Greetings from a writers group who have a few questions!

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
1

Hello all,

I’ve come on behalf of me and my group of writer friends who’ve all very enthusiastically taken up Scrivener for windows during the beta. I think most of us have plans to move over to the full retail version when the time comes. Though I cant speak for everyone, I know I will be making the purchase.

My friends and I, being a paranoid group of obsessive writers, all have some common questions in relation to the beta and how it may cross over into retail when the time arises.

I had a good look at the forums to make sure these questions hadn’t been repeated elsewhere before I posted, but if any are repeats or I posted in the wrong place, I apologise.

The main query is one we all share. A lot of us are using Scrivener now with our Work in Progress or Nano Novels, and we are all somewhat concerned about what happens to the saved work in scrivener after scrivener leaves beta.

Will we lose access to it unless we purchase a license?

Will we lose access to it even if we do purchase a license?

If the unthinkable does happen for one of us, and we lose access to the scrivener program, can the documents still be accessed outside of Scrivener?

As you can see, our main fears are all related to losing work. While we do understand this is beta, and accept what that means, we are more concerned about the inevitable closure of beta periods and moving into retail affecting how we can access the work we did in beta.

Is there anyone out there with information that can ease our minds on this?

Thanks in advance, and may the words be with you.

P.S. Line spacing needs adding A.S.A.P. most manuscripts are double space mandatory, and so a lot of us are used to writing in that way too!

2

While this has yet to be decided formally, I would guess that version 1.0 would effectively end up being a trial, and if it has the same trial stipulations as the Mac version always has, this will mean 30 days of actual use (skipping allowed), with a 1 launch grace period so you can do a big export session of all your project if, at the end of that period of time, you ultimately decide it’s not for you. Export and Compile will be the two tools you’ll want to brief yourself on if you plan on departing, and your trial is about up. Export basically attempts to make a copy of your binder in Explorer using files and folders, and auxiliary text files to hold as much meta-data as possible.

But once again, I’m not the one making these decisions, so until Lee or Keith steps in here, this is “informed speculation”. No matter what happens, you’ll know when the beta is about to end, and can react appropriately if the post-beta transition does not appeal to you in whatever way, with Compile and Export.

Yes. One of the advantages of the project folder format is its emergency accessibility. All media and and text fields in the project (actual document text, notes, synopsis cards) are stored as plain-text UTF-8, RTF, and base media format (a PDF or what have you). These are all accessible within the project folder architecture. Furthermore, the project infrastructure itself (what makes your binder outline look the way it does and so on) is all stored in human-accessible XML. It’s actually pretty easy to open up one of those and figure out what is what, if need be. These files store the construction of the Binder, file names → serial number conversions, meta-data, etc. While not everyone can make immediately use of this without some programming knowledge, the fact that is is accessible and that anyone with a reasonable amount of knowledge can decipher it means it is likely a recovery tool could be developed and shared.

But again, this is really worst case (you have your project on a Flash drive while on assignment in Uganda and dropped your laptop in the river type stuff). In most scenarios, you will have access to a trial version and can use the Export feature, which will nine times out of ten produce a much better result than an emergency recovery.

The latter point is the more salient at this point in time. As for the former, due to the way Scrivener is designed, one needn’t write according to manuscript mandates unless they really want to, thanks to the compiler reformatting tools. In other words, even if you write single-spaced TNY now, in a month or whatever when this feature is finally polished off, you can compile to double-spaced Courier as if that is what you had been typing in all along.

For those that prefer to work in such a fashion, yeah, I do agree it needs to be fixed—the main hold-up, if you’ve read the bulletins, is that at the moment there are more critical RTF related bugs that need to be solved first.

And as always, give that [b]File/Backup Project To[/b] menu command a lot of love. :slight_smile:

3

I’m nothing to do with Lit&Lat, just a pretty long-term happy user of Scrivener on the Mac. But, for what it’s worth,

(1) As a series of betas, I’m pretty sure they will have an expiry date … it might not be the day the stable version is released, but clearly, the aim is to get people to buy the program, not spend the rest of their writing lives using a beta version which will no longer be supported; pretty normal, I would say. On the other hand, Keith’s trial policy has always been 30 days of actual use … or put it 30 days on which Scrivener is opened … not 30 calendar days. That is generous; so many of us have downloaded software to try, opened it, and then been too busy to open it again within the 30 calendar days of the trial, and so lose the ability to actually try things out. It’s happened to me many times.
(2) As for access to your WIP, yes you will. If you decide not to purchase the published version, the sensible thing would perhaps be to compile it to RTF, while you still have a working beta, or a trial copy of the commercial program, which you can then access in other word-processing software. Furthermore, even if your Scrivener expires before you get round to that, what it consists of is a folder full of .rtf files on your disk. They will still be there, and openable in other software. If your project is large, identifying what is what will be a bit of a pain, as the files have only a number as their file name – the numbers seem to me to be sequential in terms of creation, not of linear order within the binder – so you have to open them in turn (or use Quicklook on the Mac) to check the contents.
Just to show you how possible this is, I had a project which wouldn’t upgrade from Mac v. 1.x to v. 2. I discovered that the culprit was a single file that had got scrambled by a UTF error in being imported from Word for Windows (Chinese version). It was a project with 2 to 300 documents in it. Keith asked me if I could send him that one file out of the package – Mac-talk for a special kind of folder/directory – to help him find a solution to conversion problems. I opened the package and skimmed down through the files with Quicklook … file 466.rtf was the one, so I copied it out of the package and sent it to him. Didn’t use Scrivener as I had had to remove that file from the current version of the project in Scrivener 2.
So tell your group to relax. One of the founding principles of Scrivener was that files should be recoverable as long as the disk permitted access to files, no matter what happens to Scrivener itself.
HTH
Mark

PS I see Ioa has got in first and more authoritatively. :slight_smile: Being on opposite sides of the Pacific, I have no idea what the time is in Portland … I assumed, and hoped, that Ioa was getting some well-earned sleep … or at least relaxing over a drink of whatever it is that is his current preference!

4

Many thanks for your quick and in-depth replies. I’m sure this will put the fears of some of the more paranoid among us to rest. We can just get on with the writing now :wink:

5

That is definitely the idea! :slight_smile: