Can anyone help with this? I have sent this question to tech support a few days ago, but no response.
I have set up a very nice image as the background of my composition mode but every time I restart the app and use it, the background is black. Should not the image be retained? Or do I have to select it each time?
Thanks for any help.
— Richard
Sorry about that, we do tend to give ourselves weekends off, so not everything coming in over the weekend gets answered immediately.
Okay, yes naturally this setting should be retained. What I would try first is to set your underlying background colour to something noticeably different than black. If when it resets you see that colour instead of black, then my tentative guess would be that you periodically use synchronisation to share this project between multiple machines, and not all of the machines have the graphic—or have the graphic in precisely the same place. Scrivener will just remove the assigned backdrop if it can no longer find it.
If that does describe your situation, consider dropping the graphic into your Binder somewhere, and then assigning it from there (all images in the Binder will be listed in the backdrop menu for your convenience). Now the picture will “travel” with your project wherever it goes.
On the other hand, if you change the background to something else but it still comes up black, let me know of that result. Black is kind of like OS X’s default “Oops” colour, when an image is meant to be shown, but isn’t for some unknown reason—hence why I suggested making sure your default solid background colour is something other than black.
Thanks for the response. Of course you should have the weekend off.
Just to check to see if I am clear: I have two Macs I use Scrivener on — Macbook Pro and Macbook Air. I use the former during the day and the other one in the evenings. I have a picture as background for each Mac, but a different picture and one that resides on that computer. Is that the problem? Should I have the same picture on each? I will certainly try the Binder idea, just checking to see if I understand the problem.
— Richard
Yes. I had the issue you describe (with a project shared between my MBP and iMac), and solved it by placing the image in the Binder as Ioa suggests above.
Yeah, if you’re switching machines multiple times per day, Scrivener is probably just losing track of the image and clearing the setting.
It’s more about the name. If you had two different pictures but they were named the same, then it should work. In this context, “name” is the full address to the image, not just the Finder name you see—the full path—which means the short user name, part of the absolute path, needs to be the same as well. For instance you might have the graphic called “my_backdrop.jpg” on both computers, in the same “Pictures” folder, but the full path is actually different: “/Users/mymacbookpro/Pictures/my_backdrop.jpg” and “/Users/mybackbookair/Pictures/my_backdrop.jpg”. That’s where Scrivener would get confused.
I just thought of another situation where it might break whenever switching machines, even if both computers are using the same exact account name, and the folder structure is identical, if you are using the Mac App Store version of Scrivener, then it will not work because of sandboxing. Sandboxing means you have to specifically give a program permission to access a file. That permission does not (and cannot) exist on the other computer, so it gives up and you lose the assignment.
In either scenario, throwing this file into the Binder would solve the matter, as it now just references the picture using its own internal numbering system, rather than file names.
Well I think I have it fixed. I used the same picture, a copy on both machines, and put the pix in the binder on each machine. So now, so far, is there when I open.
Thanks for your help.
— Richard