Hi, since upgrading to Scrivener 3 (on a freshly clean installed macOS High Sierra, if that matters) I haven’t been able to use Apple’s split view function with Scrivener. That is, as opposed to using Scrivener’s internal split screen mode, I’d like to have (a single screen of) Scrivener in one panel and, say, Safari or another Apple Pages or whatever as the other panel. I used to be able to do it but now when I try I get the white circle with diagonal line through it that tells me it’s not possible. Is there a setting I should be changing within Scrivener to make this possible again?
Apologies if I’ve posted a topic that has been covered already. I searched the forums for ‘split view macos’ but only saw topics relating to the internal ‘split screen’ mode instead.
Assuming you mean Full Screen (as opposed to Composition Mode)… As I hope you can tell from the screenshot, I’m typing this reply with Scrivener in the left hand split and safari in the right, so the facility definitely works (latest non-beta versions of High Sierra / Scrivener on a 2017 iMac 27").
I don’t remember Composition Mode ever working with split screen, but I could be wrong (it’s been a long time since I used V2) — it doesn’t now, anyway.
I just tried this on my MacBook Air 11’s built-in display. I could go into split screen, but only if I had just one editor, and I hid both the inspector and the binder. I suspect it’s because the editor won’t go as skinny as it used to. It worked OK on my external monitor, which is 1920x1080.
So yes, confirmed that split screen won’t work on smaller displays. It’s a tough push on a 1366x768, and probably won’t go much smaller, if any.
Thanks for the replies. Yes, I did mean fullscreen mode rather than Composition mode. And I have a 2014 15" Macbook Pro with Retina display—sorry I forgot to mention that—so I should have plenty of pixels to make the split view happen. I used to be able to do it but since I upgraded to Scrivener 3 and macOS High Sierra at the same time I don’t know the source of the trouble now.
Just now I hid the binder and inspector, inspired by all your comments about display limitations, and it DID work. Again, I used to not have to do that in order to get to split view but whatever, I’m there now so no complaints I guess (I was also able to reopen/show the binder after I was already in split view mode).
You always had to be a little careful about what you had open in order to be able to use split screen because of the limited width - so, for instance, you could never have the inspector, binder and editor, or a vertical split, because that wouldn’t leave enough screen space. In Scrivener 3, though, the editor requires a larger minimum width which complicates things. The problem is that in Scrivener 3, the minimum width is set to the minimum required for both editors in a vertical split, rather than only a single editor - this is because of the complications of calculating the necessary width for all scenarios, with the added complexity of Copyholders. For the Scrivener 3.0.1 update, this has been addressed, so that the editor no longer requires enough space for both editors at all times and can be shrunk down further again.
