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olivierkes / manuskript

A open-source tool for writers
http://www.theologeek.ch/manuskript
GNU General Public License v3.0
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International characters in file names #1209

Open pvphome opened 10 months ago

pvphome commented 10 months ago

I found that Manuscript saves files and directories with names that have international characters replaced with dashes. (This was tested under macOS). This makes it difficult to work with files using third-party programs. I suggest creating files and directories with names that use international characters.

obw commented 10 months ago

Not the best Idea, some network protocols have till today have Problems with this, also some versioning software programs.

There is a folder.txt file in every folder, where the real Name is placed...

TheJackiMonster commented 10 months ago

I agree that using these characters as replacement for names is intentional. It makes the directory structure safe to use in very different systems. So I wouldn't recommend changing that.

TheJackiMonster commented 10 months ago

I also don't understand how this naming of folders makes it difficult to work with the files in a third-party program. @pvphome Maybe you can elaborate?

pvphome commented 10 months ago

Not the best Idea, some network protocols have till today have Problems with this, also some versioning software programs.

Perhaps it makes sense to make this feature optional. I have not seen problems with international encodings for a very long time. I don't think such problems are widespread.

There is a folder.txt file in every folder, where the real Name is placed...

This file contains information only about the directory itself, it does not contain information about the md-files in this directory.

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Now just imagine how to find the right one among these files to open it with a third-party text editor. :) Especially if the names of subsections are not the ones that Manuskript assigns by default, but changed by the user. You can be guided by section and chapter numbers, but the user can rename them by removing the number, as well as change the order.

I also don't understand how this naming of folders makes it difficult to work with the files in a third-party program. @pvphome Maybe you can elaborate?

Here's an example. There is a popular Obsidian note manager that also uses the markdown format. It is popular for maintaining "knowledge bases" of linked notes. I tried creating a Manuscript book inside a catalog with an obsidian base to be able to edit parts of the book as parts of that "knowledge base" with the ability to link to obsidian notes, embed notes in the text, etc. Obsidian only shows the md files in the catalog, i.e. I cannot corrupt the Manuscript service files with it. But, as you can see, the main inconvenience in work is related exactly to file names. To understand what is contained in a particular file, this file must be opened.

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By the way, as you can see, the top-level catalog is still named the way the user has named it, with international characters. So, this way you will not get rid of them completely. Or here, for example, is what the menu of the last opened files of any text editor looks like when editing such files. The problem is the same: you can't guess what the file is about by its name.

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One of the main advantages of the Markdown format is that it can be edited by a large number of programs. This "proprietary" file naming scheme makes such editing inconvenient. In general, the ability to give a file a name that can be used to guess its contents is common in modern operating systems. And this is the first time I've seen a program in which this feature was specifically disabled. Just give the user an opportunity to disable its disabling, please :) by separate setting in Settings dialog.