Lost text unlinking text frames

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JWK

Hi - I'm a novice using 1.4.2. I linked text frames so that the text would flow from one to the other, but the results looked a bit confusing, so I unlinked the text frames and I've just lost two whole pages of text. The text just disappeared when I hit 'unlink'. The 'Undo' button on the toolbar is greyed-over, so I don't see how I can undo-action to get the text back. Any help would be much appreciated because this text is composed in scribus, so I don't have a backup copy as such.
Thanks,
James

GarryP

Hi James.

You shouldn't have lost all of the text just by unlinking the frames but I'm not able to replicate your problem as I'm using newer versions of Scribus (and these newer versions work fine as far as I can tell, as did previous ones, for me anyway).

The text should stay with the first frame in the chain. Have you tried editing the first frame - using the Story Editor (right-click -> Edit Text) - and seeing if the text is still in there but not displayed (for whatever reason)?

Your last save should contain the text in an earlier form unless you've not saved your document since you started. (That would be bad practice in any application.)

Alternatively you could try renaming the autosaved version of the document (from <document>.sla.autosave to, for example, <document>_backup.sla) and seeing if you can get back to where you were. This will probably only work if Scribus hasn't already autosaved over the last copy.

If the text really has gone then I'm afraid you might have lost it completely. It's a painful lesson to learn but I'd recommend writing your text in something else - a basic text editor is usually fine - then importing it into Scribus when it's ready to be formatted. That way you always have a backup copy and the editing is usually quicker.

If you're feeling a bit technical you might like to try and edit the .sla file in a basic text editor to see if you can extract the text from there - if it's there at all - but that's a long shot.

I hope someone else can give you a better answer.