John Wargo

OK, here’s final article in the series. So far I’ve talked about the method I used to backup my manuscript files through every part of the editing process and I’ve covered how I synchronized the files between my laptop and desktop computers as I went. In today’s installment, I’m going to address a problem I created by synchronizing the files between systems. It caught me by surprise several times and forced me to make changes to how I managed the files. Ultimately it’s the reason I decided to write the article series.

As I worked through the manuscript, I regularly moved things around within the chapters. I would reorder chapters as I worked through them to get the right order (Research In Motion never, ever, agreed with the placement of chapter 3) and I would rework the order of the content within the chapters as well. On top of all that, as I neared completion of the manuscript and started seeing how long it was going to be (it was approaching 600 pages and I only had a contract for a 400 page book) my editor started whacking images (a lot of them) in order to get the book within the budgeted size.

Anyway, one of the things I noticed when I started giving my editor updated copies of each chapter was that the image files for the chapter were getting overwritten with different (wrong) image files. I scratched my head for a while then finally figured out what was going on.

Before I tell you what happened, I have to give you a little background. My publisher required that the manuscript be delivered using a particular Word template and a special naming convention for all files. The chapter content would be in a document named using the author’s initials and the chapter number. So, for my book, the chapter files were called JMW01, JMW02, JMW03, and so on. Image files used in the chapter would be named in a similar manner – in this case, it was chapter file name plus an underscore and the sequential image number. So, using the previous example as a guide, the image files for the chapter would be named JMW01_01.jpg, JMW01_02.png, JMW01_03.jpg and so on. It allows for a very structured arrangement for the chapter files and I’m sure saves the editor and production people a lot of time and saved them from extra work trying to make sure they have all the image files required for the book.

Now that you understand how the chapter’s files were named; take a look at the following folder listing:

Folder listing of C:\Users\John Wargo\Documents\Publications\FoBAD\JMW01\

Backup of JMW01.wbk    8/11/2009 9:05:59 AM    40 kb
JMW01.docx             8/11/2009 9:06:30 AM    41 kb
JMW01.zip              8/11/2009 9:06:36 AM    377 kb
JMW01_01.jpg           4/10/2009 7:25:20 AM    65 kb
JMW01_02.jpg           4/1/2009 7:24:41 PM     63 kb
JMW01_03.jpg           4/10/2009 7:24:41 PM    63 kb
JMW01_04.jpg           4/1/2009 7:37:29 AM     73 kb
JMW01_05.jpg           4/15/2009 7:47:13 AM    71 kb

As I was removing image files from the manuscript and renaming subsequent files behind it, I was creating a situation where Second Copy thought it was doing the right thing by replacing the local copy of a file with the backed-up copy from the server. Here’s what happened…

Say for example I needed to remove image 1 (JMW01_01.jpg) from the manuscript; it was something that wasn’t that important for the book and because of space constraints my editor has asked me to remove it. Now, once the file was been removed, I had to rename all of the following image files so there’s a consistent naming scheme for everything. So, removing the first image file and renaming all of the other files (quite a pain I might say) would result in the following folder listing:

Folder listing of C:\Users\John Wargo\Documents\Publications\FoBAD\JMW01\

Backup of JMW01.wbk    8/11/2009 9:05:59 AM    40 kb
JMW01.docx             8/11/2009 9:06:30 AM    41 kb
JMW01.zip              8/11/2009 9:06:36 AM    377 kb
JMW01_01.jpg           4/1/2009 7:24:41 PM     63 kb
JMW01_02.jpg           4/10/2009 7:24:41 PM    63 kb
JMW01_03.jpg           4/1/2009 7:37:29 AM     73 kb
JMW01_04.jpg           4/15/2009 7:47:13 AM    71 kb

Now, knowing that Second Copy has been diligently copying all of the files up to the server, it already has a copy of JMW01_01.jpg up on the server and, because of the renaming of the local files, has a different file date and time than the one on my local hard drive (remember, it used to be JMW01_02.jpg and it had a newer file date/time). The next time Second Copy runs, it’s going to see that the server copy of the file has a newer date/time stamp than the one on my local hard drive. It’s going to replace the local copy of the file (the former JMW01_02.jpg) with the newer file from the server (the former JMW01_01.jpg).
When Second Copy gets done with its sync, the old JMW01_02.jpg (now called JMW01_01.jpg) will be replaced by the original JMW01_01.jpg from the server). Because JMW01_03.jpg has replaced JMW01_02.jpg (due to me renaming the files) the old JMW01_02.jpg is gone, deleted by Second Copy as it copied the old JMW01_01.jpg down from the server. Ouch! This created quite a mess.

