** [The following was plucked from my initial post of my reactions to Scrivener. It’s very awesome, and I have suggestions to enhance what Scrivener appears to do best. Thanks]
Scenario Opportunity for Columns
- You are a poet and/or lyricist. You have a beautiful widescreen iMac or cinema display and appreciate Scrivener at full screen (to rid yourself of distraction). The poetry lines you are writing only take up one-third of the Draft document horizontally, and still only half of the page with the Inspector expanded to the maximum dimensions of an index card. Why must so much screen real estate be wasted by so much unused white page? Why have to scroll up and down in order to view the full length of a long poem? Please, allow columns as an option so that users can maximize more of their screen when writing shorter lines of poetry and lyrics. I understand the response to this request is that I can turn on vertical split-screen and view the same document in both panes, allowing me to see the beginning and end of the document. Fine, but I don’t see how anyone can argue that this is a more intuitive and elegant solution for this scenario.
Fortunately, I can do the same Insert Table trick as I can in TextEdit, where I stretch one row downward and make the Table grid invisible (in fact, Scrivener uses the exact same Table options dialogue window as TextEditor). Although not convenient, I can live with this workaround; though, for an application that greets poets and lyricists with their own template, and considering the emphasis Scrivener puts on maximizing workflow with its environment, I don’t understand why employing columns is not at least an option. The only reason I can think of is a concern for being confusing to the user when switching to Group Mode view; after all, should columns be maintained within each Draft separation when a project is being viewed Group Mode? I would at the very least like the option of having columns when writing in an individual draft, even if they are wiped away when viewing several documents in Group Mode.
Thanks!