This afternoon, I opened up Scrivener to work on my novel and found out Scrivener had erased ALL the text of the file and repleced it with some weird symbols, as follows,
This happened in three different documents, two from the same project.
I’ve already cried my heart out because they had basically all the information about both novels and they weren’t saved anywhere else. The project Victoria was last edited yesterday afternoon, while the ABBI&JACK project was last edited a few days ago.
Can somebody please send me a light? I’m desperate and I don’t know if I’ll be able to rewrite it all.
First and foremost, go to your Scrivener project backup folder (Tools->Options->Backup will contain a button that will open that location in the file browser), and copy that entire folder’s contents somewhere else. Whenever you modify a project the oldest of that project’s backups gets deleted so that backups don’t overflow your hard drive.
Then, once you have as many of those as you can backup in a safe place, Try highlighting your test and changing the font. It appears you’re using “Junicode,” whatever that is, and that may not be a font that’s useful for writing. However that font was put into place, it’s hopefully the reason you can’t read anything. If that solves the issue for one file, there is a way to modify the font for all files in a project in a more efficient way, but I’m not going to clutter this post with those instructions unless your test is actually still there.
It worked! I’m so thankful to you, you have absolutely no idea. Seriously. I even got a headache from crying. You truly are my savior!
Can you explain me more about the font issue?
To fix it for everything in your project, first go to Tools->Options->Editing? (I’m on the beta, and haven’t seen the release version running on my machine in a couple of years, so the location may be under a different label). You’re looking for a Formatting tab somewhere that shows a short quote and has font and paragraph changing tools, much like the formatting bar above your normal editor. Change the font there to something reasonable that you like (and preferably, not a font that you installed on your computer, if that’s a thing you do). Once you’re happy with how the example font and paragraph settings look, apply those changes.
The above is a lot easier done than explained, so sorry for the wall of text.
Next, expand the folders in your project’s binder so you can see every document and folder within. Click on the first document. Scroll down all the way to the bottom, and SHIFT-click on the last document. Then use the menu Documents->Convert->Text to default Formatting (or Style? I can’t recall). That will give you a few options to check on or off. You choose how you want to change and what you want to leave as-is, then apply it.
I can only guess that you were using a font in your project that is no longer accessible to Scrivener, and the fall-back was this bizarre font that makes everything illegible, but it could also just be a glitch in the software that converted everything that you loaded into the editor. I’ve not heard of that happening, but software is complicated.