A common question from PageFour users is how to go about moving PageFour and all their Notebooks and Pages to another PC. It’s a relatively straight forward process, though there are a few steps that need to be followed.

1. Download and install the latest version of PageFour to your new PC.
2. If you are running a licensed version, open the License dialog from the Help menu and enter the product key you were given when you purchased. This will have been sent to you via email, but if it has been lost or misplaced, contact me with the name you used when making the purchase, and I’ll track it down for you.
3. Did you set a PageFour password on your old PC? If the answer is yes, open the Password dialog on your new PC by selecting the ‘Tools | Change Password’ menu, and set the password so that it corresponds to the one on your old PC.
4. On your new PC, open the Options dialog from the ‘Tools | Options’ menu, click on the Miscellaneous button, and make sure the Location of Notebook Pages value is the same as your old PC. (This step is not critical, but it will make the moving process less prone to human error)
5. Close PageFour.
6. Locate your PageFour files folder on your old PC. An earlier blog post outlines how to go about finding this folder, which may or may not be named ‘PageFour’.
7. Copy this folder in its entirety from your old machine to the same location on your new machine. When prompted by Windows, simply agree to overwrite any existing files or folders with the same name.
8. Reopen PageFour on your new PC. All your old Notebooks and Pages will appear, and all customised dictionaries and archives will be in place.
9. Two default Notebooks, ‘First Novel’ and ‘My Notebook’ will have been created when PageFour was installed on your new PC. These can be deleted at any time.

If you still cannot see your PageFour Notebooks, the problem will almost certainly lie in the Location of Notebook Pages. This should be checked again to ensure that you copied the PageFour folder to the correct location, as it is very easy to inadvertently drop or copy into the wrong folder.

The above image demonstrates the correct structure of your PageFour folder.

A few weeks ago, Adobe announced that it would be relinquishing control of its PDF format to an outside body, and in doing so probably did more to ensure the long term future of Adobe Acrobat than any other single act. Nobody likes proprietary formats, and despite the almost universal acceptance of PDF files, and the multitude of software applications that utilise it, the PDF file structure was still under the control of a single company.

This is one of the main reasons PageFour files are saved as RTF, rather than a unique format of my own devising. When the very first beta was released, a proprietary format was used. Feedback on this point from early beta testers was negative, as no one wanted to be tied forever to a single piece of software, or to have their months or years of work exist in files that could only be read by one program. There was also the fear, as with any new product, that the company responsible could fail, or the product be abandoned due to poor sales.

Similar arguments were made against the use of any kind of database by PageFour.

By saving the files as RTF, these problems were bypassed, as Rich Text Files can be read by virtually ALL word processors. There was therefore no reliance on PageFour, or on the timely answering of support emails from a small company, should a problem occur - PageFour files could simply be opened and edited in MS Word, Open Office, or some other program.

Moving back to PDFs. Though PageFour itself does not contain any built in PDF capabilities, it is possible to use other PDF software with the product, and there is a multitude to choose from, many of them free.

Some time ago, I recommended PDFCreator, and I still stand by it as the simplest free product to incorporate a PDF writing feature into PageFour. It installs itself as a printer driver, which means that to convert a Page to PDF, you simply set PDFCreator as the Default Printer from the Print menu, and print the page.

Those of you with only a single printer linked to your PC will never have come across the Set Default Printer option on the Print menu, as it only becomes visible when two or more print devices have been installed. When PageFour is opened, the default printer is ALWAYS set to the Windows default, but this can be changed by simply selecting another printer or print device from the list. This changes the default only for PageFour, and only for the current session. Other programs will happily carry on using the Windows default.

If you do choose to install PDFCreator, you will need to close PageFour and reopen it for the changes to take effect. A point worth mentioning, is that the installation of PDFCreator also attempts to install an Internet Explorer toolbar - the reason for which escapes me. This can be prevented by unclicking the appropriate option on the final page of the installation wizard.

There are other, more sophisticated PDF programs out there, many of which offer far more options, such as merging multiple pages into a single PDF document - ideal for novels. These should be tested thoroughly - especially if you plan to hand over money - as not all are as capable of handling multiple pages and merges as they suggest.

The most frequently asked question by PageFour users is “Where are my files?” And the usual reason for asking is that they want to back up their data to CD or thumb drive. Though PageFour does archive your files automatically, this does not help you in the event of a hard drive failure, or your house burning down.

When you run PageFour for the first time, all your Notebooks and Pages, archives, and customised dictionaries are written to your own user-specific Windows Application Data folder. This location can be changed by you at any time. To identify the exact location of your files, open the Options dialog from the Tools menu, and click on the Miscellaneous button. The value stored under Location of Notebook Pages is where all your files are stored.

