I had to install a new hard drive on my computer. This resulted in the usual endless reinstall of everything. I’ve been trying to reinstall scrivener. I have a version that I got on a disk maybe 4 yrs ago. I have never had a problem before during install before because I can update from within the program. However, for some reason it is not installing correctly. I usually open the tutorial to update the program and I did this. I think check things out and once it seems to be working, I open my existing projects. Here are the things I’ve had problems with.
An error message telling me that the project is an old version and has to be updated. That never happened until recently. It is resulting an doubled files. Something I really would rather not have.
The Scrivener manual is “gone” meaning the link won’t open it and when I looked for it… nope, gone. I actually use that manual… so be nice to know why.
My system saved a downloaded pdf as a scrivener file… I have NO idea why that occurred because it has never done that before.
When I used the Uninstall Scrivener… it uninstalled icons but the program was still sitting in the file where it was installed. That’s weird. The only reason I know this is on another reinstall attempt where stuff still wasn’t working, I went to check. Uninstalled again, checked, still sitting there. So…
I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled that program 4 times now in the last week. I’m tired. I don’t want to install it again and I need it. So, I need a solution. I’m fortunate I have a Scrivener on my desktop as a backup and it works fine but I’m no longer mobile since I can’t use my laptop.
BTW, I tried going to the site and trying to install there. Same problems occurred.
I’m not entirely sure where you ended up, but I’d recommend manually uninstalling everything and then downloading and installing the current version, 1.9, from the website rather than starting with a version four years out of date. If Scrivener’s uninstaller does not completely remove everything, you can manually delete whatever remains of the installation directory.
The user manual is a PDF file included in the installation directory (as “manual-win-letter.pdf” within the “resources” directory). If you’ve done a completely fresh installation, it ought to be there, but it sounds like there might also be an incorrect association on your machine for PDF files, so it might not be appearing properly there or opening correctly from the menu if that’s the case.
Probably the simplest way to fix the PDF association is by right-clicking a PDF file and choosing “Open with…”, then choosing your PDF reader and keeping the “Always open with” option enabled (the exact wording differs among Windows versions). That should correct the icon and default program for all your PDF files so they no longer try to open directly in Scrivener.
The update message isn’t an error. Scrivener 1.9 uses a new file format, so older projects need to be upgraded before they can be opened. During the upgrade, Scrivener first makes a copy of the project in the original format, with “Backup” appended to the name. Once you’ve opened the updated project and looked around to confirm that everything’s all right, you can delete the backup copy. Note that projects created in or updated to 1.9 won’t be able to open in earlier versions of Scrivener, so if you’re working with multiple machines, you’ll want to make sure you’re running the same version on all of them.