Not only was this process screwing up the files, it was also deleting files that I ultimately needed later. Very painful! It was a lot of work to completely rebuild the file structure every time this happened. I had to rename the files back to where they belonged and retrieve (hopefully) the right version of the archive. Since it might be some time before I noticed the problem I created, I would have to go back archive by archive until I found the one that contained the right version of the file I needed. I was frantically trying to finish the manuscript on schedule and keep my employer and my wife happy and now I’d created more work for myself. Crikey!

Note: if the file extensions for the renamed files were different (a .tif file instead of a .jpg file for example) then this would not have created a problem for me. Second Copy would have copied down the old .jpg file and left the .tif file in place. The folder listing would still be broken, but it would be an easier problem to fix.

OK, I identified the problem, developed a method for recovering from it, but the next question I had to answer was: ‘how do I keep this from happening again?’ The answer of course is to reset all of the files to the same date/time before allowing Second Copy to do its thing. If all files are set with the current date/time stamp, there will be no ‘newer’ versions of the files for Second Copy to find. Since I synchronized before I started working and I know this should be the ‘reference’ version of the files, there’s no risk in doing this.

If any of you are old Turbo Pascal developers, you may remember that Borland shipped a little DOS program called touch.com that could be used to reset the date and time stamp of files. Apparently it’s an offshoot from a Unix command of the same name. Anyway, it was a very useful utility and I immediately thought of it for my solution to this problem. The problem is that it’s a DOS program and this was Windows (Vista 64-bit). I probably could have dug up an old copy of the program (yes, I still had my old Turbo Pascal discs) but I was afraid I would encounter side-effects using it so I started looking for something else.

Well, I was reading O’Reilly’s Windows Vista Annoyances: Tips, Secrets, and Hacks at the time and came across a reference to a product from Creative Element called ‘Power Tools’. They had a little utility that would allow me to easily change the date and time for a set of selected files. In an excited frenzy, I downloaded the tools, installed them and went to work.

I quickly encountered a problem – I was running Vista 64 and the Power Tools ‘worked’ with that version of Windows, but there were some limitations. In order to be able to use this tool, I had to do it in the 32-bit version of Windows Explorer. Not a big deal, I located the icon for that version of Explorer and went to work.

To use the utility, you open Windows Explorer, select the files you want to manipulate the right-click to bring up a list of options. Select ‘Change Date’ from the list of options and you will be presented with a dialog similar to the one shown in the following figure.

Figure 1

In this case, I change all date/time stamps (created, modified an accessed) and set them all to the current time. Once everything’s set the way I needed it, I would click the ‘Accept’ button to commit the changes. The following listing shows the results.

Folder listing of C:\Users\John Wargo\Documents\Publications\FoBAD\JMW01\

Backup of JMW01.wbk    8/11/2009 9:05:59 AM    40 kb
JMW01.docx             5/20/2010 7:54:33 AM    41 kb
JMW01.zip              8/11/2009 9:06:36 AM    377 kb
JMW01_01.jpg           5/20/2010 7:54:33 AM    65 kb
JMW01_02.jpg           5/20/2010 7:54:33 AM    63 kb
JMW01_03.jpg           5/20/2010 7:54:33 AM    63 kb
JMW01_04.jpg           5/20/2010 7:54:33 AM    73 kb
JMW01_05.jpg           5/20/2010 7:54:33 AM    71 kb

Problem solved! I’d only selected the manuscript files, not the local zip archive I would send to my editor or the backup Word created. That’s why some of the files have different time stamps. All of the manuscript files though are set with the same time stamp which was what I needed to solve this problem.

Look for other articles in the series:
Writing a Book, Part 1 = Getting Started
Writing a Book, Part 2 – Batch Archiving
Writing a Book, Part 3 – Synchronizing Files

This article is the third in a series about some of the technical hurdles I faced while trying to write BlackBerry Development Fundamentals on my laptop (while on the road) and my desktop (when at home).  I’m trying to focus on the technical solutions I implemented so that others who begin writing a manuscript can benefit from my experience.  The first article in the series laid out an overview of the problems and the technical solutions I selected to solve them. The second article covered how I was able to ensure that I had a backup copy of every edit I’d made to the manuscript. This article covers how I synchronized the files between my two systems and, spoiler alert, caused some problems by doing so.

