The History Window: An Unlucky Discovery

[Dr. Rick Smith]

In the wee hours of the morning, I was putting the finishing touches on a 30-page report that was slightly past due. I was literally on the final page, when the "History" window unexpectedly popped up. Honestly, I didn't know that Frame 9 had a history window. I was vaguely aware that it probably worked in conjunction with "Undo" and that it probably behaved like "History" in Photoshop - you could roll things back, and return them to normal to observe the results of changes. 

But I didn't really care because I wanted to finish my report. But for some reason the History window interfered with my typing. It wasn't exactly covering the text I wanted to change, but I couldn't enter text any more. 

 So I clicked on the "go away" icon in the window corner, expecting it to disappear into the palette on the right. It didn't. I got annoyed and did some more random clicking. After all, it was hours past bedtime, I was getting drowsy, and I was ready to be finished.

This is always a recipe for disaster, but I didn't worry. I'm good at periodically saving my work, and Frame's autosave has retrieved me from disaster countless times before.

My random clicking seemed to upset Frame - it replied with the swirling circle, which usually means "Go away, I'm rebuilding a book," or "I'm dead now." More clicking brought up the ominous Windows alert: "Framemaker is not responding, do you want to wait it out, look for help with the problem on-line, or take it out of its misery?"

I thought briefly about aborting Frame - I'd lose the last 20 minutes' or so of work, but I'd get going again. On the other hand, maybe this would all clear itself up in another moment.

Sure enough, the swirling icon disappeared and Frame was back in control. I quickly hit "Save" before it tried to crash again. 

That was my big mistake.

My attempts to make the History window go away had apparently rolled back all my edits since the last announcement of "We're discarding the history now." This was apparently several hours earlier. All earlier saves and autosaves were discarded - my most recent save had made the rollback permanent. 

So today I'm reconstructing all that writing that seemed so brilliant last night as I nodded closer and closer to the keyboard. And I've also been told that the customer no longer "really" needs the report due to the results of a meeting yesterday. At least I'll still get paid as long as I send them something reasonable.

What I find especially weird is that last year I finished a seven-hundred page manuscript using Frame 9 and never once encountered the HIstory window and its tender mercies. Just lucky I guess.

Rick.

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