Here’s a new one in 1.50: weird cursor behavior in tables.
I’ve got a three-column table. Not sure what I did to engineer this, but I have a paragraph I’m editing in the middle column. But when I try to insert the cursor in a particular area of that paragraph, the cursor instead keeps showing up in the right column, one block up, instead. If I go to the end of that mid-column paragraph it seems to be okay. (I’ve lost track of whether I’ve deleted something from the two different boxes, but have deleted some things.)
Don’t even get me started on tables. I’m sorry, but they are buggy as all hell and there’s nowt I can do about it!
To explain: Scrivener uses the OS X text system. This system is built into OS X itself, and can be used by any program that uses the Cocoa frameworks. TextEdit is pretty much a “showcase” of this system. TextEdit shows everything this system can do without having much added to it (they add a page layout view for TextEdit, and that’s about it). Scrivener also uses this text system - as do most shareware programs, as otherwise the developer would be faced with writing his or her own text system, something that takes years for even a team of developers. Using the OS X text system has pros and cons:
PROS
• I don’t have to spend a good chunk of my life trying to write my own text engine (which would end up inferior anyway as I wouldn’t have a clue where to start!)
• Whenever there is an OS X update that adds features to the OS X text engine, Scrivener will automatically get those features too. A good example of this is lists and tables - both of these features got added to Tiger, and so Scrivener just got them automatically.
CONS
• Any bugs that are inherent in the OS X text engine will be inherent in Scrivener too, and I have no way of fixing them because the text engine code itself is private. I can add features, but I can’t fix underlying bugs. A good example of this is… lists and tables. They got added with Tiger and were buggy and awkward to use, and they weren’t fixed in Leopard.
This certainly isn’t new to 1.5. It’s been there all along, just as it is there in TextEdit.
Generally, if I need a table in Scrivener or TextEdit, I create it in a dedicated word processor and copy and paste it in. Like I said - don’t get me started!
Thanks, Keith. Sorry if you have covered this elsewhere. Meanwhile, then, I won’t bother you with some of the other quirky and inconsistently weird things my table is doing.
But as you say, it’s no biggie. There are a ton of workarounds with WP or omni-outliner or even Tinderbox.