Looking at the site’s statistics, it’s clear that not many of you are interested in this topic – I’m only getting a few hits on the articles. I’m going to wrap up this series this week (hopefully) then move on to some more interesting topics. In the mean time, here we go…

As I mentioned in one of the earlier articles of this series, while I was working on the book, I spent a fair amount of time on the road. It was ultimately a good thing since I was able to work long nights in the hotel room and make better progress on the manuscript without feeling guilty about ignoring my family. Because of this, I needed some way to work on the manuscript from my laptop and my desktop, but I didn’t want to store the files up on a server somewhere – I wanted them physically on whichever system I was working on so that I could access them even if I didn’t have network connectivity (which wasn’t that often, but I didn’t want to have to worry about it).

While Windows has the ability to synchronize files with a server, it wouldn’t work in my case because my laptop connected to my work domain and my desktop system didn’t. I didn’t want to have to deal with network domain issues. The solution I selected for this problem is a piece of software I’ve been using for years now called Second Copy. Second Copy is an award winning synchronization and backup tool that has supported me very well for a great many years. I use the solution to synchronize each system with a Windows server I have in my home office (The server is called Dinsdale; Monty Python fans might recognize the name) but it can also be used to write files to removable media.

The way I use this solution is to regularly synchronize the contents of my desktop system’s ‘My Documents’ folder to a dedicated drive I have in Dinsdale for backups. Since my laptop was to be used primarily for work purposes, I only synchronized the contents of my laptop’s ‘FoBAD’ folder (described in the second article in the series) with the corresponding folder on Dinsdale.

At first, I’d have the synchronization run every two hours, but before long I was getting regularly yelled at by Second Copy as it was trying to synchronize a file I currently had open. I later switched the process so my desktop would synchronize every morning at 6:00 AM (way before I was ever up working on the manuscript) and my laptop would synchronize on startup (as soon as I turned it on after returning from a trip) and every night at about 11 or midnight. With this in place, I had everything synchronizing nicely between the systems and it wasn’t until much later that I realized I’d inadvertently created a problem by using this setup. The problem wasn’t related to Second Copy, it had to do with some rearranging of files I was doing as I worked with the book’s chapters. I’ll explain more about this in the next installment of this series called Writing a Book, Part 4 – Fixing File Synchronization Errors. Stay tuned.

Just in case you’re interested in how Second Copy works, I’m going to show below how I setup the synchronization process in the program. When you install Second Copy, it launches on startup and puts a little application in the Windows system tray. It sits there patiently waiting for a scheduled job to begin then kicks off the process at the appropriate time and takes care of my file synchronization needs for me.

To setup a job, you have to create a profile; a profile in Second Copy defines actions taken upon a particular file folder on a computer system Second Copy has access to. The figure below shows the profiles I have defined on my desktop system.

Figure 1

When you create a new profile, Second Copy walks you through a wizard that allows you to select all of the options for the job. The first step in the wizard allows you to select Express or Custom setup for your profile. With Express setup, you’re presented with amore simplified menu of options to use for your profile – this option is for inexperienced users who just want to get something done without looking at every possible option. For the profile I’m setting up here, I’m going to select the Custom option (as shown in the following figure) and click the ‘Next’ button.

Figure 2

The wizard will next prompt you to select the source folder you will be copying using Second Copy.

Figure 3

You can then select to copy all files and folders or only a specific set of files and folders.

Figure 4

Once the source files have been selected, the next step is to select the destination folder for the copied files.

Figure 5

Of course, if the destination folder does not exist, the program prompts you before creating it.

Figure 6

Once the program knows which files it needs to copy and where to copy them to, you’re next prompted to specify when the job sill be scheduled to run. As shown below, you have the ability to specify a specific schedule but also to execute on certain triggers. You can also omit specific days if for example you don’t want the job to run on weekends or run every other day.

Figure 7

In the next step, you’re prompted to select the type of copy used for this profile. If you know you’re going to make edits in another copy of the file like I am for this profile, select the Synchronize option. If you want the profile to merely back up the files, then select the Simple Copy or Exact Copy options.

