Notes: broken links

I have just returned to a study topic that I was beginning to work on around six months ago and have discovered that the links in my note file are broken (it takes me to random places within various journals). I have undertaken further investigations and it seems that there are a number of other note files similarly effected.

I am assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that the resource files have been updated at some point and that this has resulted in the links being broken. I seem to recall the TJL files were updated a few months ago due to poor performance. It could well be that these notes all linked to the TJL.

If this indeed is the cause of the broken links, is this not potentially a big problem? I have already invested time in the disrupted note files and would be reluctant to amass further notes only to discover some future update has disrupted hours of work? It is important to me that I have confidence in the integrity of the note files (and clippings, for that matter).

I was wondering then if anyone else had encountered this problem and whether there was any easy way of rectifying the broken links (other than reading scores of articles in the hope that I can match up my speculative and somewhat random comments with the text)? I was also wondering if there was perhaps a better way of keeping notes that might make it easier to fix broken links in the future?

I presume Logos cannot guarantee that this will not happen again in the future.

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Rosie Perera

I've noticed this before too. Links are stored as offsets from the beginning of an article. So if text is added or removed between the beginning of the article and where your link pointed to, it will move. I'm not sure whether that also happens when stuff besides surface text is added or removed (links, for example), but I'm guessing that would be the case.

Yes, this is potentially a big problem that I don't think Logos has a solution for. They've recently started doing a new kind of resource updates where they just patch an existing resource instead of making you download the whole file again. Perhaps along with that should be the ability to detect if you have any links pointing into that resource, and updating them accordingly. I know that in Word, if you create bookmarks to certain points in a document (which can also be used to implement hyperlinks) and then edit text above that point, the bookmarks get adjusted accordingly, automatically.

Links that are subject to this kind of breakage are risky to put much time into using. I hope Logos will take some time to think up a workable solution to this problem. This is going to break all the reading lists on http://topics.logos.com too, which people have been spending lots of time on voluntarily.

Andy

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/222483#Comment_222483

Yes, this is potentially a big problem that I don't think Logos has a solution for. They've recently started doing a new kind of resource updates where they just patch an existing resource instead of making you download the whole file again. Perhaps along with that should be the ability to detect if you have any links pointing into that resource, and updating them accordingly. I know that in Word, if you create bookmarks to certain points in a document (which can also be used to implement hyperlinks) and then edit text above that point, the bookmarks get adjusted accordingly, automatically.

Thanks very much, Rosie, for the response. I guessed that this might be the case.

I hadn't thought of the reading lists and am very sorry that these have also been disrupted (particularly given the time kind volunteers have poured into this work). This also makes me wonder whether there might be a similar concern with highlighting (I have just started using highlighting in earnest) and clippings?

My concerns are two-fold.

Firstly, I do visit the forums fairly regularly (I am guessing that the majority of L4 uses may not) and have only just discovered this flaw. There is a danger then that people are, unwittingly, putting even more time and effort into note-taking only to discover somewhere down the line that their notes have been disrupted and their work wasted.

Secondly, I understood note-taking to be a key feature of the software. This revelation makes this function next-to useless for my purposes (my notes generally mean nothing apart from the text to which they are attached). It seems ridiculous that I should need to go outside of the software in order to make notes on texts within the software. It also seems ridiculous that the only safe way to locate the relevant passages is to painstakingly reference each note... longhand!

It would be good to hear from Logos with regards to this issue and, more specifically, whether it is a) on their radar, and, b) whether they are working on a fix...

I am more than slightly astonished that such a fundamental flaw has been allowed to stand in respect of such a key feature, particularly given that it is now over a year since release.

On a more constructive note, I was wondering what other people were doing in respect of note-taking? Other than inserting long-hand references, has anyone else come up with a work-around?

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/222772#Comment_222772

I am more than slightly astonished that such a fundamental flaw has been allowed to stand in respect of such a key feature, particularly given that it is now over a year since release.

Has this error been reported Logos previously? And do we know when the problem first appeared? I did start a thread with BUG in the title so we should hear something from Melissa or Bradley early next this week.

