Menu Items Where They Don't Belong

I’m procrastinating a bit this morning, so I’m going to give you a little grief about Scrivener’s menus.

I often have to search around for a menu option I need because S has two menus that don’t follow windows conventions, and contain misplaced items: View and Format.

The first is the view menu. This menu is for telling S what you want to see or not see. Do you want to view the toolbar, status bar, or ruler? It also may extend to setting the zoom or the way you want the page to display.

“Go to” is not an appropriate item here. It is something you do, not something you view. It changes what you’re seeing, but with that criterion just about everything would belong on the View menu, including File/Exit.

The View menu is not the right place for setting options (e.g. # cards across). That belongs in Tools/Options. Same for Choose Fullscreen Backdrop. The options for the fullscreen backdrop color is in the options dialog, why should the backdrop image be in a different place?

Many of the items on the View menu don’t belong there.

An item that probably should be on the View menu: Documents/Open/With All Subdocuments. For example, View/Subdocuments on Corkboard.

Other items that belong on the View menu: View/Ruler, View/Format Bar.

Finally, the options for Show Invisibles, Ghost Notes Mode, and Typewriter Scrolling belong in the Tools/Options dialog, not on the Format menu.

So, please consider those issues. Finding an item, or remembering where it is when you haven’t used it a while, is a lot harder when things aren’t where they are expected to be. New users are more likely to think that S is hard to use.