Got down to #author stuff, now that I'm retired and can devote time to the #business of #writing#fiction. First order of business: catalog the unsold novels from after the burn out that need revision and rewrites.
Turns out that disconnecting my Mac from my work VPN messed up my folders. I had somehow mapped (don't know the Mac term) my work Windows computer folders to the Mac, and when I look in documents it tries to find it on the network and fails. If I reboot, so long as I go directly from my user's directory to documents directory, I'm good. If I click on Documents in Finder, it redirects and I'm screwed.
First thing I did was copy all my writing folders to the desktop. At least I've lost none of my old novels and short work.
I thought there were 7 completed books, and I said so online. There are actually 9, three that form a trilogy and one novel with a sequel in the mix. There are two incomplete novels.
Some works are older than others. Pages refuses to open one novel from 1996, a fun space opera that possibly has the highest chance of early sales. I haven't tried the others. Now I gotta install Word, of which I am not a fan, and investigate programs that'll open the really old files. If anyone wants to chime in with suggestions, please do! (I can always find someone with a Windows machine if need be.) Putting Google on TODO. I actually have original copies of chapters from my Apple ] days, but thankfully I updated those to the Mac and to a new millennium version of Word in what were my PowerPC days.
Incidentally, there really are three novellas in good shape.What surprises me though? There looks like about 15 short stories, many complete because I see multiple submissions in the various folders. I completely forgot about these, and was sure I never wrote short-form.
@taur10@sfwrtr I started using Libreoffice when it was still Star Office. Every year or two, I see people cursing because the interface for Word has changed and become less useful & more confusing. Lately, it's like Clippy took over and unless Clippy thinks you're trying to "write a letter," you can forget it because the tools you need to write a letter aren't even visible. Libreoffice, on the other hand, has basically the same interface as it did back then. Oh, Libreoffice… Never change!
@stevendbrewer@sfwrtr Thanks for reminding me of one of the names from the past, as I recall the whole thing started as the free open source off shoot of a paid product, and has forked a few times, with LibreOffice being one of, and in my opinion, the best of the active forks.
@taur10@sfwrtr I got to know it primarily because my department had Sun workstations. But it was around a long time before then. I also had an Amstrad Computer that ran CP/M, but it came with LocoScript. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice
@stevendbrewer@sfwrtr Back when I had a Mac I remember running OpenOffice I think it was, though it might've been a different one, since I saw no reason to pay for an office suite when it wasn't something I needed too often. That and being locked in, just look at the stupidity that is DOCX
I saw no reason to pay for an office suite when it wasn't something I needed too often.
There's the rub. Office 360 is free with a small amount of cloud storage that can 4 times the amount of space all my novels and short fiction take. Whilst free is free, it's not always better. I know Word won't read the old files, so I'll give Libre a chance.
Every year or two, I see people cursing because the interface for Word has changed and become less useful & more confusing.
I've used #Word since the original Word on my original 512K Fat #mac I also used the original at work on an AT class IBM PC, maybe running the original Windows that was a DOS shell. I was as Word bigot. I bought every upgrade. As a novelist, I loved the feature called the Master Document. It allowed me to keep all my chapters organized and print them together.
Then Word got rid of it!
Since that time, I've never been happy with the changes. When Word started removing items from menus instead of greying things out, and then this ribbon craziness which messes with touch typing... Will the insanity end?
I have used Libreoffice at home forever. And it's not every year or two that I cursed at the changes in Word at work. It was constant cursing. I hate software that thinks it knows more about what I want than I do. I hate having to relearn where things are and how they work.
I hate software that thinks it knows more about what I want than I do.
Me, too. I am a navigator, meaning that I learn where everything is by experience, let's call it muscle memory. When the software tries instead to guess what I want, I have to pay attention to it instead of my work.
I hate having to relearn where things are and how they work.
Imagine having to relearn how to use a hammer because the head and claw changed depending on what type of wood it saw or whether it saw 10-penny nails or tacks.
Rant:
Change for change sake is as bad a progress for progress sake. You sacrifice the good for the new, which is just a different mousetrap. Bad design. Add new methods and new technology, sure, but don't disrupt. You sacrifice your existing user base (who's upgrading or subscribing) for the potential users.
Nope. Programmers in search of justifying keeping a job. I don't blame them. I blame the managers and design directors who are paid to know better than to let them f up a clean debugged design. Ultimately, I blame the CEOs and CTOs who want to "make their mark" and ask for new and better to show progress and justify ever burgeoning bonuses.
"You might find that Libreoffice is actually better at reading old Word files than Word."
Yep. Word can't read files prior to 1994.I finally got my links to my writing ironed out and content backed up into the cloud (what a pain), though it is in Time Machine, so I installed the newest Mac version of #LibreOffice.
I opened a 1992 file. Check.
I opened a 1989 file. Well, all the lowercase "a"s are converted to circumflex characters, but I can work with that.
I figured out (finally) how to search for dates on my Mac and found a story treatment named "The Revenger" (no extension, Mac naturally!). The date is Mar 25, 1986.
