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scrod / nv

Notational Velocity: modeless, mouseless Mac OS X note-taking application
http://notational.net
GNU General Public License v3.0
2.07k stars 404 forks source link

Upgrading to 2.0 β4 loses styles #141

Open jacobweber opened 13 years ago

jacobweber commented 13 years ago

I had a note with bold text, created in 2.0 β3. When I installed β4, the boldness was lost.

I have the notes stored as individual plain text files, and not synchronized with SimpleNote.

scrod commented 13 years ago

Sorry, this is an inevitability of using additional metadata to detect changes to notes; the notes were re-read from disk to collect it for the first time. If you want to make sure you don't lose styles, you should use either Rich Text Format files or a single database.

jacobweber commented 13 years ago

Hmm...is there a way to notify the user when that's about to happen? If not, maybe styles shouldn't be allowed in plain-text notes. It's kind of scary to lose data (even formatting) without warning -- it makes the app seem less reliable.

jacobweber commented 13 years ago

(Oops, I closed this by mistake.)

scrod commented 13 years ago

People who choose to save their notes as plain text vs rich text should be aware of the difference when they make that choice. Just think logically about what would happen to the styles in a note after editing one of them in BBEdit; this data can only go one way. I'm surprised you hadn't noticed this behavior a long time ago. The program default is to use a single database, which is the safest option. So if users don't change this then there will be no problems.

But I have to append that β on the version number for a reason; you must take some responsibility when exploring all the features of such software. I'm sorry for the loss of your styles.

jacobweber commented 13 years ago

Oh, I'm not complaining about my own loss of data; I only lost a few bold words. Just thinking of how to improve the program. Maybe it would be best to have a note appear when you select "Plain Text Files", warning you that styles may be lost.

I agree that you would expect to lose styles after re-saving the files in another editor -- I was just surprised that you also lose them in other situations.

dansheffler commented 13 years ago

After reading this issue, it seems prudent to take your advice, Scrod, and switch to the rich text storage option. After doing this, I my new notes are, of course, rtfs, but all my old notes are still txt. This would be fine, except that when I edit an old note now, it adds rtf information to the file so that when I try to open it in another program like Bean, it does not recognize the file as an rtf and all the formating data gets in the way of writing.

Is there a way to change the extension on all my old txt files to rtf without NV losing track of which files are which.