I’m super excited to share that Index Card 4 is now available on the App Store. There are over 30 new features, including a redesigned interface, the ability to add images, and text formatting. Perhaps of special interest to members of this forum, the added ability to export Scrivener .scriv files, as well as OPML, and PDF doc.
First – I am NOT being unfaithful to my beloved Scrivener and my beloved L&L. But the fact is that - at this point in time, I can’t use it on my iPad (and I have a vacation coming up, and won’t be able to take my laptop!)
Second… the developer of Index Card 4 is VERY responsive to questions… reminds me of the folks here at L&L!
Third… I decided to give this a quick spin. The developer’s website and the blurb on the app says it works with Scrivener for Mac… I’ve got Scrivener for Windows… but what the heck. No, it’s not like Scrivener on the iPad, but boy oh boy, it’s not bad at all. On my iPad I set up a project with some files (cards). On some cards I added text (body), on some I added synopsis, on some I added both. I then copied (I know, that’s odd… copy, not save) the project to dropbox… when I did so, it asked for the desired format and I chose .scriv
I then opened my dropbox folder on my PC, found the file – it was compressed so I extracted the folders… there was not a folder named Project… but there was a folder type called Scrivener Project… I clicked on that, and got the usual 4 folders that we PC users expect, clicked on the project folder, and VOILA… it opened up in Scrivener… the different cards were listed in the binder, the synopses and bodies were there… almost made me cry!
Can you go back and forth seamlessly between Index Cards and Scrivener? A reviewer on the App Store complained that when you open your .scriv Index Card project in Scrivener, and then work on it, and then go back to Index Card, some formatting gets lost. I don’t see why that should be the case. Thanks
Index Card is a plain-text editor, like just about everything on an iPad or iPhone is, so yes, it is expected to lose some formatting, just like if you use plain-text sync folders, or Simplenote.
Something worth mentioning in this thread, if you’re using the Mac’s sync capability with Index Card, you should use the version 3 format option when exporting from Index Card 4.
Not to be mean to the Mac people… but for the Windows people, I have to say --gee… I can use scrivener on my iDevice but I lose formatting?? Big fat deal!!
Frankly, seems to me that Lit&Latte is pretty open that Scrivener is NOT for formatting, and they have every expectation that once the story/report/article/thesis - whatever, is written, you’ll compile it to a word processing software and make it look pretty there.
Until Index Card, I’ve been using Textilus on my iPad, and using dropbox to get the text back and forth to my PC. When I finish a story, it is UGLY… and I don’t mean POV issues, plot holes, etc. I mean that different chapters have different fonts, different margins, etc. If it really bugs me, I quickly go through and make everything consistent (and I do mean quick, it does not take long) before I start dealing with holes and POV problems. But for the most part, I ignore the formatting until after I’ve kicked it out to Word, and then I make things pretty.
as a final note, I’ve been doing some more work with Index Card… I still love Scrivener best, but Index Card is pretty decent. It’s more primitive than Scrivener, missing a lot of features, but I can move things around, I can save my research… and when I get back to my PC I can throw everything back into Scrivener.
Yes, Index Card can use rich text format, and can export it, but it seems that when you sync from Scrivener to Index Card the formatting disappears. So it appears to be something on the Scrivener end, not to do with Index Card.
Ah, okay, I haven’t tried it out yet. So if you export from Index Card 4 to the v3 format and open that file in a plain-text editor, do you see encoded text with formatting in it, or is it plain-text? I’d suspect it is the latter because that is how it always worked in the past, and that is what Scrivener expects, so if it put rich text coding into the fields you would end up importing gibberish into Scrivener when you synced.
But I guess a new feature of Index Card 4 is that you can export in .scriv format. Indeed people report that you can double click on the exported .scriv file on your computer and Scrivener starts and opens the file. So, the issue is why would rich text get lost in this case, when you go back to Index Card? I guess the question is how you go back to Index Card with that file? Because I assume the .scriv format is not something Index Card can open, right? I am just conjecturing, I don’t even have Index Card, but I was contemplating getting it. I guess when Scrivener exports or syncs, that’s when rich text gets lost. Does it make sense?
Index Card can export in several formats, including Scrivener, but it can only open indexcard files.