It opened with a few box characters, but otherwise readable. It looks like my attempt at an Andre Norton type SF space opera. It even opened "Tree Castle", which is or probably was a Mac Draw document. It was dated Jan 1, 1986. It's my oldest document. I've a screen cap below of the mentioned documents open in LibreOffice.
Yeah, for document conversion, LibreOffice rocks. The content of some of these old documents is amateurish; weird since I was already published.
@sfwrtr@alan@stevendbrewer Gotta love open source, usually people who need something that either isn't available, or costs too much, so they fix it themselves.
@taur10@alan@stevendbrewer
I do like it when they fix issues, though statistically speaking, for the few open source projects I've used and filed bug reports for, only one item got fixed after a few years. Often I get a snitty reply that suggests I fix it myself. Not implying everyone or even a small fraction of OS devs have that attitude, but the fixing of other's issues is pretty low priority. Of course, I got the same attitude of M$. But then, it's M$. Apple is a bit better (only a bit).
Pardon the rant. Retired dev recently forced as a last project to work on Open Source Zowe implementations—but no longer working!
@sfwrtr@stevendbrewer@taur10@alan LibreOffice can even open WordPerfect 4.0 files. The only thing it doesn't open is Pages, or at least it didn't last time I tried.
@trelane@alan@jredlund@stevendbrewer@sfwrtr IIRC, Pages files like DOCX are just a container, though Apple was a bit trickier with theirs, so it might take a bit before it's reverse engineered.
Unsupported ancient old #Mac word processor formats were a real issue. Fortunately, #LibreOffice, and their adventurous programmers, solved this for me. I thank them.
Outside of the Mac, you're stuck digging through a zip file with pictures, text, and... stuff..
Apple's thing is to ensure for the vast majority of their users that their software works all the time, every time. As a ex-programmer, I respect that. If that means controlling file integrity by being the only /writer/ of the file format, so be it. Keeping the format secret is a way to achieve that, which sadly means you can't write a program to read it. You REALLY don't want to debug what turns out to be a crap programmer's mistakes. Most users are as interested in the power user stuff we're interested in as they are in learning how to change the oil on their car.
@jredlund@sfwrtr@stevendbrewer@taur10@alan REALLY?! I was just about to trash a bunch of .wpd files which kills me b/c much of my life was in WordPerfect. Thanks for the tip!
@alexandrasweetie@sfwrtr@stevendbrewer@taur10@alan I stayed in WordPerfect until Word took over university and corporate discourse. WordPerfect zigged when it should have zagged. The choice was whether to do a Windows version or an OSX version, and they mistakenly went with the latter. Word and its massive bloated dumbness have ruled ever since. But we have LibreOffice!
Company I worked for, thinking itself married to Big Blue (IBM), fielded a major product (long sunsetted) to OS/2 before it "fizzled." I got to work on the NT then Windows port, often in a savior role. R&D without foresight wanted compatibility, so the made the same code support both, then transmogrified process-oriented code to threaded, then finally stripped the OS/2 out of the codebase. Should have simply rewrote for the new platform and sacrificed a year to get robust results. Wasn't allowed. Really tough for the developer tasked with making the code run without crashing. Me.
That problem with the file from 1989 (lower case a's becoming circumflexes) is worth reporting.
If you were able to attach that file to the bug report, there is a good chance someone could look at it.
I reported a user experience problem in a certain Libre Office Writer dialog about paragraph breaking, just this past summer. It was discussed, and got addressed.
I will look at the file with the "a" replaced by a circumflex in TextEdit first. This is the type of silly thing that just shouts Pilot error!" maybe decades old.
@sfwrtr@stevendbrewer@taur10@alan We also use LibreOffice at work (we also usually have some version of MSO but for me LO is the main tool) and several times I was able to "recover" old Word files using LO much better than Word. It's embarrassing that MS can't provide 100% backwards compatibility for their own proprietary format.
"It's embarrassing that MS can't provide 100% backwards compatibility for their own proprietary format." My reason to get [#Libreoffice thread.]
Not that simple.
A #programmer, especially at a big name house costs money, $150k or more, not including bonuses. (I just retired from 39 years #programming at an indie shop.) Maintaining backward compatibility? it's more code to test and—if it fails or causes other #code to fail—debug. It's more code to write again when management changes, changes the programming paradigm, language requirements, storage access, privacy standards, auditablity, or who knows what. It requires at least a dedicated programmer across the supported products, maybe a seasonal team when code changes, and for sure a slice of management time.
100% backward compatibility for what? The vast number of users have no files older than a few years, unlike packrats like me. Max 7 years is a best practice in business. People actually update old files or PDF and archive them. Problem solved.
Moreover... there's always people who work for respect and no money that will do this scut work themselves, maybe because they need to open old files or simply that they can, and make it available for free and nice comments. The LibreOffice dev team, if there is one, sees it as a feature to increase the install base. Remember that they get donations so it's not exactly work for free. If this external programming fails, #Microsoft is more than willing for these people to do tech support, or let them get sued or boycotted—and suck up the bad PR.
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