I would love to see the ability to use forms. I tried out Storyist and the only thing that made me consider switching to it was the way they let you use forms with different fields for character sheets and such. This has been a big pain for me in Scrivener. I have different plotting worksheets, character sheets, location sheets, world-building sheets, etc. that I like to fill out but there’s no easy way to do that in Scrivener because I can’t have different fields for each question so the result in Scrivener tends to be a formatting mess. Is this something that has been integrated into version 3?
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If you have a properly formatted form from another program, have you tried pasting it into a blank Scrivener document and saving it as a template? That’s pretty much how most of the pre-made templates in the Novel template appear to have been created. I’ve created several the same way as well.
Scrivener doesn’t preserve fields. I’m wanting an actual form in Scrivener like Storyist does so I can type in the information and then tab to the next field.
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Can you create forms i .rtf files?
I tried an experiment.
I created a form-based document using Word’s Employment application template, then saved it as RTF.
After importing the RTF file into Scrivener, the form fields were retained, although the import process definitely changed the formatting. Copy and paste had a similar result.
You may want to give something like that a try and see if you can make it work for you.
Thanks for the help, but I’m not looking for a workaround 
. I’m posting here in the wish list forum because the top item on my wish list is for Scrivener to do this the way Storyist does: have completely customizable forms with text fields right in the program. I’d like to know if this is something that has been added to version 3. I don’t know if it’s even possible with the way Scrivener is set up.
As a long time user of both Storyist and Scrivener, I have compared the strengths and weaknesses of the two.
Storyist has a slightly fancier version of Character sheets/Plot Threads etc than Scrivener, however, I have always found the Scrivener Character Sketch and Setting Sketch Templates to be more than up to the task and easily customisable.
Yes, Storyist does have fields to tab between, which can be a little ‘cleaner’ way of inputting the information.
That is where the advantage ends IMHO.
Having attempted to write the same project in both, the advantages of the way Scrivener handles chapters, scenes etc then the final compile far outweigh any small advantage Storyist may have with forms templates.
If forms is the be all and end all for you, then Storyist is the better bet. For everything else, Scrivener by a mile.
Don’t expect changes to forms in V3.
I don’t think so – as you allude to, Scrivener’s focused on the basic unit of the rich text document. All of the character sheets and other “forms” in Scrivener are just specially-formatted rich text documents. Their only difference is in content, not in kind, and that keeps the programming necessary to support them simple because they don’t have to treat them differently.
I can confirm that this feature does not exist in Scrivener 3 (Mac).
Katherine
You can make your own forms by using Scrivener’s table capability. See the following thread by a member, CarolineNorrington, who did. Last I knew, the links in the latter part of the thread (by WhaleVomit77) were still valid.
An example from Caro’s Novel Outliner v2-1 > “One Sentence Summary”:
https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/novel-outlining-template/23546/1
And of course, tables can be a pleasing thing to look at, as well as providing a simplified approach to text editing:
True, tab moves through all cells not just the right column, but at least with this approach you can add your own fields or change the wording of them with as much effort as you’d exert typing in the data.
Thank you!