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/222774#Comment_222774

It occurred to me that another thing which might be affected by this is all our past typo reports. If those are tied to a particular offset in the resource and the resource has had other edits in it before they got around to fixing the typos (I fear typos are pretty low on their priority list; I've reported thousands of them in the past year and have seen none get fixed yet), then when/if they do ever get around to looking up our typo reports, they will scratch their heads and say "I don't see any typo here!" and skip to the next one. The typo could be several lines down and they might not find it.

This makes me very nervous. I've spent hours hunting for typos of a certain variety (e.g., scanning/OCR errors -- all words that had 0's and 1's in them instead of O's and l's) and reporting them.

Kevin Becker

MJ, Rosie - I think your concerns are valid but I think there's something else is probably going on here. The Journals put out by Galaxie have been causing problems with Logos 4. Over here: http://community.logos.com/forums/p/29909/221334.aspx#221334 Bradley said that there are different resource IDs for the same resource; it's entirely possible that the OP has switched from one id to another. Of course, this is just speculations but it seems unlikely that with all of the resource updates in the past 6 months that Logos would drop resource ids and thus breaking the link so completely that it would be reported as an unavailable resource! It's more likely that the links were made to an alternate version of the TJL. Andy were perhaps the notes made on a different computer or have you re-installed Logos since then?

One final thought, Bob has said that they made the highlighting anchor system very resilient to bug reports shifting words. I would also think that with the page numbers likely being coded in the correct spot it makes it likely that even severe typo corrections would not cause a whole-book cascade of errors like adding a word to a book in the publishing phase can force a complete re-pagination.

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/222809#Comment_222809

MJ, Rosie - I think your concerns are
valid but I think there's something else is probably going on here. The
Journals put out by Galaxie have been causing problems with Logos 4.
Over here: http://community.logos.com/forums/p/29909/221334.aspx#221334
Bradley said that there are different resource IDs for the same
resource; it's entirely possible that the OP has switched from one id to
another. Of course, this is just speculations but it seems unlikely
that with all of the resource updates in the past 6 months that Logos
would drop resource ids and thus breaking the link so completely that it
would be reported as an unavailable resource!

Ah yes, I
see that Andy had some totally broken links. I was thinking they were just
all taking him to the wrong place in the right resource, which could
have been accounted for by the issue I mentioned. But I have indeed seen
links move to a different spot after a resource update, because they
are anchored by offset, so that remains an issue of concern, though
perhaps only tangentially related to Andy's issue.

Andy

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/222809#Comment_222809

Andy were perhaps the notes made on a different computer or have you re-installed Logos since then?

Hi Kevin,

I do have a laptop and desktop so I cannot be certain which computer I made the original links on. To further complicate matters, I suspect that I have undertaken at least one complete reinstall during the period in question (a power failure blew the motherboard on the desktop). However, I am fairly sure of the following (some of which respond to M.J.'s questions),

The effected notes were created between eight months and a year ago;
I have only just noticed the disruption, but no recent notes (i.e. within the past six months) are effected;
I am 95% sure that all of the effected notes pertain to TJL;
Only a few of the notes are completely broken, as much as I can tell, most seem to lead elsewhere within the journal;
Clippings (even those made at the same time and from the same resources) are not effected.

To be honest with you, it is not such a huge problem if this is a one off issue associated with a specific problem with a limited collection of resources. If this is the case, we can presumably be generally confident that the note-taking function is reliable and stable.

Thanks once again, Kevin, M.J. and Rosie, for you kind assistance.

Andy

David Paul

I have a solution to your problem...it's called Logos/Libronix 3...an absolutely fabulous program that does all kinds of things with Logos notes that L4 can only dream of. If NOTES are a huge part of your study, then you should be using L3 as your main program...period. L4 cannot and apparently never will match what L3 can do because there doesn't seem to be the will to have L4 do what L3 can do. For my part, as much as Logos's tremendous search capability is a major factor in why I use Logos software, the Notes function of L3 is FAR AND AWAY the most important part of the program for me. If I had to erase either L3 or L4 from my hard drive forever, it would be "sayonara L4". I would lose a lot, but not nearly as much as I would lose if L3 was taken from me.

I remember when L4 came out, people were jubilantly posting to these forums stuff like "I just erased L3 from my computer!" I kept asking myself "Why???" To me, it was a lot like saying, "I got my new golf cleats today!!! My tennis shoes and slippers just went in the trash!"

Long Live L3!!!