Hi Beta Testers,
Before we get down to business, I thought I’d share something amusing this week regarding a post I read on another website’s forum about ‘real writers’ only using Macs. Well, that certainly got my attention.
My first thoughts were along the lines, ‘How the hell did Shakespeare cope?’ Do real ‘artists’ only paint with oils? What about acrylics, pencils, charcoal, or heaven forbid - digitally? I heard similar comments years ago about ‘real graphic designers’ not using PCs, and ‘real photographers’ only ever using slide film.
The bottom line is that ‘real writers’ just write. Period. They write whether it be with a quill, paper and pencil - as Lee Child did with his first book, using voice recording, using a typewriter, with a computer, or with one’s toes; as a disabled user on this forum is forced to. The notion of any particular platform being more ‘writerly’ is just profoundly ignorant and nonsense. The bottom line is that we choose what ever works best for us and fits with our immediate situation.
A writer writes and chooses tools, methods and processes that best facilitates the elicitation of their mental thoughts and evoked emotions to some more permanent form - whatever that may be. A ‘real writer’ will write with or without a Mac or PC, with or without Scrivener, or any other fancy software tool. I’m fortunate enough to actively use and own machines running: Linux, Windows, and Mac - they all have their pros and cons and require continual justification to my wife that they are ‘not’ play-things and gadgets, but essential. I even have an old IBM AS400 mid-range mainframe gathering dust in the garage - now that was a machine. Had such ignorance suggested that a ‘real writer’ uses an AS400 I could have a least understood how they might have come to that conclusion - oh those were the days. But what would I know, I’m not a ‘real writer’ - my grammar (is it an ‘a’ in grammar or is it ‘e’? Oh, crap!) just read this post you’ll see for yourself:(
Wow! Can you believe we’ve been through 12 beta’s over the course of almost 6 months. Scrivener for Linux and Windows has come a long way. We can all be very proud of how we have all shaped this deceptively simple looking but incredibly flexible tool. I suprised myself, far from a ‘walk in the park’ I’d hoped. My hat goes off to Keith, the original genius behind the Mac version - what a bloody brilliant idea and indespensible tool it has become to many of us.
There are once again many fixes, in fact we have 15 known bugs left to fix after this release. As I have not been able to keep up with the forums adequately I would really appreciate it if once this release goes out that any outstanding bugs you find be reported against this post. That would certainly make mopping things up far simpler and faster for me and I apologies if you have to re-link or post about any bug that I may have missed - I’m sure there will be a few. Please however, ensure that if this is the case that you can replicate the bug in 021.
There is no such thing as bug free software - mathematically it’s virtually impossible to test every possible combination - at least in a typical life time; however, I’m sure that you’ll find this next release pretty robust with a bunch of annoying bugs squashed - I have provided a reasonably detailed list below of most of the things we have fixed in beta 021. We’ll be particularly alert for bug posts post release 1.0 go live and will certainly be looking to address those rapidly with updates.
Beta 021 will require a full un-install of the previous version of Scrivener. This is due to several reasons but principally because of the installer fixes. This will be the last time I promise.
Next week we are looking at implementing our performance fixes as a result of ours and your analysis, we’ll also look at implementing animations for tasks that are taking a while and fixing the auto-update dialog (it works, it just needs to be refined). Of course, we will continue to fix the remainder of known bugs and those posted on the release post. It’s going to be a very late night and huge week next week - let’s see how we go.
For the impatient - you can download both Windows and Linux here -> http://www.scrivenerforwindows.com
Bugs fixed in this beta release include:
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Crashing on Fullscreen with more than one doc selected in binder
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References arn’t remembered when a URL is not entered
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CTRL+N or Add menu execution a second time in Corkboard switches to a blank document in the Binder
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Ability to drag and drop keywords assigned in the HUD into a document through the binder or header
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Alt-Tab causes cursor to disappear in fullscreen
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Save as Template window is too tall for the average netbook
screen. It appears to contain a lot of extra vertical space in
the middle, so should be easy to compact by 50 pixels or so -
Custom templates do not write a Settings/templateinfo.xml file,
meaning that future revisions of custom templates require
manual input of icon, description, and title settings -
When changing the name of a keyword from the HUD, if the HUD
is in the middle of the screen, the decision dialogue comes up
underneath the HUD, and neither can be moved out of place in
order to make room for it. This could be especially troublesome
if the HUD is covering up the Cancel button -
Merge should be disabled when focus is in the editor
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Merge bug - Basic text editor merging appears broken
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Merge bug - Strange line-spacing is injected, causing text rendering glitches if you arrow around
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Merge bug - The synopsis does not concatenate
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Merge bug - Concatenation in Notes should inject an empty line as this
is a safe assumption to make. Otherwise you get run-on paragraphs between documents -
Merge bug - No snapshots are preserved (should get both A & B) snapshots
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Duplication does not preserve snapshots - Should spawn a new snapshot folder copy with the duplicated item’s ID.
