I’m using Scrivener version 1.9.7 for Windows and I love it. But I’ve noticed some navigation problems. These are basic functions that I use every time I work in Scrivener. Maybe these glitches have been fixed in a later version, and if so I will definitely update.
The navigation I’m talking about is basic Microsoft Word functionality that appears to be built in to Scrivener, but sometimes doesn’t work. For example, to move quickly from one word to another, you do ctrl+arrow right or left. To move to the next paragraph, you ctrl+arrow down. Even better, for highlighting, you can, for example, select several words at a time with shift+ctrl+arrow right, and then copy them or delete them. Wonderful stuff that most writers use all the time.
Here are the glitches I have found. If I am in the middle of a text, and I want to go to the top of the current paragraph, I hit ctrl+arrow up. However, Scrivener always takes me to the top of the previous paragraph. Then I have to skip back down to the paragraph I wanted (which for some reason works fine).
More annoying is highlighting a whole paragraph. In Word this is as easy as pie: at the top of a paragraph, hit shift+ctrl+arrow down, and the whole paragraph is selected. I can copy it, delete it, move it. In Scrivener this works only about ten percent of the time. Usually nothing happens,and then I have to highlight one line at a time, which depending on your text can be very time-consuming.
Don’t know why these glitches should exist in a system that otherwise works perfectly. I hope somebody has some feedback on this.
I can confirm the first of these. It happens pretty much every time for me. It doesn’t add much extra work to correct, just Ctrl+Down Arrow, but I would also consider it a bug. Or at least a poorly implemented feature.
I don’t think I’ve ever had the second thing happen. For me, highlighting paragraphs in this way works right all the time, at least as far as I can recall. Do you observe the problem more in some kinds of text than in others, e.g., in text copied and pasted from Web pages, Word documents, PDFs, etc.? I generally find that when I copy from a PDF in Adobe Reader, every line gets treated as a separate paragraph.
FYI, they are working hard on the next version of the Windows program. It will be v. 3 (skipping v. 2), thus aligning the version numbers, and hopefully the features, with the Mac program. ETA is “sometime in 2018,” the last I heard.
Thanks for your response. Good to hear I’m not crazy!
Your question about the source for the text is probably a good clue to the glitch, because most of my material was originally imported from Word documents. A quick test a little while ago showed that in text that was originally generated in Scrivener, I didn’t have the highlight problem. The other navigation problem was still there.Hopefully the powers that be are aware of these problems and can fix them in the next version.
Interesting! Possibly using Documents > Convert > Formatting to Default Text Style would help, even if the text from Word appears to be properly formatted; there could be some underlying formatting funniness. That procedure should set everything in the given document to whatever you have set up in Tools > Options > Editor as your default formatting. Worth a shot, and can be reverted by Undo, I believe, if it messes something up. Of course, if you’ve got 100 documents to do this on…