New to Scrivener - couple of Qs.

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
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Just started playing with the Scrivener beta for Windows today. Absolutely going to buy as soon as the real version is available (heck, I’d prepay :wink:

So some questions…

  1. I thought I’d read that you could set the editor colors to whatever you want. One reason I stopped using Word as my primary writing tool and switched to OpenOffice was that I could setup the window so the text was green-on-black (like an old computer terminal). After many hours of typing, I find it’s a lot less straining on the eyes than Word’s white-on-black (or the equally hideous white-on-blue). I didn’t see a way to do this in Scrivener…I played with Options->Editor, but those are text attributes. I don’t want to change the way my text looks in a real print out or publish, just what it looks like while I’m editing.

Am I missing something, or is that not a Scriv feature?

  1. One thing I miss is a thesaurus. I’ve been editing this afternoon with a copy of Word open just so I can use its thesaurus, which is obviously suboptimal. I know they’re not adding features while they work on finishing Scriv for Win, but does anyone know of a standlone or plug-in or something that provides a good thesaurus? There are web sites and I have Word, so I’m not stuck but it seems like something that is a real must-have.

  2. I notice the “Research” folder in the Binder has a different icon than other things. Is there a way to change icons for items? I see you can choose to “use label color in binder” which accomplishes more or less what I want - I was just curious.

Can’t wait for the real release of Scriv for Win!

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Welcome to Scrivener!

The settings you are looking for are all in the Appearance tab, not the Editor tab—that just sets up how your formatting should look. In the Appearance tab, under the “Colors” section, expand the Editor and you’ll see options for Text, Page, Links, and many other items that can be adjusted. So long as the text itself does not have a hard-coded colour in it, this should work.

Full screen also has its own set of adjustments that can be made.

I am not as familiar with good tools on Windows, like a nice stand-alone thesaurus. I am familiar with the cross-platform Visual Thesaurus, which I find to be a huge leap over typical implementations and often leads to better word choices rather than just more flowery word choices. But it does have a rather unorthodox approach and is graphical (you see words as networks in three dimensions), so I’m not sure if it’s quite what you are looking for.

That’s a planned feature, but not implemented yet.

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I’m also waiting for Scrivener for Windows and just dropped into the forum to see if there was any current news and noticed your post.

As to a good stand alone Thesaurus, I use a program called THE SAGE. It’s free as well I think and does a multitude of other things. Hope this is helpful.