bug reporting on unofficial linux version ?

Scrivener Scrivener on Linux (Unofficial)
1

Hi ! I’m a writer who up to present has used LibreOffice on linux and I just found out a couple of days ago about Scrivener. My first thoughts were that this must be a useful way of working so I started off by reading the forum and then became depressed as I found that the linux version was unofficial, unsupported and would time out in January 2016.

Then I found the October announcement that a further beta was released. So with a couple of clicks I installed the 1.9.0.1 beta (64 bit) deb package on my UbuntuStudio 14.04 machine and started today to see how it worked by running through the tutorial.

I’ve a way to go yet before completing this exploration but I already found what might be a bug in “Step 4, Full Screen”. I can see that there is a ‘bug hunt’ forum for Windows and Mac versions. The linux beta declares itself in the ‘about’ to be “Scrivener for Windows and Linux” and I haven’t found any mention of ‘my’ anomaly in the Windows ‘bug hunt’ forum.

Although this linux beta is not supported, I imagine someone would like to hear about possible glitches in case they are not linux specific. Is there a preferred pathway for reporting bugs in the linux version ?

2

I had hoped for some indication of a preferred channel for logging bugs / glitches in the unofficial linux versions but maybe the end of year celebrations are causing backlogs up the line. So in the absence of other advice, I shall list here such problems as I have encountered so far. These may be aberrations on my installation so it would be perhaps useful if others could confirm or refute my observations.

My installation is on a UbuntuStudio 1404 LTS (64 bit) pc kept up to date with all latest updates and I am using Scrivener 1.9.0.1 beta (64 bit) for Windows and Linux.

  1. In “Full Screen” mode : in the control panel at the bottom of the screen, the Alt key changes the ‘Paper width’ slider control to ‘Paper height’ but the slider cannot then be moved by the mouse. The paper height does not change.

This is contrary to what is stated in both the tutorial under ‘Step 1’ and the manual in chapter 16.2, page 156 (A4 version).

However, if instead of Alt, one selects ‘Alt+Shift’ then the slider can be used to change the paper height. Curiously, applied in the other order ie. Shift then add Alt, paper height is not affected, only the width.

An alternative which also works is ‘Ctrl+Alt’ or ‘Alt+Ctrl’.

  1. The user manual cannot be selected and opened from the Help menu nor by using F1. Either case just opens a crash dialogue explaining that the pdf reader closed unexpectedly. Same happens on the New Project window if one clicks on ‘User Manual.’

Scrivener doesn’t crash but there seems to be no way that I can access the manual from within Scrivener.

I found the user manual in /usr/share/scrivener/bin/resources/ where I was surprised to find both ‘letter’ and ‘A4’ versions of the pdf file. My workaround is to place a copy or a link to the manual on the desktop.

  1. In the outliner view, “Alt-click on a disclosure triangle” does not open all sub-folders within the folder as described in ‘Step 10: Outliner’ of the tutorial and in chapter 12.2, page 109 (A4 version) of the User Manual. ‘Alt+click’ produces the same behaviour as click on its own.

Set aside the observation that the ‘disclosure triangle’ is in my case a ‘disclosure square’ - that is trivial but may indicate that the documentation is behind the evolution of the software.

The workaround is to use ‘Shift+Alt+click’ or ‘Ctrl+Alt+click’. Unlike the ‘Full Screen - Paper height’ problem noted above, the order of application of Shift+Alt and Ctrl+Alt makes no difference - all variants work.

  1. Difficulties with text colours.

    a) In the format toolbar, the A icon for text colour change does not work. The same is found in the Compile/formatting dialogue. Neither click nor right-click does anything contrary to what is described in the tutorial in ‘Step 16: Compiling the draft’.

The only way I can find to change the text colour is in the contextual menu (right click in text) and that does work, including access to the whole colour palette.

b) In the Meta-Data Settings/Custom Meta-Data dialogue, there is a "Use the color picker to set the text color:" instruction against a coloured square.  But I could find no way to induce a colour change in that square which was always blue when the dialogue opened.  Regardless of the colour which appeared when a new Title was entered in the Meta-Data editor and which was accepted with an 'ok', next time the editor was opened, the colour square was blue changing to red whenever any title was selected.

There could well be some setting that I’ve missed about text colours and I would appreciate comments.