It says in the tutorial: “Formatting you do in Index Card will be retained when you export to RTF, PDF, and Scrivener.”
Scrivener exports .indexcard (v3) without formatting and not to .ndexcard (v4), which would contain basic formatting (bold, italics, underline).
I guess we just have to wait for an update of Index Card in which it can open .scriv files, or an update of Scrivener, making it exporting to the new .ndexcard format, or simply accept that we can’t go back and forth with formatted text.
It seems the developer of Index Card is a little loose in his definition of “sync”: his own support website only lists import and export (from Scrivener) under “Scrivener sync”. This despite Scrivener sync being listed as a feature on the App Store. Disappointing.
This is not to denigrate the app, I’m sure it’s grand, just that in these days of cloud services (iCloud, DropBox, Cubby, EverNote, etc) it’s reasonable to expect sync to mean sync. There are other apps that will sync document content with Scrivener, so I was attracted to Index Card because I thought it would do more. Glad I double checked the fine print after reading this thread.
If so, the developers of Scrivener are equally loose in their definition of “sync”.
You can export the content of the Draft folder to a Dropbox rtf-file, using the Sync command, and edit it with e.g. Textilus on an iPad, and then “sync” the modified rtf-file with your Scrivener project when you are back in Scrivener. Not much different from syncing with Indexcard. The only real difference is that you have to use a Collection and can’t use rtf-format from Scrivener to Index Card, but that is hardly the fault of the Index Card developer.
It should be fairly simple to modify Scrivener slightly so that you can sync the Draft folder directly into Index Card v. 4 format, instead of syncing a collection into Index Card v.3 format. But then again, why bother if they are working hard with the final coding of an iPad version of Scrivener.
It should have been just as easy for the Index Card developer to allow import of *.scriv files inte Index Card, provided that Apple allows that?
I bought index card 4 thinking I could “sync”. I’ve abandoned index card for iOS now as it is very much a one way process if you use formatting. Useful if you start a project in index card and want to export to .scriv to continue in Scrivener. Not good if you want to hop back and forwards between the two, as the formatting does indeed get stripped out, and index card cannot import .scriv format.
Not surprising when you remember that a .scriv is not a single linear file, but potentially thousands of files linked by the .scrivx, not something iOS is designed to handle. That is the root of the sync problem that Keith and Co. are having to overcome for Scrivener for iOS.
Uhh, no. It’s very different. Unless I completely misunderstood the following description on the Index Card website:
and…
This is different from the folder sync function in Scrivener (I really don’t understand why you used the quotation marks around “sync”). There is no import or export. I just write in Scriv, and then write on my iPad (or TextEdit, or iPhone, or wife’s Windows machine, or via a web-editor, or…).
To illustrate: I just made a new folder into a Cubby and then synced it to a Scrivener project. For fun, I created a project Keyword named “Cubby_sync” and every document in the project with this keyword gets added to a collection that is then synced to my new Cubby. In my iPad, I use a cloud aware app (in this case, Readdle’s Documents) to open that Cubby and… look! There they are!! Readable, editable, documents that are now automagically kept in sync with no more effort required by me. I change them on my iPad (including typeface, colours, etc) and those changes appear in Scrivener. No import. No export. It just happens. How is that not sync?
As I said, this is not to denigrate Index Card—I certainly don’t want have a go at an indie developer—it is just that the app does not seem to do what it says on the label (unless “sync” is being used in a different way to other apps*).
[size=85]*Although I suppose it is possible that “import and export” are being used in a different way, but since I have not bought Index Card because of the normal meaning of those words, I can’t check which terminology is being used correctly.[/size]
I used quotation marks because I was quoting a previous comment on syncing.
I think we define synchronization differently you and I.
I use NoteSuite for some of my writing, on both my iPad and my Mac. It syncs, automatically, without me doing anything. A write on the iPad, put it down, open the Mac, continue writing, etc. Syncing in Scrivener require that you set up a syncing folder in which the files are saved in e.g. rtf-format, and it doesn’t automatically sync with this folder, unless you close and reopen Scrivener or the project.
I prefer Textilus on the iPad, but Documents works in a similar way. The big difference between these note apps and IndexCard is that in IndexCard you actually import and see the whole project at once. I get a better overview in IndexCard, but have a better writing environment in Textilus.
