I want to use Scrivener together with IA Writer on my iPad. Syncing goes just fine, but I have a problem with line breaks. The parsing of them between the two programs are confusing. IA Writer does not quite understand the line breaks from Scrivener, but worst of all, when syncing from IA Writer to Scrivener, line breaks are truncated, i.e. two line breaks become one and so on. As you can see here:
I have looked at the preferences in both apps but cannot seem to find any pointers in the right direction. I have FYI set up Scrivener as to handle the files as regular txt files.
Scrivener adds double-spacing in between paragraphs when syncing to plain-text, because word processor formatting such as paragraph spacing and indents, used to help the eye visually discover the boundaries of a paragraph, will all be stripped out. Spacing the paragraphs with a clear line in between them is what plain-text authors use (just as we did back in the typewriter days if we didn’t use tabs).
I’m afraid I don’t see any truncation though, my eye just isn’t seeing what you mean. Each paragraph looks complete from the start to the end of the line.
But what I mean is that if I have two carriage returns in my IA Writer document, then one of them is removed when I sync back into Scrivener. This happens with all returns, so that if I have a paragraph going like this in IA Writer:
The big brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The big brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The big brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
It will look like this in Scrivener upon import:
The big brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The big brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.The big brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The removal of the blank space is expected if you have the “Automatically convert plain text paragraph spacing” checkbox enabled in the sync settings. It adds them on the way out, and removes them on the way in. If you just want Scrivener to leave them alone you can disable that option.
I can’t get the second condition to reproduce, however. I tried a number of different things, and two lines next to each other like that do not get jammed up together into one line. Can you test by adding a file to your Dropbox folder using a regular text editor (TextEdit in plain-text mode is fine if that is all you have) and see if you get the same result? I can’t think of anything that IA Writer might be doing differently here, but I don’t have that program so I can’t test it specifically.
Ah, that did it! Perfect. No problems now, thanks. The other condition might just be between IA Writer & Scrivener. I didn’t connect the dots between “paragraph spacing” and the line feeds (or returns). Thank you so much. :mrgreen:
