Importing story files

Some of you may remember in a previous post I mentioned that I would be getting a new computer, and I was backing up my story files for Inform 7 in email attachments.
For some reason, while I am having no trouble downloading the attachments, Inform does not seem to recognize them or be able to access them. Is this because they were renamed while being uploaded onto the web, so when I downloaded them, they had a new name? Do I need to change the name of the file back to its original name, so that I can use the file?
What I am doing is I am reading the file with Microsoft Word, and then cut/pasting it onto the Inform source page. It’s tedious(the one I have successfully imported is 68 typed pages long–it’s my newest project, not even half done, and I have five other projects). There has got to be a better way, and I suppose it has to do with the file name…?
My new computer uses Windows 10.

Thanks

First of all, you shouldn’t use Microsoft Word to edit your source code, ever. It tends to be “helpful” about formatting and ruin your code. (Tab-stops in Inform are very important.) Notepad is better, or whatever your text editor of choice is.

Second, Inform likes its projects to be set up in very particular ways. The best way to transfer a project over, if you only have the source text, is to create a new project in I7 and then either paste the text in or overwrite the “story.ni” file.

Or zip up the entire directory, including the project and materials folder, and back up the zip file. Then you know you’re getting the same file arrangement back.

Draconis,
I don’t use Word to write the story itself–I was using it as a place to put the story when I downloaded it. Next time I will use Notepad. So I will need to cut/paste after all…?? How do I overwrite the file? Can I not just rename the file so that Inform will recognize it?
Thanks

Zarf, thanks for the tip.

Okay, I just now realized that I would have to have the whole project backed up in order for Inform to ‘recognize’ it…duh…thank you zarf. I still have the other computer, with all the files, so if I get tired of cut/pasting, I will do that. Thanks.

An Inform project folder contains not only the source text, but various other bits of metadata and scratch files Inform uses. So it’s easiest to let Inform handle that part.

If you tell Inform to create a new project, then save and close, you can go into that project folder (in Documents/Inform), find story.ni, and put your old backed-up story.ni in its place.

(Re Word: sometimes even copying and pasting through Word can mangle things, leading to very strange errors later.)

Thanks, Draconis. When I download the backed-up version, I would then go into Inform, create a dummy project, then go into the directory, select the story file(the only file under the source directory), click on ‘Organize’, then ‘delete’, then find the downloaded backup and move it into the source directory(via cut/paste–which I discovered can also be done in directories)? That sounds a lot more convenient.

You know this morning I tried Notepad, as you suggested, with the cut and pasting, on another of my projects, and it’s a lot less tedious. It gives me one huge page of code, took only seconds to cut, and then I pasted it into a New Project window, and it got the whole thing, without errors. I was stunned. I may go back and do this with the other one I mentioned, just to eliminate any hidden errors.

Thanks for the help!