Unable to work on older files

[Rui!]

Hello, all.

I had an older computer on which I worked; I did a couple of scribus documents in version 1.4.x (can't remember exactly which one it was); I've now bought a new computer, but before I saved everything important to an external drive. I installed the newer scribus version (right now I have the 1.6.1), and the documents are all there, but no images or text are showing. What should I do?

Thank you all for any help.

[PatJr]

yiks!
hope you still have that old disk drive
for what you want, you need
File>Collect For Output
then scribus will save a document and all the resources to a directory
the regular save leaves everything where it is and only references the location in the scribus sla file

[Rui!]

Thank you for the information.

Unfortunately I can't access the old disk, I formatted it because I'm going to give the pc to my daughter.

That's a real shame, does it mean that I can't even recover the text?

I found this:

https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/How_can_I_move_a_Scribus_file_to_another_computer_along_with_its_images%3f#:~:text=How%20can%20I%20move%20a%20Scribus%20file%20to,copy%20the%20entire%20directory%20to%20the%20other%20computer.

It seems to me like there would be more than one way to move files from one computer to another, or am I reading too much?

[utnik]

hi rui

if you didn't something special, the text should be there. (but a single line of text i. e. a title in a tight frame may not be visible, as the new scribus version with it's new text layout engine or a replaced font on the new computer might lead to a text overflow...)
with the images it is a bit more complicated. if you still have all the images, a manual recovery is doable, but might be time consuming. the situation is much better if all the images are in the same directory. in this case you could change edit path to the images in the code of the .sla file. ('search and replace' with a text editor)

utnik

[AdmFubar]

Thank you for the information.

Unfortunately I can't access the old disk, I formatted it because I'm going to give the pc to my daughter.

That's a real shame, does it mean that I can't even recover the text?

If you only have formatted the disk, and the partitioning hasnt changed, then recovery is simple. Use photorec to recover the data on the disk. You will need another disk with enough space to recover the data source drive data.

Versions are available for all major platforms
See https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

[Rui!]

Thank you all for your help, I solved it in a way that was easier than I expected. I saw someone in another forum suggesting opening the .sla file with a text editor and changing the version, but this on a completely unrelated question, mind, and that's what I did. I have no idea why this works, but it does: the images are there, the text is there, everything is correctly formatted, the color schemes are there, I'm so happy.