I’ve been using Scrivener since late summer - pre NaNoWriMo. I upgrade to ver 2.0 of Scrivener earlier this week, once it was available. I am also participating in NaNoWriMo this year, so I downloaded the Trial version made specifically for that contest. However, I thought if/when I upgraded to 2.0 the NaNoWriMo Project Template’s would be included. It wasn’t, but no worries. I exported the template from the trial version and then imported it into the 2.0 upgraded version. Success. However, I do have one issue I still can’t figure out.
Version 2.0 doesn’t have an option under the Compiler for NaNoWriMo Obfuscated text. I’ve been successfully using that feature with my NaNoWriMo project and would like to continue to do so with the 2.0 upgrade. Don’t really like having two versions of Scrivener on my Mac, but need both until I can figure out how to compile Obfuscated text with 2.0.
It’s very easy to make one yourself. Just choose a starting point from the “Format As” drop-down, then save that as your “NaNoWriMo Obfuscator”. Select the “Replacements” compilation option replace one letter in the alphabet with another letter or numerical digit. You can even substitute some letters with multiple other letters; it’ll just make the individual words bigger.
Once you’ve got it set up, save it again under your custom NaNo exporter.
Tip: You only really need to substitute about 10 letters. Include the most common ones. Just always substitute letters and numbers for other letters and numbers, not punctuation marks or spaces, etc…
You can also download the NaNoWriMo compiler present and starter template from the NaNo page in the Mac section. That’s a separate .zip file for users who are not on the NaNo preview anymore but want access to the exclusive stuff that came with the preview. The zip file has a readme with instructions on how to install these files into your copy of Scrivener.
One other thought on obfuscation: it think the best way to obfuscate your text is to change all of the letters a-z into a single character (like ‘x’). Substituting certain letters for a distinct set of other letters can be reversed. It’s the simplest form of encryption, which is designed to be a two-way process. But for NaNo, all you care about is getting the right number of distinct groups of characters or “words”. Nano will count “It was a dark and stormy night” as exactly the same number of ‘words’ as “xx xxx x xxxx xxx xxxxxx xxxxx”.