I discovered a new feature in V3 while glancing through the User Manual in search of something else, viz. ‘Hoist Binder’.
The manual carefully explained that this was in the submenu under View > Outline. The useful new Search > Menu
Bar function confirmed that I should use View > Outline > Hoist Binder but my difficulty was that View > Outline appeared to have no sub-menu.
After quite some time, I discovered that Outline appears twice under the View Menu: as both the 3rd and the 14th items. And the 14th item does have a sub-menu.
I have checked and this double appearance of Outline under View is also present in Scriv 1.9 but I never noticed.
It does not seem to me to be very good practice to have a duplication of the same word under a dropdown menu in a GUI. Perhaps this could be rethought before V3 gets a full release?
Hi Katherine. Yes, I could see the difference between the two Outline entries when I eventually spotted the second one down at no.14 in the list.
I was thrown by seeing the first Outline at no 3 in the dropdown list and discovering that it didn’t have the sub-menu I was expecting to find. It doesn’t seem right to have two entries in the same dropdown list and have them so far apart. It is small consolation to learn that the same occurs in the Mac version.
Couldn’t they be combined under a single Outline entry with the functionality of the top one added to the sub-menu of the 2nd occurence? That would make for a cleaner gui for both Mac and Windows.
I’m not on the design team, so I can’t say for sure what the thought process was. But I think having the three View modes grouped together at the top is important. A better idea might be to simply rename the second entry.
I can’t recall seeing a question of this nature before on the forum, so unless this is noted as a frequent point of confusion in the support queue, perhaps not worth making a change?
That said, I can see that having two menu items with the same name and navigation path would be confusing to Scrivener newcomers. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen Scrivener’s learning curve called out on other forums as being the reason why folks dropped it, so anything to cut down on confusion would probably be a good thing.
My suggestion is to change the View>Document/Scrivenings-Corkboard-Outline menu options to View>Group Mode> Document/Scrivenings-Corkboard-Outline. Group Mode is how the toggle buttons are referred to in the Customize Toolbars pane, so that would make the menu options consistent with the toolbar terminology. That would demote the menu choices one level, but I wonder how many people are actually using the menus for that, versus pressing the toggle buttons.
I think a lot of the exposition about Scrivener’s learning curve being the reason to drop it translates down to “I want to work the way I want to work and L&L won’t adapt their program to let me work just like this other program I’m not using while still getting all the benefits of Scrivener except the ones I personally don’t care about.”