Freezing up after I type a few characters

Scrivener Scrivener for iOS
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I’ve been having this problem for a while now. I’m using Scrivener on my iPad Air with a Magic Keyboard, and I’m writing a script using the BBC Radio Script format.

I’ll open Scrivener, type a few characters, and the app freezes up completely. My only option is to close it completely and relaunch the app. But then I keep having the same problem. Eventually it goes away, but I don’t know why.

Please help if you can!

Thank you!

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It really shouldn’t be doing this…by which I mean it never has happened in such a fashion here on an iPad Air 4 with Magic Keyboard.

However, I could offer ideas:

  • first, try shutting down and then restarting your iPad. They do need to get rebooted from time to time.

    • If your is like mine, with a power button on the short side and a pair of small volume buttons on the top left near that power button, then you press both the left-hand top button and the power button at the same time, and hold for a few seconds.
    • This is slightly awkward, but you can do it with a kind of pinch, or with fingers from each hand, and in a few seconds, an unmistakable power-down slider will appear near the top of the screen. You can release then, and use the slider to shut the iPad down.
    • give it twenty seconds after the screen goes dark, then push and hold the power button until an apple symbol appears. I think it’s 5 seconds hold. A line will appear below the symbol, extending as the iPad boots up.

  • the other thing to mention is that sometimes the iPad can disconnect from the Magic Keyboard. It doesn’t happen often, but a knock can invisibly shift and partially dislodge it, so it doesn’t make adequate contact.

    • to clear this, just pop the iPad off the keyboard, and then settle it back on, aligning with the edges of the backplate. When you get it in position, the magnets will pull it into place, with a satisfying snap. Contact should be good then.

Hope these will help; this instrument and with Scrivener should be in most regards a very reliable combination. There’s always a possibility there could be some other issue, but it doesn’t seem likely with this symptom.

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It only happens in the Radio Script template as far as I can see. On regular text it’s fine. I also don’t have this problem on any other apps.

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Can you pinpoint specifically which file in the project causes this freeze? Everyone, or one?

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Hi @geekyMary,

Do you have access to Scrivener on a Mac (not a Windows user, so don’t know about possibilities there)? If you do, you could try running Edit > Text Tidying > Zap Gremlins on it, in case some stray unwanted control characters have got in.

Again, I don’t use Scrivener on my iPad, so can’t really help.

:slight_smile:
Mark

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GeekyMary, I think xiamenese has a good idea here, if you have a Mac.

I checked on Windows, and Zap Gremlins isn’t part of Scrivener there, nor could I find a particularly available way to do the zap otherwise.

However, there was an idea for something that might work in Scrivener itself, since you say the crash comes only after you start typing.

This would be to go to the problem document (page), and select all the text (ctrl-A), then copy it (ctrl-C). Now create a fresh document, title it differently, and paste the text in.

Now see if you can type in the fresh document. If so, you can title it differently, send the bad one to trash, then put the fresh one in place and reset the title to what you wanted.

Worth a shot? The idea is that what you paste isn’t the saved RTF, but an internal form which has in that way been ‘cleaned’.

If this doesn’t work, you could try the same trick with an external editor like Word or free LibreOffice (which is very good). In that case you copy, paste, and recopy the text within the external editor, then paste result into the fresh page you created in Scrivener.

Either of these methods depend on just exactly what happens in the editor, but they’re easy to do, and worth a try, no?

Best fortune…

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