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Collection views do not allow re-ordering - Not strictly a bug, but I’m listing it as one because the ability to have experimental orderings of component sections is one the principle advantages of having something like collections around
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Outline View - centered vertical justification
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In Outline View, when the Synopsis occupies several lines of text, the top of the text does not line up with the other items in the entry, e.g., Title, Type, Label, etc
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The Mac has a feature called: convert-to-default-formatting - now added to ScrivWin and ScrivLinux
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The Mac has a feature to lock the editor can be locked with View>Editor>Lock - now added to ScrivWin and ScrivLinux
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Scrivener incorrectly selects when using shift-select to select multiple index cards
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Importing a file, either drag and drop or via the menu, doesn’t take the imported file’s created or modified date but uses the current date for both
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File format updates to align with Mac platform
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I noticed that some ruler styles don’t seem to be consistently coming in from the Mac. The title alignment was left instead of centre, and all but the last line had dropped the custom tab stops used to lay out the text
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Current navigation of multi-view docs in full screen is limited to up and down arrows between document. Page up and down only move to bottom/top of each document - not between docs as expected
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Outliner: Implemented - Alt click on a twisty triangle to open all subfolders inside the folder automatically
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Can’t download Foreign dictionaries
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Installer Auto-detection of previous install
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Installer Fixed size issue in add/remove programs i.e. Scrivener is no longer a ridculous 1.25GB, but ~80MB on disk.
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Mac 2.0 features implemented: allow for Search for annotations/footnotes, highlight color and or words or text color and or words - very powerful:)
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Fullscreen cut and paste is fixed
32-39. Major revision of auto-capitalisation i.e. addressed your comments like:
a. If I leave a space after the word, before the end-mark, it will capitalize.
b. Please make my rebellious little Scrivener leave off capitalizing any word that doesn’t follow either a PERIOD or a PERIOD-END QUOTE.
c. I noticed that it won’t capitalize one-word sentences, i.e. wow! huh? drat.
d. I want to be able to leave the “s” after the dash uncapitalized.
e. In Scrivener, “undo” only temporarily removes the capitalization, which reappears the moment I type something else. I want to be able to keep automatic capitalization on, but be able to remove this capitalization if I choose to.
f. Any embedded punctuation causes capitalisation of the following character (if it’s alpha).
g. Any end-of-word condition will cause an evaluation of the auto-capitalisation of the current sentence. This means that if you undo the auto-captialisation, it will be redone next time you end a word.
h. When you have multiple embedded punctuation marks, re-capitalisation occurs only after the last punctuation character.
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Drag and Drop URL from browser has been implemented
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Based on substantial feedback, I think 10pt Courier is a bit too small—mainly because on many machines ClearType disables and the result is nearly illegible. 11pt, although it takes up a lot more space, will probably be a better default for most people. It’s not too large, and seems to be anti-aliased well, and will lead to fewer people having to figure out preferences.
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Many fixes for screen resolutions and auto-positioning of windows, especially tiny netbook screen users
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I’m one of the odd people who docks their Windows Start bar somewhere other than on the bottom of the screen (mine’s on top). When Scrivener first opens, the main window opens up with the controls underneath the task bar, making them inaccessible. (Good thing I know my Alt-Spacebar commands to move the window) - fixed
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Its still the case that sometimes the font will reset to something other than it should
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Is auto-numbering working yet? Many users says it’s not compiling properly - addressed.
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When using a variable such as the page number in a template, the compile recognizes the lowercase version but not the uppercase. The result will be that the $N variable will render as plaintext ‘$N’, while the lowercase $n will render properly as the number ‘1’. Some of the variables alter themselves when capitalised, like <$w> and <$W> return ‘two’ and ‘TWO’, which is probably where the bug stems from.