Figure 8

Once you’ve selected the type of copy, you’re prompted to select options for the job. In general, I usually synchronize deletions also but ensure that I make multiple backups of any file. This allows me to keep a very clean synchronized copy, but also maintain copies of files I’ve edited or deleted elsewhere. With this in place, I have even more options for recovering from an error.

Figure 9

With all of the settings defined for the job, you’re prompted to provide a name for the profile and you’re all set.

Figure 10

That’s it for this installment, be sure to check out the other articles in the series:

Writing a Book, Part 1 = Getting Started
Writing a Book, Part 2 – Batch Archiving
Writing a Book, Part 4 – Fixing File Synchronization Errors

As I mentioned in the first article in this series (here), I needed a way to have a sort of version control system (VCS) without installing a version control system. I wanted something simple, something that would work regardless of whether I was connected to a network. What I decided to do was use the batch file processing capabilities of WinZip to create complete backups of the manuscript (including all documents and images). With this system in place, I could execute the batch process at the end of any editing session (or in the middle if I had a lot of changes) and have a complete backup of everything in case I needed to revert to some older version or dig up some old content I’d deleted and shouldn’t have.

Before I begin, it’s probably important to let you know that while I was working on the manuscript and before I had a contract with a publisher, my working title for the book was Fundamentals of BlackBerry Application Development. Throughout this article and others in the series, you’ll probably notice that I named everything with the abbreviated version of the title: FoBAD. What’s funny though is that I also registered a web domain for the book as a placeholder. All of the options I wanted were already taken, so I went ahead and registered bbdevfundamentals.com. I figured I’d grab that domain and later, when I had the final title, at least I’d have a domain to use if the one connected to the official title was taken. As I negotiated with the publisher for the title, imagine my surprise when the final name my publisher came up with was BlackBerry Development Fundamentals which, when abbreviated, matched the name of the domain I already secured for the book’s site.

The requirements for the solution were:

Now let’s dig into how to setup the batch process I needed for my project. When you open any of the later versions of WinZip in Classic mode, you’ll see a window similar to the one shown in Figure 1. You’ll need to click on the ‘Backup’ tab to expose the options you need to create batch processes.

Figure 1

As highlighted in the figure, select ‘Create’ to create a new backup job. WinZip will prompt you to provide a file name for your backup job. I suggest you put the job somewhere else than the folder you will be backing up. Use either you’re my Documents folder or, as shown in the figure, a folder immediately above the folder you will be backing-up. In this case, I named the file FoBAD Backup.

Figure 2

With the WinZip job created, it’s time to start configuring the settings for the backup archive. WinZip uses a wizard metaphor for setting up jobs, so you’ll be stepping through multiple screens as the job’s settings are defined.

In the next part of the wizard, you’re prompted to identify the files and folders that are included and excluded from the backup job.  In this case, I want to backup the contents of my FoBAD folder, but I don’t want to have to store my backups somewhere else. So, I’m including the FoBAD folder but excluding my Backup folder (as shown in Figure 3. For the manuscript, I also had a folder where I stored all of the source code and research documentation I used as reference for the book. Since the content of that folder never got updated (only new items added to it) I didn’t feel the need to include those files in my backup – it would take up too much hard drive space to be useful and I can always replace the content through an internet search. You can see the folders I’m excluding by looking for the ‘Exc+Sub’ in the Action column in the figure.

Figure 3

Click the ‘Select items…’ button to pick the items that are included and excluded from the backup job. The file selection dialog is shown in Figure 4. Place a check mark on the files or folders you want included.

Figure 4

In the next step of the wizard, you can select which type of backup being performed. For my manuscript backup, I selected a normal backup which grabs all files regardless of the file’s archive attribute setting. You can also use settings that allow for an incremental backup, differential backup or an update (refresh the contents of an existing backup archive).

Figure 5

Next the wizard prompts you to select some additional settings for the archive. I like to use the selection for relative folder information – that way I don’t end up with the full folder path in my archive. With relative folders set, only the folder structure information below the starting folder is included with each file.

Figure 6

In the next step is where the batch processing capabilities of WinZip become most useful. As you can see in Figure 7, you can specify a root file name for the backup (in the ‘Zip File Name’ field) then append the current date and/or time to the file name as well.

Figure 7

This feature supports additional options as shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8

You can also click the ‘Subfolder Options…’ button to specify the output folder options shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9

Or you can click the ‘Special Folders…’ button to specify the output folder options shown in Figure 10

Figure 10

Clicking the next button gives you a summary of the job’s settings as shown in Figure 11.

