A grad student perspective

Scrivener Wish List
1

Great news - I use Scrivener for all my PhD work, along with Goodreader for note-taking, annotating PDFs, etc. Most/all the other students on my program with iPads use Goodreader (or Papers) in the same way, ie. as an e-reader/note capture app, then transfer files to a desktop for writing up. I’ve converted some to Scrivener already…

I concur with the posters who don’t see themselves using this for heavyweight composition work. Ideally, tho, I’d like to drop Goodreader when this comes out :wink:

Here’s what a mobile Scrivener would have to do for that to be an option:

1: PDF markup! Which really would be very useful in the desktop version, too - and PDFs marked up in Goodreader display fine in Scrivener as it is. The “summary” feature in Goodreader (extracting underlined passages, notes, etc. with page numbers) is INCREDIBLY useful, and I’d love to see the same feature in Scrivener (again, mobile and desktop).

This would make pulling the key passages, reading notes out of a long text, and ideally directly into scrivenings, a good deal easier. Right now I email the summary from Goodreader, then drag it into Scrivener from Mail.

Missing this would be a deal-breaker for me.

2: WebDAV. Might sound odd, but the main campus site architectures (Sakai/Blackboard) allow webDAV syncing (eg. of course materials); yes, Goodreader supports this.

3: AFP browsing and sync. I thought syncing only specific folders was OK-ish until Goodreader’s last update added this; really, it isn’t.

4: Option to auto-sync between the iPad and a Mac when opening a doc on either device, and both are connected to one’s home wifi network, again via AFP and without going through iCloud. If Apple let you do that. iCloud is all very well, and probably fine for syncing hella book-length projects even with just the free storage allowance - UNLESS you have Scrivener files with large numbers of scanned PDFs, images, media, etc.

Right now I have to initiate a sync from Goodreader, then refresh any changed files individually in Scrivener. Or, browse a .scriv file as a package in Goodreader and annotate the files within it (yes, this works!) - however I assume this is not recommended!

2

5: Vellum would be GREAT on a touchscreen! :stuck_out_tongue:

Being able to move scrivenings, notes, etc around on screen and create visual connections between them would be seriously cool.

3

I can see PDF annotation being a useful tool to include, but it’s probably not going to make it in for an initial release (nothing’s in stone though).

If you could have a PDF in your scrivener project and be able to ‘open in’ goodreader (which I also love), annotate and then again ‘open in’ Scrivener to have it come back with the edits, would that workflow work? Again, no guarantee on any feature at the current time.

4

Ooh yes please! Even better if, like on the desktop, Scrivener showed the annotations in Document notes.

5

Maybe it wasn’t entirely clear, but at the end of my post I mentioned being able to do this already:

1: Connect to your Mac over AFP from Goodreader and browse to a folder with a .scriv file in it
2: It should display as a folder, not a file; you can then tap the arrow to browse its contents
3: Navigate through to Files, then Docs, and all the PDFs in the project will be viewable! Unfortunately they’re numbered, rather than having readable names. But you can annotate them and then…
4: To transfer changes back, sync the .scriv file to Goodreader as if it were a folder (or, sync its parent folder), BEFORE annotating, and obviously again after.

Adding files to Scrivener from a GR-synced folder, and hitting “reload file” in Scrivener after syncing new annotations back to the Mac from GR, also works. Two features in the desktop version would make this substantially easier: either being able to also sync the contents of the “Research”

Oh, and syncing to an external folder, with the draft files in TXT format, also allows for editing within Goodreader already…

Do you mean it’s supposed to show annotations in doc notes now? It doesn’t for me.

6

Sort of.
Well, yes, it does, but you need to do it intentionally (which I discovered it by accident). I retraced my workflow to see how I did it. I’d been reviewing a draft of a few chapters as a PDF in GoodReader, emailed myself the file plus summary from within GoodReader, then opened the file in Scrivener. The summary appears in Scrivener’s document notes (see example below) and corresponding annotations appear in the PDF.

Edited to correct the name of GoodReader (mistakenly typed as QuickReader)

7

Sort of.
Well, yes, it does, but you need to do it intentionally (which I discovered it by accident). I retraced my workflow to see how I did it. I’d been reviewing a draft of a few chapters as a PDF in QuickReader, emailed myself the file plus summary from within QuickReader, then opened the file in Scrivener. The summary appears in Scrivener’s document notes (see example below) and corresponding annotations appear in the PDF.

[/quote]
Aha - QuickReader ≠ Goodreader!! If you mean QR, that’s probably why it’s not working here…

8

<nom checks his pulse. Surprisingly, despite evidence of brain death and zombie stupor, he is still alive>

I meant GoodReader. I have never heard of QuickReader, have no idea what it is or even if it exists. Will edit my previous post to correct. Sorry. :blush:

Here are the steps to get the annotation summary.

  1. Using GoodReader, make your annotations to the PDF.
  2. From within GoodReader, choose “E-mail File + Summary” from the export options (from the icon tray, select the icon that curves up and to the right)
  3. In your email application on your Mac, open attached file in Scrivener.