3

Another ‘bug’ : the ‘help/donate’ link (literatureandlatte.com/linux/scrivener.php) gives a 404 error.

The donate address has been disabled by scrivener. I would prefer to donate rather than buy a windows licence because that path distorts the apparent market. Any ideas ?

4

It did not work so well (in both meanings: not bringing in money and not functioning; I suspect the latter caused the former) and I suppose it is therefore disabled.

I namely tried to donate some time ago and was stuck of it trying to force me to create a Paypal account, as I wished to just use my credit card.

5

From:

The release post for 1.9.0.1

You might like to take that into account.

Mr X

6

Thank you Mr X. I had already taken that announcement into account and I noted that it said “we currently have no plans …” (my emphasis). I would expect that out of self-interest, devs would still be interested in bug listings for several reasons, two possible being :

  • they might want to make a later version for reasons only they know
  • the bugs might not be platform specific.

As a user of the linux version of scrivener, I am also interested in whether the glitches I noted are unique to my installation, general to several if not all linux distributions or just down to my ineptitude or omission of something important.

I do think it is useful to comment on and list departures from expected behaviour.

7

That was their polite way of saying they’ve decided not to make a Linux version. Could that change? Sure. Someone could win 1.5 billion dollars in the lottery, too. But right now, and for their announced roadmap horizon, they’re not doing a Linux version. Any attempt to read any more into that statement is wishful thinking.

If you think you have a bug that is really cross-platform and not Linux specific, see if you can reproduce it in the Windows version since they share code. If so, post about it in the Windows forum.

8

I’m afraid I’m not too prone to wishful thinking. If I used Windows, I would certainly have checked out my linux observations on that platform but in the meantime I consider it both a civic duty and a self-interest matter to report departures from expected behaviour.

I’m consistent in that approach with any software I use but this forum is for scrivener and this sub-forum for the linux platform.

I have no philosophical objection to Windows and if ever I find that work becomes impossibly complicated on linux, I would set up again on Windows.

I would still hope that others may confirm or deny my observations listed higher up in this thread.

9

If you want to let other Linux users know that you have some sort of bug or problem and you would like to know if anyone else experiences it, this forum is where to post. Whether the L&L team look at it and care to reply is up to them individually.

But I think the situation is that LAP and Tiho_D have their work cut out with bringing the Windows version up to parity with the Mac version with the release of version 3 — there’s a thread somewhere explaining why they’re skipping version 2 numbering for Windows — which it seems also involves rewriting the code-base to use an updated version of Qt, and that they are not planning any further Linux versions for the foreseeable future. If, when Scrivener 3 for Windows is out, LAP feels he has the time, interest and energy to do the work necessary to re-compile it for Linux, I don’t think he will be influenced by any bug postings here. Furthermore, my reading of the situation is that priority after the release of Scrivener 3 might well be given to such things as writing their own code to provide better support for tables and lists than is provided by both the Qt and the Apple text engines.

All that is just my impression from following the forum posts, and I am not privy to the thoughts of Keith or the rest of the team other than what they post here. But whatever the future holds, there is clearly going to be no update to the Linux version for the foreseeable future, and I wouldn’t expect any responses from L&L to posts on this forum.

Mr X

10

So I’m pretty sure this is a bug, but I’d like confirmation to see if anybody else is experiencing this or if it’s just me:

I’m running the 1.9.0.1 beta (64bit) on a Chromebook running Ubuntu (Trusty) through crouton. The software is running as expected EXCEPT that Ctrl+Shift+Up/Down doesn’t work. The expected behaviour would be to select/deselect paragraphs at a time, but instead just nothing happens. Ctrl+Shift+Left/Right works (selecting/deselecting words at a time) as do other key combinations. But this particular one doesn’t, which is kind of annoying as I use it a lot. :stuck_out_tongue:

I’ve checked in other programs and the key combo works fine, so it’s just Scrivener. Is anybody else experiencing this? I’ve had some problems with key combos in crouton in the past, so it may just be me. Thanks in advance!

11

Hi zoopzoop

I’m using Scrivener 1.9.01 64bit on UbuntuStudio 1404 LTS and the ctrl+shift+up/down do work as expected, selecting and deselecting whole paragraphs.

I don’t have any experience of crouton, so can’t offer any opinion about that.