IAWriter Sync

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

I’m trying to sync with external folder, using Dropbox, because I’m writing on in IAWriter on my iPad as well as in Scrivener.

I swear I watched a video tutorial about this, but now I can’t find it and I’m obviously doing something wrong.

When I sync, the new files I wrote on my iPad don’t appear in Scrivener. I tried doing “Import” and all it imports is an empty doc.

I’m new to Scrivener so there are probably a thousand ways I’m doing this wrong, but if anyone can point me in the right direction, I’d appreciate it.

2

I haven’t tried it in a while, but the last time I tested it, iA Writer didn’t work well with Scrivener. It can’t actually navigate into sub-folders and edit the files within them. Maybe they’ve changed that, they said they were going to add that capacity about six or so months ago; so maybe give them a nudge if it still doesn’t. Whatever the case, the .txt files you create with it need to be either in the Drafts or Notes sub-folder that Scrivener creates.

3

Thanks!

I swear there was an IAWriter bit in the vid with SimpleNote but maybe they edited it?

I do see the doc in the drafts folder. When I open it in TextEdit, the text is all there, but it’s empty if I import it into Scrivener.

The good news is that the files are there, I just can’t get them back into Scrivener easily. My work-around was to open them (from Dropbox folder) in TextEdit and cut and “paste and match style”. Not seamless, but worked fine.

Thanks for replying.

4

Unless you really like IAWriter (which is a fine text editor), there are other options for using the iPad and syncing with the folder structure of Scrivener. I think Writeroom is the best, although Daedalus Touch is good too (but not ideal for a couple of reasons, see my other posts). Daedalus Touch is the best looking though…choices, choices… :smiley:

5

Also Notebooks, PlainText, Nebulous Notes, Textastic, and there are probably also some others as well these days. They keep breeding.

6

BTW, IAWriter just had an update that makes it work with Dropbox and iCloud much better. Not sure how it affects working with scrivener because I haven’t tried, but maybe those problems are gone now

7

That it has! It looks to work pretty well now. I’ll be happy to start endorsing it as an alternative. The primary problem with it from the past was that it could only sync with a flat list of files in its Dropbox folder—a mechanism I’m not at all fond of as it means applications spamming my root Dropbox folder with their folders. Now it allows for full navigation throughout the entire Dropbox share. So you can drill down to the Scrivener sync folder you need, edit files, save them, jump back out to notes, etc.

Sync worked well. No weird encoding glitches or anything, so I’m not sure what was wrong with the file you witnessed syncing as blank. I tried both editing existing material and creating new material.