First Impressions / Wish List

[KB]

Hello,

I’m glad you like Scrivener, thanks for the kind words.

First, it would be useful to remember that Scrivener is coded by a single person - me (and the Windows version has another developer). And it costs just $45. There is no team of people working on this; we’re not Apple or Adobe or Microsoft, and we don’t have those sorts of resources. I think that’s useful to bear in mind when you ask for things like full layout or a built-in citations manager - there is a reason these things tend only to be part of programs from the “big” software houses.

For one thing, there’s the overall setting of preferences in Scrivener . . .

I’ve answered this in your other thread.

Another thing Scrivener needs is a Right Click → Synonyms behaviour…This is an absolute MUST, really, and is a glaring oversight in an otherwise masterfully done app.

Scrivener uses the standard Mac ctrl-click menu, the same as other text editors based on the OS X text system. This may be a “MUST” for you, but most other users seem happy with the standard Mac way of doing things (you can already call up a dictionary and thesaurus). Personally, I’m always suspect of looking up too many synonyms anyway…

A third thing Scrivener would benefit from is some actual, real-world page-layout controls; it doesn’t have to rival Apple’s Pages, but it should have some basic abilities. Like drag and drop image placement, along with cropping and rotating tools, a few lightbox effects, etcetera.

You can add images and resize them, but bear in mind that Scrivener is most certainly not intended to be a full page layout program. It takes a whole team to put together something like Word or Pages, so I would require a team to add these features on top of all the work on the core Scrivener features. I suppose I could put Scrivener’s price up to $99 to cover this.

A fourth thing – and this is a big one that would require a lot of coding – is a BUILT-IN citation and/or bibliography manager

You can easily use existing citation managers with Scrivener - Sente, Bookends, Endnote and so on.

Even Microsoft Word, that clunky old dinosaur of an app, has this functionality, so a state-of-the-art masterpiece like Scrivener really ought to have it too.

Heh, but “even Microsoft Word” is built by one of the biggest software companies in the world and has a whole team working on it. It wouldn’t make sense for me, the sole developer of Scrivener, to go and spend months coding something that can already be achieved with Endnote, Bookends and so on.

A fifth thing – and this goes along with simplifying the interface – is for there to be just ONE full-screen mode for Scrivener. As it is, you’ve got the OS X Lion full-screen mode, and then you’ve got Composition mode. Well why should these be two separate things? Insofar as I can see, Compose mode is far and away functionally superior to Lion mode, so why not just stick with that and simplify things a little?

This is entirely subjective. Composition mode blocks things out and allows you only to work on a text document; Lion’s full screen mode allows you to take the entire screen into full screen and use the main interface without distractions. Personally, I now live in the latter, with Scrivener set up to use a grey theme while in Lion’s full screen mode. So if I had to choose, I’d ditch Composition Mode - but I’d never do that because too many users like it.

Sixth, Autosave and Versions.

Please see this thread:

Why Scrivener Doesn't Support Versions on Lion

We’ve been asked by several users whether Scrivener will be supporting Versions any time soon. The short answer is “no” - the only way Scrivener could support versions is by dropping some of its core features. For those interested, though, the full explanation follows. There are two types of window-based programs on OS X, essentially: Document-based programs. These are programs in which you work on different documents in different windows, such as TextEdit, Pages, Word and so on. Shoebox …

In short, Versions is not currently compatible with the sort of project structure Scrivener uses - and not all users are as enthusiastic about Lion’s Autosave and Versions as you are. But read through the thread above for full information (you will see that I have a ticket out with Apple tech support about this, too).

Seventh, the regular “Find” dialog and the “Find by Formatting” dialog really do need to be combined into just one critter. I mean, there really isn’t any need to have this functionality separated, is there?

Hmm, there could be a case for this, but I don’t know. There are several different Find features in Scrivener, and combining them all could be messy. Maybe something to think about for Version 3.0 though.

