General ⇒ Source file lost (.tex), but I have .dvi file...

[1cp]

I'm pretty new to Latex. Anyways, last week I copied and saved the .dvi, .tex, and .ptp files of my thesis to my desktop, just to make it easier to attach them all simultaneously to my professor.

Now, I think I made the mistake that when I returned to my work, rather than opening them from their default location, I opened them from the desktop and started working on and saving them there this entire week (I just opened them once and left it open the whole week).

So when it came time to send everything to my professor, I had forgotten this fact, so what I did was copy and paste the files from the default location back onto my desktop... not realizing that I had just undid all of my work. Somehow, fortunately, I managed to preserve the new .dvi, so I can still view my work, but it associates the old .tex with it. I can't seem to find the new .tex anywhere.

So I guess the question would be, do I have any hope of either 1) recovering my new .tex file somehow, or 2) being able to use the new .dvi to create source code?

Thanks very much.

[1cp]

I was also thinking a system restore might work if I can go back to yesterday. Do you guys know if that would work for a .tex file?

[sommerfee]

1) recovering my new .tex file somehow

This depends on the OS / file system, but usually the answer is no.

2) being able to use the new .dvi to create source code?

No, unfortunately you can't. You need compare the old dvi file with the new one [1], and need to maintain all changes in the source file manually.

[1] To make things more comfortable you could convert the dvi files to ascii, and use a text diff tool to get the differences.

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5301 ... text-ascii

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi,

welcome to the board!

Check if you editor saved backup files, such as with the file name extension .bak instead of .tex. If you are lucky and the editor did it, you just need to rename it.

Since there are more tools available for pdf than for dvi, you could convert that dvi file to pdf, do the same with the other version, and compare both pdf files. There are tools for this, for example:

• DiffPDF
• diffpdf
• xdocdiff which works with WinMerge
• i-net PDF Content Comparer (not free, but with trial version)

Stefan