47-51. Many fixes for footnotes including:
a. This is with the compile for .pdf and .rtf options… When I select and format text as a footnote, and then change the compile option to include footnotes as footnotes, the text is included inline, and not as a footnote, in the compiled version. When the compile option is to include footnotes as endnotes, it is included correctly as an endnote in the .pdf, and almost correctly in the .rtf. (In Word 2007, the endnote number appears above the line and the text appears below; in OpenOffice Writer, the endnote number appears once at the end of the document followed by a single quote, and then again followed by the endnote text. So, almost.)
b. Many of my footnotes have italicized sections to indicate the title of a book or movie, and pretty much all of them have a mention to one or the other. I don’t feel it is, in any way, unreasonable to expect that footnoted text behaves more or less similar to we’ve come to expect with normal formatting tools, except perhaps that it’s possibly smaller.
c. Okay, it’s been over a month and several releases, but if anything, footnotes are working even worse that before. On the rare occasion when I can get them to show up, they appear as part of the sentence they accompany with no indicator that they’re a footnote.
d. When in the full screen mode it appears to be impossible to turn a selected bit of text into a footnote. The simple keystrokes (alt > r > f) do not work and I can find no buttons on the bottom panel.
e. The edge of the oval that designates a text as within or outside of a footnote is not always clear. I have accidentally placed periods inside of footnotes that were intended to go outside of them on several occasions.
NOTE: Extending footnotes over multiple lines can be done now by pressing SHIFT+ENTER. This is a work around until we completely overhaul footnotes in version 2.0 to be aligned with Mac 2.0 functionality.
52-54. Endnotes fixes address comments such as:
a. In the text, 11 is added before every footnote number (e.g. my notes 1 to 25 appear to be numbered 111 to 1125). They are not superscripted, and they do not appear to be linked to the actual endnotes.
b. Instead of appearing as a continuous list starting at the top of a page, the endnotes are divided into several pages and begin at the middle of each page beneath a line.
c. The notes themselves are broken up into many separate lines, with each line getting a superscripted number which bears no relation to the actual endnote number.
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Keyword Hud - It behaves like a System Modal window and not like an Application Modal window - This is an issue even without switching to other applications. This is both annoying and should be easily fixed.
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Keyword Hud - The Keyword HUD is the topmost window in Scrivener even when it doesn’t have focus. Other modal windows in Scrivener are under the Keyword HUD display. This means if you actively use the HUD and you’ve made it big you can actually find other windows entirely obscured by the Keyword HUD. This is particularly noticeable when you’re changing the name of a keyword and need to rename it in existing documents.
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Keyword Hud - The Keyword HUD does not remember the location or size within a session. The user-impact of this is that the HUD becomes tiny and changes the location on the screen every time it is reopened. This is super annoying – I encounter this far more often than I switch to other applications, and when I do switch to other applications I encounter this problem as soon as I switch back to Scrivener and reopen the HUD. If you’re not going to explicitly keep track of the size and location of the Keyword HUD you can at least not hide/unhide the HUD so it keeps track within the same session.
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Keyword Hud - The Keyword HUD is always in the way. The forth problem is the existence of the Keyword HUD as a HUD/popup window. There’s stuff that can only be done in the HUD (like changing the name of a keyword already in use). As a popup window, if Scrivener has been maximized it is always overlapping something important on the screen. – That is, everything in Scrivener is important, and needing to move the HUD around on a regular basis to perform common tasks is an inconvenience. I would like the same information to be available in a tab like the search results – ideally with the ability to split that pane to show both the binder and the keywords. (Though I’d be fine with one at a time, too.) As it is, when I need to use the keywords heavily, I wind up putting them right smack dab in the middle of my text. The fact that the place most out of the way is the middle of my text is absurd for an application that otherwise makes it easier to write.
(Comments: Hopefully now that it remembers geometry this user will feel more comfortable hiding and showing the keyword hud to get around this issue. The idea of putting it in the binder though isn’t exactly a bad one though. maybe a preference? or menu option? would be trivial to add/remove it from a vertical splitter in the binder itself (or have a copy of the same widget)) -
When I go to paste a block of text into the editor, it’s auto-selecting the word where I put the cursor and then over-writing the word with the text I’m pasting in.
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Jumping cursor over multiple lines
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Resize import images
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drag and drop images from resources into edit
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drag and drop images from files system into editor
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Pasting images into editor
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Updated various compile presets for outliner and folder titles
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Standard manuscript format - Standard Manuscript Format ™ uses underlines rather than italics, as that’s what many publishers want. Can we change the compile options to accomodate this
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Standard manuscript format - When I compiled the manuscript, I did so into an .rtf file. When I opened the .rtf file ( I also checked in print preview and saw the same thing), the space for the Chapter title (which according to the Novel MS format in Scrivener was to be half a page) was only about the space of five lines or, page-wise, maybe a tenth - definitely not the half page. The title page had the title of the novel scrunched up right under the table that includes the word count, name, address, etc. even though it’s said to be printed in the middle of the page.
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Unable to drag and drop an external reference — such as website/web address — directly into the document/project references pane within Inspector.
Fingers crossed, let’s see how we go.
Thanks again to you all,
Lee
Thanks for the heads-up about having to do a full un-install.