Figure 11

As this point, what I have is a backup job that backs up my manuscript folder but ignores the Backup and Research folders. The archive is called ‘FoBAD BackupFILEDATETIME.zip’ or ‘FoBAD BackupFILEDATETIME.zipx’ depending on which system I created the backup on. Figure 12 shows a snapshot of my Backup folder listing all of my backups.

Figure 12

Notice the difference between the file extensions on many of the backups. On my laptop I have WinZip configured for Legacy mode (standard Zip file format) but on my desktop I have the new and improved file format in use (zipx). I did this because on my laptop I needed to share zip files with other people who didn’t have a version of zip that supported the new file format. On my desktop I work in isolation, so the format of the zip files doesn’t matter.

After the job was all setup, I created a shortcut on my desktop pointing to the backup job. To perform a backup, I merely double-click on the shortcut and the backup launches, runs and closes when it’s all done. The first time you try this, WinZip will ask you whether you wish to execute or edit the job when it’s opened; be sure to tell the program to execute it and you’re all set. You’ll have a quick and easy way to backup any project so you have access to all previous versions.

Look for other articles in the series:

Writing a Book, Part 1 = Getting Started
Writing a Book, Part 3 – Synchronizing Files
Writing a Book, Part 4 – Fixing File Synchronization Errors

After I completed BlackBerry Development Fundamentals, I thought I’d write some articles that outlined some of the process I followed to complete the manuscript. What follows is the first part of a series of articles that document the tools and procedures I used to help make the creation of the manuscript as painless as possible. In this installment, I’ll lay out the issues I had to address and in subsequent articles describe each of the solutions I used to solve them.

Writing a large word document is not that hard, but dealing with a complete manuscript (and associated image files) was rather challenging. As I worked, I quickly noticed that I was going to have a problem keeping my chapter files in good shape. I knew I’d be working on the manuscript from both my desktop PC when working at home and my laptop while on the road. The issue then was how do I keep all of the files accurately synchronized between the two systems and how do I maintain the integrity of the files as I worked on them.

The first thing I had to concern myself with was what tool I would use to craft the manuscript. Since I’d written a complete, 600 page product manual for ADT in Word, I knew that I could easily do it there. Having written my first book in Word then switched to Adobe FrameMaker for layout, I knew that I didn’t want to do anything with the book in FrameMaker. I thought of using Open Office just for grins or perhaps Google Docs, but I know just how to put Word through its paces, so I knew I had to do all of my writing in Word.

The first thing I did then was created a folder for the manuscript and create separate Word documents for each chapter. Since I knew I’d have a different document for each chapter, I knew I wouldn’t have to deal with any issues Word had with large files. I had a pretty good outline of what I wanted in the book (the end book ended up looking nothing like it) so I thought I’d be OK setting up each chapter and plugging through one at a time until I got it done.

When I started the project, I forced myself to work on one chapter at a time, in sequence. I knew that if I jumped around, I’d never feel like I was making any real progress and I also knew I’d omit things. I started on chapter one then wrote each chapter in sequence until I completed it. That ended up being a very good decision and allowed me to demonstrate real progress to my publisher. Most published authors I’ve spoken with complained regularly about the schedules imposed on them by their publishers. I was already 6 chapters into the book when I received my contract from Pearson and ended up never getting a schedule from my editor. He got chapter by chapter from me in timely installments, so he knew he didn’t have to worry.

I made a couple of big mistakes with my manuscript as I started writing…

First of all, I put each chapter file into the same folder. This seemed like a good idea until I started associating image files with each chapter. With each of the chapters in the same folder, all of the image files were there too. As I started placing images into the chapters as I worked through them, it got harder and harder to navigate through the folder to get to later chapter’s image files. I quickly learned (well OK, not that quickly; I think I figured this out long past the halfway mark in the book) that the best thing to do was make a separate folder for each chapter and image files. That way, everything was together and it was very easy for me to zip up each chapter folder to submit a chapter to the editor for review. With the files all in one folder, I was able to right click on a folder in Windows Explorer and have WinZip package up all of the files in a zip file already named for the chapter (since the folder already referenced the chapter name). Once I got all that figured out, it became much easier to manage the manuscript files. If you’re writing a novel, you can probably put all chapter files in the same folder; if writing a technical book or a book with a lot of illustrations; use a separate older for each chapter.

