Hi, first of all thanks for what you’ve done so far. it’s beautiful software truly.
As i do a lot of writing writing for screen / blog, and research, i constantly try out various methods. The one thing that sticks out to me is that i will have pieces i work on for a long time, and sometimes i wish that i could create an aliasof a section, to include in another section, but that alias could change all of its clones. for example, if i used a character development section to build up a character, it would be nice if you could just highlight a section, and use option-drag to make an alias in a folder called act 1. or that using a save the cat template, you could quickly create different arrangements of scenes to compare.
another thing i really wish for in this application is more “OSX-like” image friendliness, as found for example in apps like pages or outline. drag anywhere, text moves out the way, resize. and to have the option of limiting file size, perhaps a right click option to commit resized image at current size (for quick downscaling of images for draft) or for there to be an image import preference that globally constrains image resolution.
and last, would be really nice to have individual size control for sticky notes, i’m writing a story right now and have a lot of different cards i’m trying to organize, so my sizes are all as small as i can to fit more cards on screen(s) , but some of them would benefit from being able to see more of the index summary.
Just a few humble suggestions i hope that you can relate to, and i’m happy to elaborate more or to assist in ironing out issues with the logic.
thanks again, and much respect to this application that you’ve created.
Aliases: see Collections. This feature is all about making lists of items without moving the originals. There is a lot of depth to this feature, but the basics are covered in Step 14 of the interactive tutorial (Help menu). More detail will be found in 8.4, Using Collections, starting on pg. 80 of the user manual PDF. One simple trick that a lot of people miss: click on the collection’s “header” in the Binder (the one that is filled in with the collection tab colour) to load the contents in the main editor. You can even organise a collection on a freeform corkboard of its own. It’s a great way to set up work spaces that pull from resources in disparate locations of your project.
Have you tried any of this in TextEdit? Because that is more indicative of OS X’s image handling than Pages, the latter of which might as well be Microsoft Word for all it has to do with OS X’s text features. In particular, try taking an RTF file from Word that has an image and load it in TextEdit. Pretty awful, right? That’s just the tip of the iceberg, it will also toss out footnotes, comments and even some basic formatting. We’ve at least fixed those parts of the problem, but you can probably see how taking the step to desktop publishing levels of layout would require a massive undertaking that would be out of place for a program that is meant for writers, rather than designers.
That is already done, when you change the size of an image in the editor you are impacting its print dimensions (the pixels however will not be touched, just the meta-data that describes the relationship between pixel density and physical measurements). In short don’t use the slider unless you intend to change the size of the image.
If you’re looking for a way of keeping the editor clean and high-performance, consider using Edit/Insert/Image Linked to File…. This way you can keep your images outside of Scrivener, and hot-swap low resolution for high resolution when the time comes.
Index card sizes: we experimented with this a long time ago, in fact making index card height dynamic depending upon the amount of content within them. The result was kind of awkward unfortunately. Consider that these things are in a grid, and that grid is meaningful as it correlates directly with the order of items in the Binder. That means if you have one card with 500 words, you’ll likely end up with a bunch of blank corkboard for several screens before you come across another card. But even milder examples just look goofy and ultimately a bit pointless, since the row height is always set by the tallest card. On the freeform corkboard the concept would make more sense, but there are no plans to make it so you can drag out card sizes individually even there—you can globally adjust the card height though, have you tried that?