italics-- usually a few words, often starting and ending mid-word, They shouldn't be italicized. Words that *should* be in italics, that I *know* I have set in italics, are ... no longer in italics.

WTH?

I've been moving sections around (with some difficulty, although I think I've finally mastered that) so i thought it was a artifact of that. But I'm actually fairly bewildered. Any ideas what's going on?


thanks for any help you can provide...

Ellen

[Thoth]

Hello Ellen, and welcome to the Forum.

I never experienced this particular problem and I've been using Storyist for some years now.
By any chance, do these random italics occur in Sections that you had cut and pasted from a document created by another word processor?
Is this an imported file? Storyist might be misinterpreting/reinterpreting the style codes.
But maybe not.

Weirdness.
-Thoth

[Ellen]

Thoth: Thank you for the response.

Hm. Well, most of the manuscript was written in a different word processing program. I hadn't gotten around to creating many styles, so the majority of it is default. I guess that might be the problem..?

I have moved blocks of text to and from Notepad cards, which if I read the answer to another question right, could potentially cause formatting issues, especially if you have not assigned styles. Unfortunately, I've done it so often I've got no idea if the random italics are in the sections I've moved or the ones I haven't.

I've seen reference to "corruption" here and there -- I can't imagine a corrupted document only effecting something like formatting, but I suppose if it were only the file formatting is based on, ... er... can you tell I'm not a programmer? Yeah, obviously. I've been using macs and word processing programs for longer than I'd like to admit, and I've never encountered this problem anywhere except a rumor of a worm-like computer virus that randomly changes data. I *seriously* *seriously* doubt that's the issue here. I just thought of it because it is somewhat crazy-making to find changes I didn't make, and have changes I did make disappear.

I also ran across a section that was interrupted by another section I can't remember moving, but I expect that was me doing something incorrectly when tired. Working with sections is easy once you get the hang of it, but I struggled with it for at least two weeks. I didn't import the file -- I just "copy and pasted" the entire 99K document in, and then started making chapters and moving sections around between chapters. Speed has its disadvantages.

Anyway. I'l try applying styles to the manuscript as I finish revising it and see if that solves the problem.


Ellen

Thoth, on 12 October 2011 - 04:03 PM, said:

Hello Ellen, and welcome to the Forum.

I never experienced this particular problem and I've been using Storyist for some years now.
By any chance, do these random italics occur in Sections that you had cut and pasted from a document created by another word processor?
Is this an imported file? Storyist might be misinterpreting/reinterpreting the style codes.
But maybe not.

Weirdness.
-Thoth

[Thoth]

Okay, Ellen.

One more thought, if only because others have mentioned unexpected changes in styles when working with index cards: The comment text on the index cards is the same text as in the Synopsis portion of the Section Sheets; change one and you change the other.

Good luck.
- Thoth.

[Vanessa]

I've just experienced the same problem. I moved a section to a different chapter and found that the italics had all migrated to odd places. This file contains no text import. It was created from scratch in Storyist.

I've also found this to be a problem when exporting to RTF and some other formats. The document will open okay in other word processors the first time or so, but then there comes a point where the italics migrate and random sections end up single spaced. I actually had a contest coordinator send back a file for me to fix because the formatting was so screwed up she couldn't send it on to the judges that way. Very frustrating!

Vanessa

[Thoth]

Okay. Pretty weird. I can't seem to make this happen.
Could you tell me your platform (which Mac/which version of OSX) and which version of Storyist you're using?
-Thoth