Empty Templates

[holyguyver]

I have tried installing Scrivener onto the latest Linux Mint, both by .deb & .tar, & no matter what I do the templates always come up blank/empty, regardless to whether they are the ones that come with it or if I install new ones. Is anyone else having this problem & how do I fix it.

Also Scriver crashes if I try to import anything (pictures, video, audio, pdf, ect)

[TonySargeant]

Hello,

I have realised, after using Scrivener for a while, I have the same problem.

When a new project is created the template chosen is inserted within the folder created. Therefore
with a project called fred and the novel with parts chosen, the folder structure will be.

../Fred
../Fred/Files
../Fred/Files/Docs
../Fred/Files/ProjectNotes
../Fred/NovelWithParts.scriv (project.scrivx resides here)
../Fred/NovelWithParts.scriv/Files (search.indexes, user.lock, version.txt resides here)
../Fred/NovelWithParts.scriv/Files/Docs
../Fred/NovelWithParts.scriv/Files/ProjectNotes
../Fred/NovelWithParts.scriv/Files\
../Fred/NovelWithParts.scriv/Settings\
../Fred/NovelWithParts.scriv/Snapshots\
../Fred/NovelWithParts.scriv\
../Fred/Settings (ui.ini resides here)
../Fred/Snapshots

This appears to be a straightforward folder and file handling issue where the original Windows code needs some work to operate in a Linux environment. Linux treats the Windows directory separator '\' as a normal character.

I think the folder structure in the windows environment may be:

../Fred.scriv (project.scrivx resides here)
../Fred.scriv (project.scrivx resides here)
../Fred.scriv/Files (search.indexes, user.lock, version.txt resides here)
../Fred.scriv/Files/Docs
../Fred.scriv/Files/ProjectNotes
../Fred.scriv/Settings (ui.ini resides here)
../Fred.scriv/Snapshots

Which makes a lot more sense. I hope this helps the programmers nail this bug.

[holyguyver]

Here is a Scrivener projected created in Windows & a Scrivener project created in Linux so that developers can test them & see the difference that causes one to come up blank.
zip of the 2 folders:
http://www.jackkemplin.com/temp/ScrivenerLinuxWindows.zip

[nibor]

Hmmm... even Keith says in his Welcome Nanowrimo that the Nanowrmo templates can be downloaded for linux version.

This version seems to working really well except for this and spelling.

Seems like it's an important issue.

Anybody?

[ellarien]

It's a fairly well known issue, I think, that most of us have learned to live with. I have a workaround, but it does require having access to a Windows installation. In Windows, create a new project with the desired template and don't add anything to it. Open that project in Linux and save as a template -- you will then have a template that works on the Linux side. Failing that, find a friendly Windows user who can create the blank project for you. I suspect you could find them on the Web somewhere, and some of the fancy templates that get shared online are actually blank projects (.scriv) rather than template (.scrivtemplate) files.

[garpu]

If you search back, I'd uploaded a bunch of blank templates.

[holyguyver]

So any news on fixes to this?

[oneillkza]

Doesn't seem like it, and it's been an issue since at least 2011.

Anyway, here is a link to the post garpu mentioned with the blank projects to use as a workaround:

viewtopic.php?f=33&t=15971&p=112346&hilit=+templates#p112346

[AmberV]

I think the problem is with the zip library on Windows. It adds back-slashes to directories in the zip, causing them to make a mess and sometimes not even fully decompress with some decompression tools and on operating systems that use normal path slashes. This problem has been around since the early pre-release betas, and a bug report has been filed for it since then, so I’m guessing it’s not exactly the easiest thing to fix. I get this problem on a Mac as well, and I can usually just clear out the junk files with back-slashes to get the project functional, but I’m of course using a completely different unpacking tool.

With ordinary project backups and such you can dodge the problem by not using Windows Scrivener’s built-in zip tool to do the compression, but with templates the file is actually a simple XML wrapper with a zip blob in it, so using the built-in compressor when creating the template is unavoidable.

That’s the challenge anyway.