I am using the demo to see if I want to buy this program. Seem to be a lot of issues here. In any case:
I imported a synopsis of a screenplay I am working on in Script Mode.
I then went to documents>split and split it into files in the binder to see things as scenes. That worked fine except the text is grayed and hard to read.
I then selected all the files (scenes) and they came up on the corkboard but with text only on the first index card.When I open the inspector, same story. I only see the name of the file but no text.
I then did an Edit Scrivenings and it all came up as shown in the tutorial film but grayed out again.
This, of course, makes it practically impossible to work with this document.
Is this some sort of limitation in the demo? Or am I missing something?
Other than this, I like the program and will most likely buy it if I can find out how to import text in black workable format.
Sorry, what do you mean? Issues pertaining to Scrivener on the forums? There certainly aren’t a “lot of issues”, relatively speaking, except that obviously the forums are where people come for technical support, so this would be the place you find people reporting their issues (that being what the forum is for ). But Scrivener is generally stable and has a very good reputation, so I’m slightly thrown by this comment.
Where was the screenplay imported from? Was the text grey in the original text file? Have you tried changing the colour to black by selecting all and using the colour panel (shift-cmd-C)?
The corkboard shows the index cards associated with each document. The index card shows the synopsis of the document. You need to enter a meaningful synopsis for each document yourself (or you can use the auto-generate synopsis button above the index card in the inspector). When you import a file, it is automatically assigned a synopsis generated from the first few lines of text (although this behaviour will be changed in the future as it seems to cause confusion for new users who assume therefore that the index cards are for showing the first few lines of text of the document rather than for showing your own synopses). So the imported document will have a synopsis automatically assigned, but any documents split from it won’t.
This is not a limitation, no, and I’ve never heard of anything like this happening before, so my only guess is that the text was either grey in the original document or has somehow been turned grey during the import process. What format was the script in originally (the .doc importer - the one provided by Apple - seems to be the worst for messing up formatting occasionally)?
Hi Keith.
First off, thanks for your speedy reply (and on a Sunday!)
To get right to the subject, I think I understand your explanation of the index cards and imported docs. I just assumed that by splitting the text it would show up on the index card but that does not seem to be the case. However, I was not aware of the little button at the top of the inspector that has solved my problem brilliantly.
Now on to what I was doing wrong: For some reason, I thought the program would just import anything and I was trying to import an .odt file from my NeoOffice. Actually, I am surprised it even imported it at all. But that was the problem. I saved it as a .rtf and it imported perfectly. So, color me embarrassed.
So, once again, thanks and you now have another happy customer. I hope I don’t have to come back here again but, knowing me, I probably will!
Interesting - so it was the .odt import. Nothing to be embarrassed about at all - that sounds as though it’s yet another bug in Apple’s .odt importer. What happens if you open that .odt file in TextEdit? Is it grey there too? I ask because Scrivener relies on the importers/exporters that Apple provides to developers via its text engine, as Scrivener uses a modified version of the default OS X text engine (which is the same one as appears in TextEdit. This is a mixed blessing - it means that one-man development teams such as myself can produce complex applications such as Scrivener without having to spend several years writing our own text engines, but it also means that we often have to live with any bugs in the engine and report them to Apple and rely on them. The .rtf importer/exporter is generally the best because it is an open and easily-extendable format, so I have been able to hack into Apple’s default RTF importer/exporter and modify it considerably. RTF import/export is therefore very solid. But other importers/exporters - such as .odt, .doc and .docx - are more problematic and so just use Apple’s default code, and unfortunately there are problems with them. I hope that makes sense of why changing the format to RTF fixed things.
). But Scrivener is generally stable and has a very good reputation, so I’m slightly thrown by this comment.