Longtime Scrivener user, but had to move from macbook to iPad.
My iPad is an excellent writing device, but Scrivener’s lack of customisability in styles is fast becoming a headache, and will ultimately have me migrating to another writing app. As it is, there is no way to differentiate between the Title, Heading 1 and Heading 2 styles. I can’t change their font size, so they end up equally small. This makes writing a PITA as I lose an overview of the structure of my text.
The only option remaining is to manually adjust font sizes, which is a hassle, and is forcing me to spend time “designing” my way out of this, which is what Literature & Latte specifically claims it doesn’t want to do.
Please provide a way to adjust (the size of) the styles in Scrivener for iPad, as this is a basic feature for any self respecting writing app.
Please have your app join the 21st century, or you will lose a lot of users.
I’m not sure how to state this otherwise, since I have scoured through a hundred posts here and on other forums, and apart from telling people to “go find it under the paint icon” (which is not helpful, and misunderstands what is being asked) or a dismissive comment by the developers (?) to basically stop pestering them, I find no promise or commitment to this very widespread, and very real issue.
When software devs browbeat their users into silence, instead of taking their issues seriously, I find there’s rarely much left to “defend”.
The iPad version is a truncated version, whose promo vid on the app store shows styles & capabilities that aren’t even possible without first going through the Mac/Windows version.
I think you’ll find the iOS version is exactly as it’s always been promoted.
Could it be better, yes, will it be in future? Possibly, but the old ‘do it or else’ comment on a post has never achieved anything I’ve ever seen in 40+ years in IT.
1/ If you go and watch the promo on the Apple Store, you’ll see Title text much larger than the body text. Which is not possible.
2/ This was not a “do this or else” post, but a warning that basic style support (which btw is present on the Mac & Windows versions) is a basic feature, and the lack thereof will lose Scrivener users. I am writing this after noticing hundreds of earlier posts mentioning this exact same issue, being told to “gently keep quiet” because “Literature & Latte isn’t going to listen anyway”.
3/ As for precedents in the IT world, I suggest you look at what happened to QuarkXPress. QXP used to be the most used, most respected, and frankly only decent, trustworthy app in DTP Publishing (lay-out, esp for large documents/books). Their userbase was much more locked into the app than Scrivener’s userbase is, yet what did them in was not a lack of money or users, but their refusal to listen to their own users. They got near completely replaced by Adobe’s InDesign in at most 5 years.
Seriously though: Scrivener isn’t cheap and shouldn’t be. But their formatting system on iPad is broken/truncated. And it makes writing itself a slog.
I don’t have the iPad handy in the motorhome so won’t comment on 1.
It looked and read exactly like that. Scrivener iOS was never intended to be on the same level as Scrivener Mac/Win, but an adjunct in response to many requests for a version for writing on the move (see L&L DO listen to requests and introduce products/features when they gel with the L&L vision). The ‘lack thereof’ hasn’t seemed to lose Scrivener users, the vast majority use it alongside a Win/Mac licence. I’ve yet to see anyone be told to keep quiet because L&L isn’t going to listen. What has been said repeatedly is that it’s not a popularity contest. Keith/L&L add features if it suits their vision on what L&L should be (while taking note of customer feedback)
The Quark example is a false equivalency. They lost for a multitude of reasons and Adobe won by offering a competent product and by buying and killing competing ones, getting their user base at the same time. Once they had the market sufficiently locked they went subscription. I used Pagemaker, Quark, InDesign and others over the years. Personally, Pagemaker was my favorite and I always found Quark frustrating, perhaps that is also part of the reason they lost.
I just tried this on my iPad and I can see what you are complaining about. Styles are available, but unless you override font and size when you set the style (and every time) there is very little to show the difference with the default presets.
As a possible workaround, if you still have access to a mac, open the project there (or start a new one) and setup the styles as you need them. Sync that project to your iPad and then the styles you setup will appear as you set them. This applies to font family, size, and typeface but not text color. I’m not sure why the text color is ignored on the iPad, but there is an override for it, but now we are back to adjusting everything style block manually and I get that frustration.
I’m not sure why they didn’t include a styles editor like other writing software has done. If I had to guess it was one of those ‘would be nice to have, but lets ship a working version first’ sorts of deals.
At the time iOS Scrivener was released, Mac Scrivener itself didn’t have true styles either. Now that it does, revisiting the iOS Scrivener implementation is definitely something to consider.
Note that I’m the only L&L employee to comment in this thread so far. Our users are entitled to their own opinions, but they do not represent the official stance of L&L.
As noted, the intent has always been that iOS Scrivener would be a companion product to the desktop platform. Over time, iPads have become much more capable, but iPad-only users remain a relatively small share of our total user base.
I agree that not being able to re/define styles is a surprising omission. (Though it has never been a personal barrier for me, b/c I’ve always thought of Scriv iOS as a companion app.) But Lit-Lat should make it happen.
But what I wanted to contribute was this: from the quote above it sounds like you are trying to use the heading styles to do within-document structuring. As such, the friction you are encountering there is not specific to Scriv iOS — you would find the Headings in desktop Scriv equally inapt. The reason this doesn’t work the way yu expect “out of the box” is because Scrivener was designed with the (unorthodox) idea of structuring your project via the hierarchy of folders and docs in the Binder, not within-docs.
So, one available workaround for you would be to break your project into its actual structural units and let the Binder structure do what it does best: show the structure of your text. Doing this does require some considered work with Compile, because you also in the end want the structure of the work to be communicated to your reader in various ways, section breaks and numering and titling and such.