I have a strange document file in my current Scrivener project. At first it was putting in unwanted page breaks which I cannot remove, and now it has hidden some text. If I try to copy its text into a new document, that document becomes dodgy and won’t let me paste into it. This is part of a 93,000 book which has to be handed in in 2 weeks so I am PANICKING!
The View → Text Editing → Show Invisibles command may help you find the source of the problem, as it will show tables, page breaks, and other “white space” characters.
Katherine
No, that’s not working. And it’s now spread to another file.
The file shows the correct word count, in this case 8K words, but is only displaying 4k of them. If I open it in Quick Reference, I get all the words. I can’t edit in the main window though.
Have you tried Edit > Text Tidying > Zap Gremlins? Does that help?
Mark
Sadly, that doesn’t, but thank you for the thought. What I can see, having looked at the rogue documents in Quick Reference, is that the ‘missing’ text always comes after a quotation I have indented, and then missing parts, in QR, run on in much narrower and inflexible columns than the rest of the text.
And the text is still present in the documents; the word counts are fine and if I select the right paragraph break, it will give me a word count of hundreds of words even though the text is invisible.
The big question is whether it’s the files or the program which is dodgy. Do I try and paste/retype everything into a new document (bearing in mind that it is 93K and has to be delivered in a week) or reinstall Scrivener? Or just hit my head on the desk…
In case anyone else gets this, I have now solved the problem. All the text had - somehow - been squeezed into a single cell table. Selected the strange bit, removed table, sorted.
Glad you got it sorted! Give yourself a pat on the back and a glass of something nice as a reward!
Mark
I’m surprised Show Invisibles didn’t help, then, as I find it especially helpful for showing hidden tables.
For future reference, embedded tables are especially common in material copied from the web, as a table is one of the easier ways for a web page to force a particular layout.
Glad to hear you’ve resolved the problem.
Katherine