I am working a lot with code editors like Visual Studio or Notepad ++ and they have the concept of extensions, where the provider of the software offers some open interfaces to allow 3rd parties to plug in their own functionality. Would be much appreciated if i could add functionality that i find missing in scrivener by myself and possibly also offer it to others via a marketplace.
This could expand the functionality of Scrivener significantly. A variety of other tools could be integrated into Scrivener such as:
- Submit/Export directly to a publisher.
- Integration with Content Management Systems
- Connections to royalty-free image libraries.
- Integrations with timeline, mindmap, and other tools.
It would open up a lot of possibilities.
This has been previously requested and, last I knew, L&L indicated they had no desire or plans to write a framework for extensions.
Some encouragement though: a Scrivener project is a self-documenting database. User scripts can easily read Scrivener files and create alternate forms of output without requiring a plug-in architecture. If someone’s workflow would benefit from automation, it hardly matters whether their scripts are launched from a Scrivener menu or from an Autohotkey menu that floats above it.
But Scrivener is much weaker on the inbound side; it can synchronize its documents to reflect external edits, but otherwise does not have a batch update mechanism under the user’s control. Best would be an XML file that Scrivener could validate and then use to add/update custom meta data in the open project. The XML file could be generated by a user workflow script, giving users a way to update binder entries without manually keying in the changes (or resorting to unsupported batch methods.) This would seem like a prerequisite for any Extensions architecture, but it’s also the logical evolutionary path for document sync. Something to hope for in Version 4.
Cheers - Jerome