In the above example, my files are stored in the “C:\Documents and Settings\Darren\Application Data\IMBT\PageFour” folder.

If there are many user accounts on your PC - say one for yourself, another for your husband, and children etc. - and each of you runs PageFour, there will be multiple PageFour folders, all in each user’s Application Data folder.

Depending on your Windows file settings, this folder may not always be visible when browsing. If this is the case, open Windows Explorer, go to the Tools menu, select Folder Options, open the View tab, and make sure the Hidden Files and Folders setting is set to “Show hidden Files and Folders“.

Your Notebook Pages should NEVER be stored in the “Program Files” folder of your PC. This location is normally used by software as it installs itself, and often contains files that are needed to run the software. PageFour will by default install into this folder, and many of the files it writes here are used when setting up new PageFour users, so this folder should be left untouched and does NOT need to be backed up.

So which folders and files should I back up?

That depends on how often you back up. There are four separate folders, along with many sub-folders within your PageFour folder - Archive, Data, Dictionaries, and Temp.

The “Archive” folder contains ALL your existing archives, in some cases going back as far as a year. If you back up frequently, or to a location without much memory (a thumb drive for example), you may decide not to back up this folder. The Archive folder does not contain your most current work.

The “Data” folder MUST be backed up. This folder contains all your current Notebooks and Pages. In the example above, there are seven Notebooks - Blog, Business Blog, Journal, etc. The best way to back up these Notebooks is simply to copy the entire Data folder.

The “Dictionaries” folder is quite small, and only contains your own customised dictionaries, along with any auto-correct dictionaries you may have updated. This is not a critical folder, and you may choose to back this up only rarely.

The final folder, which may or may not exist depending on which PageFour features you have been using, is called “Temp”. You do NOT need to back this folder up, as its contents are temporary and of no great importance.

Do remember to close PageFour before performing a backup.

Is there a quicker way to back up?

Yes, there is. If all you wish to do is take a copy of your existing Notebooks, the quickest method is to go to the Tools menu and select Export Notebooks. This will copy all your current Notebooks and Pages to a location of your choosing for easy backup. In the case of a thumb drive, it will perform the entire backup for you, whereas if you are backing up to CD, exporting to a recognised backup folder on your local machine may help speed up the process.

Backing up your PageFour Data folder IS important, as hard drive failures and corruption can occur at any time. How often you decide to backup, is of course, up to you.

I always love receiving emails from PageFour users. Usually, these emails begin with a small compliment, quickly followed by a suggestion for improvement or a question about a particular feature. Occasionally (from those with a more troll-like disposition), the email takes the form of a rant about how PageFour is just like Product X, which is free, but if I added ALL the features of MS Word, they might consider buying it.

The suggestions for new features and enhancements I immediately add to my list, being careful to increment the common ones that pop up over and over again; the questions about existing features I answer by explaining the feature in question, and drawing attention to similar features that may also be incorrectly understood; the troll-like comments I do my best to answer politely, without letting my more sarcastic side come to the fore.

I’m planning on utilising this blog more fully over the coming months, and have decided to begin by talking about some of the features in PageFour that users often question. I’ve come to the conclusion that many existing users are not fully aware of all the features within PageFour, and that their use of the product could be improved by describing them, and the reasons they were implemented, in more detail. Commonly asked support questions will also be addressed in detail.

In terms of feedback, I always welcome comments about the product. Every time someone points me to the lack of a particular feature, or suggests a method of improvement, I add them to the future releases spreadsheet, and it is from this list that upcoming work is decided upon.

Recent suggestions and queries that caught my interest come from Tammy, who suggests expanding on the word count feature to encompass entire Notebooks rather than just individual pages, one of my new French users who suggests configuration files to allow the menus to appear in different languages, and from Mike, who brings up one of the most commonly asked questions - Where exactly are the PageFour files on my hard drive?

I’ll be starting with this question.

Over the past year, there have been a number of enquiries about the possibility of a Mac version of PageFour. My response has always been that the probability of releasing a version for the Mac is very low. I’m a Windows developer, and have been for many years. Despite having a lot of respect for the Mac software community, I have never been tempted to join. My training and working life have been focused primarily on Big Business software - an area that tends to impinge little on Mac users.

Every time someone queries me on the Mac, I point them to Scrivener, a neat piece of software, written - like PageFour - for creative writers. For many months, Scrivener was available as a free beta, as the product was still undergoing development, but version 1.01 of the completed version has just been released.

Definitely worth checking out if you’re a Mac user, as it does share some features with PageFour (the use of Snapshots being the most obvious). You can download it here, or check out the authors blog here.