zim-wiki team mailing list archive

[Jaap Karssenberg <jaap.karssenberg@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 4:41 PM, Mark Hughes (Zim mailing list)
<mark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I have been using Zim on two Windows machines and keeping the files in sync
> without problems. Now I have switched one machine to Ubuntu/debian (Bodhi
> 32bit non-pae distro).
>
> Copying a Zim Wiki from Windows 7 to Linux worked fine, but I'm having
> problems when files are moved from Linux back to Windows 7.
>
> SUGGESTED DIAGNOSIS
> I suspect that Zim tries to find a saved file for a reference, fails,
> creates an empty virtual file. Perhaps Zim on Windows 7 reads the Linux
> saved file and includes some control character in the name (e.g. looks for a
> filename "SomeRef\n.txt" instead of "SomeRef.txt")?
>
> BEHAVIOUR
> The reason I think this is that if I copy all the files from Linux to
> Windows 7 (e.g. using SpiderOak file sync) and then open Zim on Windows 7,
> the tree view behaves strangely, and suggests to me that when Zim loads some
> .txt files it fails to find the .txt file corresponding some or all of the
> references.
>
> Firstly is shows a limited tree - not all the subpages seem to be present.
> The tree does however contain all the nodes, and more (!), but most are
> invisible. The invisible nodes are revealed as I pass the mouse over them,
> sometimes going invisible again depending on what I do.
>
> I can see that there are duplicate top level nodes/pages in the tree, some
> with the correct subpages listed, others missing some or all subpages. One
> node (referenced in Home) has a lot of sub pages, and appears three times in
> the treeview. The first instance appears shows a lot of subpages, but each
> is empty when selected (ie. purely virtual pages). This I suppose is because
> Zim looked for the ".txt" file, did not find it, and assumed the file did
> not exist. The file does exist, so I am guessing that the filename is not
> matched for some reason because of the transfer from Linux to Windows.
>
> The filesystems show the same names, so I wonder if when Zim on Windows 7
> reads a reference in a file that was saved on Linux, it mistakenly adds "\n"
> or "\n\0" or something into the filename because of the different EOL in
> Linux. Just a guess!

File names are handled exactly the same. Only difference can be
non-ascii characters if you have different file system encodings
between the two systems.

> If I edit one of the virtual pages in Zim, Zim will save over the file that
> corresponds to that subpage. I can't however get the tree back to normal.

Did you try running "zim --index" ?

> It would be great to be able to move Wiki's between Linux and Windows. Hope
> this helps achieve that at some point!

Zim (should) fully that already. I use a lot of file syncing myself
and I know others do as well. So assuming the issue is more specific
to your setup. It might help if you detail how you sync the files:
copy from a share drive, dropbox, rsync, ...

Regards,

Jaap