So far, I absolutely love Scrivener. It’s a godsend to us novelists out here in the writing world, because with Scrivener, I finally have a program that combines the organizational features of DEVON or Together with the functionality of a word processor that was built and designed for large writing projects. That, and the ability to abstract the format of the output – while adding some nice automated organization – from the composition process is outstanding.
Scrivener is a work of art. It’s the best writing software I’ve ever come across, and since installing it, it has virtually taken the place of Microsoft Word and Apple’s Pages for my novel-writing projects. Oddly, the thing I love best about it is the ability to set a “paper texture” and a “background” (mine is currently parchment paper with a shiny wood texture beneath it); I find that the right visual aesthetic is crucial to churning out good prose . . .and Scrivener’s ability to let me abstract the formatting from the actual writing has actually made writing a lot easier. That and the organizational features are stunning in their elegant simplicity, and have already got me thinking more in terms of overall structure, which is always good for us fiction writers.
But, there are things that I wish were different. For one thing, there’s the overall setting of preferences in Scrivener . . . I mean, as it is, you have the main Preferences window and its various panels, the Page Setup window, the Compile settings window, and then Meta-Data Settings and Text Preferences under Projects, etcetera. Plus, some of these are global to the whole program and all projects, some are limited to affecting only certain views/modes/editors, and some global but project-specific, and others are one-time-only. It would be nice to just have only two – Global Preferences, and then Project Preferences, with the Compile settings stored in the latter. This would no doubt change some peoples’ workflows – since they’re so very used to the program – but it would help new users get the hang of things much faster, and would be much more intuitive.
Another thing Scrivener needs is a Right Click -> Synonyms behavior. For a word processor seemingly designed with us writers in mind, this seems like an accidental omission; I really miss the ability to simply right click on a word and have all of its synonyms right at my fingertips (rather than having to launch a separate thesaurus instance from the edit menu). This is an absolute MUST, really, and is a glaring oversight in an otherwise masterfully done app.
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. One feature of this would be to allow the user a fine-grain of control over where things go in the final compiled document (page numbers in headers, or footers? etc.). Another might be to let Scrivenings Mode actually display graphics, charts, tables, pictures, etcetera, which it currently doesn’t do; a final thing this ability would lend those of us who want things like pull-quotes (possibly taken from a subdocument), blurbs, or drop-caps the ability to actually use these things in our work in Scrivener, and would also lessen the need for users to leap out of Scrivener and into another program just to polish off a document.
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, along with the appropriate MLA/APA styles rigged into the Compiler so as to generate properly. An academic paper just isn’t an academic paper without a works-cited page, and as it stands, Scrivener doesn’t let you do this. 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.
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?
Sixth, Autosave and Versions. I know this is probably already in the works, but I thought I would go ahead and mention it anyway; Lion’s new autosave feature renders the “old way” of doing things (i.e., a hard-wired autosave) sort of obsolete; also, how cool would it be to be able to go back and browse all the different versions of a novel that I’d laid out in Scrivener, with each subdocument’s edits in place at each stage of the game? This would be a tremendous time save for those of us who work with files that go through successive iterations – like novels.
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? Also, the Find dialog needs to be able to accept wildcard characters, invisible characters, and codes, as well as let the user specify where or not the text in question is italicized or underlined, what font size it is, etc., In other words, more than just raw text searching, please. 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; with Scrivener’s already-powerful organizational features, adding this ability would only lure more novelists, playwrights, and other writers away from the Big (though often ugly) Dogs to a better, more well-organized program dedicated to the writing process.
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. 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.)
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. Not so trivial would be my implementation of a DREAM FEATURE: The ability to organize index cards on virtual “timelines” labeled with character names or place names, to better facilitate story development. Such a thing would be fantastic; especially if each timeline had its own sort of “Synopses Scrivenings” mode, wherein each timeline full of index cards had the text of those cards stitched together into one flowing “history” of that character’s events?
Tenth, 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 use “Level”-style 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.
Eleventh – and possibly the biggest suggestion of all, and next to synonyms, the two biggest missing features – are the ability to generate a Table of Contents and an Index (possibly by using text styles in the case of the former, document keywords for the latter). These would be immensely helpful features for those of us who do academic work as well as for our other work, too. For instance, I just wrote a 250 page guide to the fantasy world I’m creating for a new novel, and really wish that I could generate a ToC and an index for it in Scrivener, without having to go into That Other Word Processor.
