Importing old files into newest novelwriter

[rhiaro]

Hi folks. I've been stuck on v1.6.6 on an old operating system for an irritatingly long time. I'm in the process of switching over to a new machine and am excited to have the latest version of novelwriter at last... I wonder if anyone could give me any pointers (or a script..) for importing the older files? I'm happy updating XML by hand and so on if need be. It's just one project and not a massive amount of files.

I can dig through the changelogs for the intermediary versions and piece it together myself if need be, but I thought I'd ask here first in case it saves me any time.

Thanks!

[vkbo]

novelWriter should be able to open any project of any age. It is regularly tested against old XML version all the way back to the original format. Of course, you may want to make a backup of the project first just in case.

The format changed quite a bit in 2.0, but there shouldn't be any issues. Make sure all the status and importance labels are ported over since the way they are stored changed a fair bit too.

[vkbo]

Did you try to remove the entry in the Welcome list?

[vkbo]

The ~/My Project path is the default if you try to create a new project. Unless you've created "My Project" and opened it successfully, it shouldn't even be in that list.

[vkbo]

Another thing you can try in a terminal:

novelwriter --debug ~/path/to/project/folder

Does that work? With --debug you should also get some detailed output of what's going on. Look for WARNING or ERROR. Add --color if you want to make them easier to spot.

Edit: I'm suspecting it is silently failing to open your project and sending you back to the Welcome dialog. It shouldn't do that, so it would be good to find out what it's failing on so it can be fixed. The log output will help with that.

[vkbo]

Also, to be sure, this is what you're doing too, right?

Mint.22-screen0.webm

[vkbo]

Any news? I'm particularly curious about what happens when you run

novelwriter --debug ~/path/to/project/folder

in a terminal. I would like to know if there is a bug anywhere that needs fixing.