The second mistake I made was related to the Word Template my publisher wanted me to use. I took a look at it as after I began the project and felt that it was too ugly to work in day to day as I wrote the manuscript. They had a lot of special stuff you had to put in there (like a separate style for the first and last bullets in a list) and I thought it would be easier to write in a generic template then apply the publisher’s template before submitting it for review by the editor. Wrong! As I got further and further into my manuscript, I started having to submit early ones for editing and found myself wasting a lot of time fixing a document (by applying the publisher’s template and applying all of the special styles the publisher wanted me to use) when I should have been finishing up other chapters. When you write a book, get the publisher’s template ASAP and start working with it right away – it will save you a lot of stress later (and ultimately shorten the amount of time required to create the manuscript).

OK, now that I’ve described the mistakes I made, let’s dig into the issues I had to address and how I addressed them.

The first thing I needed to do was figure out how I was going to be able to keep every possible version of every chapter’s content. Being a developer geek, you’d think I’d use some sort of version control system, but I didn’t have one at my disposal and didn’t want to take the time to set one up and learn its tricks when I just needed to be writing.

When working with deliverables for my employer or a customer, I always save a new version of the file every time I open it for editing and use the current date in the file name to keep them separate. What I do is append the date to the end of the file name in the following format: yyyymmdd. Using this format, the file names for a particular file would look like this:

Samplefile 20100131.docx 
Samplefile 20100215.docx 
Samplefile 20100303.docx 
Samplefile 20100421.docx

What happens when you do it this way is Windows automatically sorts the file names by date in the file name. It’s easy to do and automatic in Windows. It always surprises me when people try to do this, but use the date in a different format (mmm-dd-yyyy, mmddyyyy, mmm ddyyyy or ddmmmyyyy) because Windows will sort these alphabetically and December will come before January. If you’re going to append the date to a file name, do it in a way that saves you time later searching for the file (use yyyymmdd format).

Anyway, when it came to my chapter files, I didn’t want to use that approach. I knew that when I submitted the chapter files to the publisher that I had to have them in a particular format (author initials plus chapter number – so: JMW01, JMW02, JMW03 and so on) and I didn’t want to have to rename the files before I submitted them (remove the date from the file name). So, I had to stick with a single file name for each chapter, but still wanted to keep an archival copy of each file. What I ended up doing was using the batch processing capabilities of WinZip to create a file I would execute at the end of every editing session (or in the middle as well if I was making a lot of serious changes) to create a zip archive of the manuscript. By doing this, I used more disk space than I needed to, but had every single version of every file at my disposal. It was never any trouble to go back and find a previous edit of the file. I’ll walk you through how I set this up in a later installment of this series.

The next thing I had to do was figure out how to make sure an exact copy of the manuscript was available to me on both my desktop and laptop systems. I knew that Windows has the ability to sync files with the server, but I didn’t want to sync the whole My Documents folder – only the manuscript files. A very long time ago, a customer (Jay Luteran from Euclid Hitachi) introduced me to an award winning piece of software called Second Copy from Centered Systems. I’ve been using this software package for years and it allows me to easily synchronize files between multiple systems. In a subsequent article in this series, I’ll show you how I used Second Copy to accomplish this.

Synchronizing the files ended up creating a huge problem for me as I adjusted the chapters and moved things around; I’ll explain this too in a subsequent article.

Another thing I wanted to do was make a single file out of all of the individual chapter files. I wanted this file so I could easily look at the complete page count and occasionally print out a full copy of the manuscript so I could stare at it in awe. What I did to accomplish this was use Adobe Acrobat Professional to create a complete PDF out of each chapter file and use Acrobat’s ‘Combine’ function to merge multiple chapter files into one complete manuscript. I’d written a program to do (in Delphi) a very long time ago, but for some reason the program wasn’t working on Vista 64, so I had to use the tools available from Adobe. Unfortunately with my home grown program, I could save the file list with the project and easily recreate the file by launching the program and clicking a button. For some bizarre reason, Acrobat doesn’t allow you to do that, so you have to select all of the files every time – I wish it worked differently, but Adobe hasn’t been asking me for my opinion.

OK, that’s about it – that’s all I have to tell you now. I will be writing subsequent articles that dig deeper into the topics I described above. Look for other  articles in the series:

Writing a Book, Part 2 – Batch Archiving
Writing a Book, Part 3 – Synchronizing Files
Writing a Book, Part 4 – Fixing File Synchronization Errors