"Auto Populate Synopsis" hangs if Doc is empty[BUG LOGGED]

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
1
  1. Go to an empty Document
  2. Enable the Inspector
  3. Make sure you click the document once so the Inspector shows the title for the empty Document
  4. Click the “Auto Populate Synopsis” button.
  5. Note that Scrivener hangs.

I did this three times in a row, so it seems totally reproducible. This is also a major bug, and it should be straight-forward to fix. It usually works if something is in the Document – just not if it is empty.

Hmm… I found it also hung when I tried it on the “Title Page” in the NaNoWriMo template. But that only happened once and was not reproducible. (When it hung, the “Synopsis” for the Title Page showed empty. When I went back to it, it not only had something in it, it was not what the “Auto Populate Synopsis” put in it.)

What I found really cool about this was that even though Scrivener hung and I needed to be a little forceful when I killed it, it didn’t lose the work I had done a few minutes prior. – This really makes it look like it’ll be fine for me to do my NaNoWriMo with this year.

The first few times it hung I needed to manually kill it, but after the third time or so Windows started recognizing when it hung.

2

Thanks, this is a known issue at this point. Avoid using that button in empty documents or media files for now. It should be disabled in the future.

Scrivener is pretty good about keeping your data safe even in a crash. It has a fairly aggressive auto-save feature. In a worst case scenario, if you’ve been writing absolute non-stop for an hour you could lose your work in the case of a crash. But most people, even in a furious writing frenzy, will pause for two seconds now and then, which is what the auto-save interval is set at by default.

On the crash recovery side of that, things are good too. The integral project management files are all backed up constantly, and if any of the primaries are lost they will be used to recover the project. Missing files will be recovered in the binder, etc. So even in catastrophic cases you should be pretty safe.

Of course let us know if you ever experience otherwise.