A way for the user to add invisible characters easily is on the list (you can already hold down the Option key to enter a return or tab character in there, this is standard with such controls). It’s non-trivial, however (even if it may seem simple). Scrivener uses the standard Find panel, though.

I don’t mean to keep comparing Scrivener to a program it isn’t meant to compete with, but these are basic features in MS Word

Again, it’s good to remember the difference in resources available to us and Microsoft.

Eighth, the fact that Scrivener uses RTF and RTFD as the default document types is nice and all, and is well-thought-out in terms of outside compatibility and simplicity, but since most users are used to using Word anyway, why not just go ahead and change the internal document engine to use .doc or .docx? This would simplify life for those of us who want to pull out individual files, or drag and drop to other programs, while still retaining a good bit of formatting control.

Eek, don’t ever do that! You should never edit the underlying files in a Scrivener document - that’s not the idea. The format is designed so that even if all copies of Scrivener disappear from the Earth, you will still be able to access things, or if you are in a tight pinch somewhere and really have to pull out one of the files, you can do, but really you shouldn’t be poking around with the internals of a project or you could cause problems. Also, why would we want to move to using a proprietary format over an open one? That makes no sense at all to me. RTF is essentially plain text and you could extract all text from it in a plain text editor if you ever really needed to; it’s also supported by almost any rich text editor. The same cannot be said for .doc or .docx.

On top of that, we again return to the fact that I am but a single coder. I use the standard Apple OS X importers and exporters for most file formats, and these importers/exporters strip images and footnotes and comments. Because of the plain text nature of RTF, I have been able to extend RTF support significantly. But the standard OS X importers/exporters for .docx and .doc cannot be modified because these formats are not plain-text-based and are a lot more complex (even .docx, which is XML-based); these importers/exporters even mess up line spacing, in fact. (Just test them out in TextEdit).

There would never be any good reason to use .doc or .docx over .rtf for the internal file format.

Heck, why not use Apple’s Pages format, which is less universally compatible, but far more robust than Word format? (There is the problem of Pages format being less “open” than the .doc format, but it’s still something worth thinking about.)

Er, if by “less open” you mean “not open at all”, then yes. .pages is a proprietary format and Apple have made it clear that they have no intention of releasing the specs. I suppose I could spend months reverse engineering it, but then they could change everything in the next version of Pages so that wouldn’t be such a good idea. We can’t even support the import or export of .pages documents because it’s proprietary. (And even if the specs were released, again, it would take months for one coder to writer translators for it.) Moreover, our file format is used across platforms, so there would be very little sense using the .pages format inside .scriv files when .scriv files have to be opened on Windows too!

Ninth, there’s the behavior of the Corkboard. I should have the option of double-clicking an index card to open the document (or other Corkboard) lurking beneath it, but I don’t. This is a trivial feature, but it would make the process of using the index cards a lot smoother and more intuitive.

Double-click on the icon in the corner. If you could double-click anywhere on the card to do this, how would you edit the text? That would be very un-intuitive. Certainly this is the first complaint we’ve ever had about this, so I’m guessing the current behaviour is intuitive to most.

Tenth, and lastly, while Scrivener’s “Compile” functions are very robust indeed, why is there no analog to them for importing documents? For instance, let’s say I have a Word document divided into chapters. Well, why can’t I import that document and have Scrivener “detect” where the chapter breaks are using “Level” settings similar to those in the Compiler, as well as applying new, structurally-derived formatting to the text that’s being imported? This is probably a lot less trivial than I’m making it sound, though, although such a feature would be incredibly handy for working on large, already-organized documents.

There is an “Import and Split” feature that will split a document up. However, Scrivener’s importers cannot read structure from a Word file. I agree that this would be a nice future addition, and if we ever are able to expand so much as to afford the resources to write all of our own importers and exporters (which would be nice), then something like this might be possible.

Whew!

All the best,
Keith