Missing interpretations

[Althea Day]

This is the second time I'e gone into the program to read with my private deck, one that I designed myself, and found the interpretations have been wiped out. It is tedious.

[Althea Day]

I've updated the Deck Service, and now I find the interpretations for two (at least, I haven't checked them all) decks are missing. What is going on?

[Programmer]

There is no relation between installing the Deck Service and you not being able to find your .reading files, I am sure that is just coincidental. Are you saying that having saved the interpretation as a .reading file you now find that when you open the file it is empty, or that you can't find the .reading files you previously saved? I have never heard of the former happening, so I am assuming it is the latter. The program would never delete anything without prompting you first, so I expect it is more likely to be a case of having saved them to a different location without realising it. Perhaps one source of confusion is that earlier versions of the program used to save these files by default to [Program Files]/Orphalese Tarot/Readings, but more recent versions of the program save to [My Documents]/Orphalese Tarot/Readings (this change was to make the program compatible with Vista). It is also possible to set a custom location for saving readings. The best way to confirm where they are being saved to is to open the Options form, press the button for All Decks settings and then look on the Folders tab.

[Althea Day]

Thank you kindly for replying.
The readings are accessible.
By interpretations, I mean the LWB and Personal interpretations for each individual card. Several have disappeared, but not all of them. I had written interpretations in for my deck in both places, LWB and personal, and they have been erased.

[Programmer]

OK, thanks for the clarification. There are few things more annoying than working on something only to find it has been deleted, so first of all let me say that I am very sorry you have had this issue.

I have tried to recreate the problem, but I haven't been able to, or to work out exactly how it happened. As you know, the changes you make are saved automatically as you move from card to card. The program doesn't prompt you to save the changes or press a button or anything, because this would slow down the process of editing cards and would feel a bit "clunky". However, I am guessing that somehow a situation has arisen where the program is saving the contents of the text fields when they are empty and overwriting the notes you had put there with empty strings.

I have just uploaded a new version of the program with an extra safety feature to stop this ever happening. After this change, the program will not update the text of the cards if the new text is blank. So you can edit the text, but you can't clear it by deleting everything in the boxes and then moving to the next card. If you do this and then go back you will see that nothing has changed. Of course, the user needs to have a way to clear the notes altogether if they want to, so I have added a button to do this. So now the user must proactively press the button and confirm that they want to clear the notes for anything to happen.

I have just uploaded this new version, it is 8.12.3.2. I know this doesn't make up for the time you lost, but I hope it makes you feel sufficiently confident to download this new version of the program and try editing the cards again.

[Programmer]

I am posting again because another idea has occurred to me. Maybe the notes have but not been deleted at all, but for some reason the notes window can't read and display them. The notes windows use a format called RTF to add formatting to the notes (for colours and fonts etc). If the notes were somehow incorrectly formatted the program would not be able to display them. I am not sure how this could happen, I suppose one reason might be if you had tried to edit the notes file using a program like Word or some similar program. You could try opening the notes files in something like notepad to see if they have really gone or if they are still there (or you could just send the file to me at administration[at]orphalese[dot]net and I will be happy to check).