"no such file. . ."

Frequently, after saving and closing a new project to a particular directory (a non-Dorico Documents directory, in this case), I can re-open the project if I “open” it from within Dorico. However, Dorico gives me the following message whenever I try to open the same file from within its directory in Windows Explorer:

image

Any idea about what might be causing this?

Thanks!

This is only a wild guess. I am not a regular user of Windows, but I have experienced situations (some years ago and with older versions of Windows) where using reserved characters in a Windows filename caused odd behaviour. In my case, the characters were hyphens/dashes, apostrophes/quotes, full stops (periods), and spaces at the end or start of a file name. Reserved characters are used by the file system for particular purposes. The most familiar example these days is the use of forward slashes in a URL (web address) to indicate a change of directory (folder).

This Microsoft web page Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces - Win32 apps | Microsoft Learn gives a lot of information on reserved characters and naming conventions.

In your screenshot, the error message contains two apostrophes and some periods at the end. You could try removing them or replacing them with some other “normal” character and see if that makes a difference.

Another thing to try is to move the file to another location and see if it opens from there. One with a shorter filepath, such as directly inside the Documents directory, would be my first choice. Even though Windows has a filepath character limit of well over 200 characters, sometimes the operating system and applications differ in how they handle really long filepaths. Similarly with reserved characters. Sometimes an application will allow a file name to contain characters which the operating system will interpret, and handle, differently.

Good luck!

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Looks like Windows cannot see the suffix for Dorico, probably because ending a filename with a period has confused it, since period is the separator for suffixes, e,g, ‘foo.txt’'. Try a name without a period at the end.

This may not be right because you say Dorico can recognize it internally, but worth a try. Personally I’d avoid filenames with heaps of punctuation in them anyway, descriptive though they may be.

This kind of issue has certainly come up before in Dorico for Windows, e.g. here.

The problem is that arguments passed to Dorico at start-up have to be interpreted to see whether they constitute, for example, a list of files to be opened, and certain punctuation characters in the path name (e.g. commas) can throw this off, causing Dorico to think it’s trying to open multiple files and splitting the argument at that punctuation, which obviously won’t work.

Thanks to everyone, for your replies!

Just read the thread - thanks, Daniel - and found that eliminating a comma from my Dorico filename fixed the problem. Also saw that dragging & dropping the file onto the Hub also did the trick.

I understand, from the "No such file or directory" - #15 by dan_kreider thread, that there may be multiple behind-the-scenes Dorico operations at work that cause this, so I don’t imagine that it would be an easy thing to resolve; however, is such a fix still on the horizon?

Thanks again!

It’s not something I would expect to be changed soon, I’m afraid.

Okay – thanks for the quick reply!