Scrivener Project Crashes Upon Opening--DESPERATE!

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

Help! I have 50 pages of my book due tonight and the project (as well as the copy I made) opens and then closes immediately, causing Scrivener to quit unexpectedly. The searches indices are getting rebuilt each time I try opening my project (or the copy), and I now have two Relocated Items folders on my desktop. An old version of the project is fine. Any suggestions are much appreciated, thanks.

2

I think we posted at the same time! I’m having a similar issue, but I don’t even get the building index message.

One thing I saw elsewhere was to hold down the Shift key and then try opening the file (holding down the Shift key the whole time while it opens). Not sure what that does or whether it’ll fix your issue, but no harm trying?

3

I read that as well and did try. Scrivener opens. I can load an old project, but the current one crashes it.

4

OK, I’m doing a lot of clicking around–maybe this will work on yours?

I went to my desktop folder with the Scrivener files in it. I held down Control and clicked on the file, then clicked on “Show Package Contents.” From there I went to Files --> Data, then searched through the folders. Each folder has a content.rtf file and if you click on it, you can get a preview of what’s in the file. If I opened that.rtf file, it brought up the Scrivener file as a Text doc.

At least then you could copy/paste from the Text file into a new Scrivener doc or a Word doc?

5

Each document you have in the binder is a .rtf file. Then there is an xml file called .scrivx which holds the structure of the binder and tells Scrivener where the different .rtf files fit. So it’s actually possible to reconstruct a project even if it breaks down.

6

If a single project crashes Scrivener, the first thing to try is resetting the project’s display settings:
scrivener.tenderapp.com/help/kb … y-settings

Katherine

7

Katherine, thank you! It seems that reseting the project’s display settings fixed the problem enough that I can go in and manually return my settings to how I had them. I really appreciate you chiming in here.

mdith86–Have you tried this?