Maybe there’s a button I’m not seeing, but where’s the fuss-free screen for just writing?
I don’t want to contemplate the little paintbrush icon for an entire writing session, nor do I want to risk burning it into my iPad screen over the long term.
Composition mode on Mac scrivener is great. Can you work on making top and bottom bars optionally user-dismissible? Swipe-away?
Is it there and I’m not seeing it?
There are no plans to hide those icons entirely. Scrivener isn’t a plain text app, so the formatting controls are part of the rich text editing experience.
All the best,
Keith
Can’t you swipe over to the other extended keyboard rows that show punctuation marks, or the arrow keys row?
“rich text editing experience”?
I want the experience of writing, me and the words. Thats why I have Scrivener for Mac, because it has a proper composition mode.
Always-visible formatting controls are weird. It reminds me of Microsoft Word screen bloat.
And to answer the second question, I can’t swipe away the top bar. That little paint brush is going to be staring at me like that silly paperclip.
Do we need a way to access formatting? Sure.
Do we need to see the button every second? Not at all; that’s true whether it’s RTF or plaintext.
It’s like the binder or any of the other functions, they should generally be optionally collapsible when not important to the user.
It would just be nice to have those bars auto-fade/hide while you were typing.
Not having an iPad, I can’t be sure this is different from the iPhone version, but that row above the keyboard, where the paintbrush is, has a center area with the horizontal bars on my device. I can drag that left or right, which shows different icons. The paintbrush is only on one of them, and the others might be more useful to you (such as the jump left or right by one word icons). At the very least, it’s not about formatting… 
Also, press and hold on the paintbrush; you get a selection of other functions that can replace the paintbrush on the toolbar! (I just re-discovered this)
I think booktalk refer to the things at the top of the screen, where you have the clock, and the paint brush.
Huh. Life in iPadland is a bit different from iPhoneville. Still, if it’s the formatting bar, it should work the same, no matter what part of the screen it appears on, no?
Yes, the iPad and iPhone versions are slightly different, due to the relatively expansive screen on the iPad.
Katherine
Please consider an actual composition mode.
I didn’t think that the Scrivener philosophy was that formatting interfaces were more important than distraction-free writing.
Hi Lunk,
I noticed that you are using a Swedish keyboard but that it must be also a special one, presumably a third party keyboard, because it also has a second extra key row, besides the one that comes with Scrivener.
May I ask you to tell me what keyboard you are using? Is it available in the App store? Does it require full access? Are you happy with it? I am very much looking for a software keyboard that is as complete and/or as customizable as possible to make writing (typing) easier and faster for me.
Thanks!
Dee
Hi Dee! It’s the usual in-app Swedish keyboard. Nothing special at all. The differencenbetween mine and rdale’s is that I run Scrivener on a 12" iPad Pro.
Hello, just want to throw my bump in here with this. I absolutely love and adore my Scrivener experience on iOS but I would also very much appreciate a true “fulll screen mode” like we have on the Mac (if possible). If I dare, I would like to go so far as to suggest a seperate optional color scheme for full screen mode (like on the Mac, my personal favorite is orange text black background, not really unique but I’m not aiming to inspire here). I understand however that there are limitations on iOS and if this is one of them then I will happily take what I have and be perfectly content.
Dee,
That second extra shortcut row you are seeing there can be switched on in your iPad Settings. Go to General > Keyboard and enable Shortcuts.
However, Keith has done such a great job with the customizable shortcut row Scrivener provides, you may find as I do that the built-in shortcuts row are not worth the screen space – the functions you really care about are already available on the Scrivener row.
Best,
gr
Control-option-F to toggle (keyboard bar, status bar, and binder) for all us lovelies who use external keyboards.
I use the app on the iPhone and find the true RTF editor working great, but, to second DanielParadise, to have a few more color schemes would be lovely, especially the inverted one: dark background, light text, along with a dark keyboard (Daedalus-like). Should help with battery life, too…
Just a quick note: on an LCD monitor, a light background and a dark background consume about the same amount of power. The biggest power drain is the back light for the display, which is just a light bulb (fluorescent or LED, usually) and is on all the time. Turning a pixel dark means using a transistor to polarize the liquid crystal material so that light can’t pass through. In a monochrome display, this means that a dark pixel actually consumes more power; color displays are a little more complicated.
Katherine
Learned something new today…
