Pages

Scrivener Wish List
1

I would like to see physical pages as I type, rather than an endless scrolling screen. Perhaps this option is already present, but I can’t find it.

Thanks for a great product!

2

The last physical page I saw when writing was rolled into an IBM Selectric :slight_smile:

3

For not-so-physical pages, I recommend Pages (iWorks). :wink:

4

There will be a page layout option in 2.0. The idea behind not having a pages view is that pages don’t really have much meaning in Scrivener. As you work on your text in small chunks, you are only ever working on a couple or three pages at a time (depending on how short or long your sections are), so it wouldn’t give you an idea of how many pages you have in total. And also, because you can completely override the font and formatting attributes during compile, where the text falls on the page could be completely different when you export or print. However, I do appreciate that these things aren’t what’s important to some users and that some people just like the look and feel of a page in front of them, and also that screenwriters especially rely on pages as an indication of time, which is why I’m adding a page view to 2.0 despite the above reservations. Hope that makes sense.

Thanks for the kind words.

All the best,
Keith

5

I would chime in, remembering that William Burroughs used to write on endless rolls of paper, and Nabokov on small pieces of paper. Scrivener is the perfect mix of both ways.

Paolo

6

I could be mistaken on whether or not Burroughs did it later, but it was Jack Kerouac who wrote on a roll of taped together tracing paper when writing On the Road. That version was never published, incidentally. The one that got published came five years later after a number of re-writes, but it certainly did enter the realms of legend. :slight_smile:

7

It was alleged early on that Kerouac typed* on rolls of toilet paper, which was amended to read that he ought to have been typing* on toilet paper.

*Truman Capote’s comment on Kerouac: “That’s not writing, it’s typing.”

ps

8

I must have been confused. By reading the introduction of both The naked lunch and The soft machine I cannot find any mention of a roll. On the contrary, I find mention of a “manuscript”, that I guess is the classical pile of separate sheets.

Paolo

9

I once edited a boatbuilding book written in pencil on a continuous roll of teletype paper bought at a military-surplus disposal sale.

It was an adventure, especially when you’d encounter little nuggets like, “I forgot to mention you should screw down the keelson atop the frame futtocks before you run the stringers,” with no page numbers for reference. I ended up typing the whole thing into Word 1.0 and reconstructing as I went.

I’m pretty sure Keourac used a continuous roll of paper. And I seem to remember Thomas Wolfe standing writing on top of his refrigerator (he was tall, and refrigerators in the 1930s were mostly from Munchkinland) and dropping the unnumbered pages into a pasteboard box, to deliver to his saintly editor, some 55 years before computers might have made his job bearable. And 75 years before Scrivener would have made it a piece of cake.

10

Me too would be very happy as well if a future version of Scrivener would include pages. Being not only a writer but also a literary translator (English to German), a page view would be very welcome to me. As a translator you get paid for “norm pages” that are defined as 30 lines of 60 characters per page (which is definetely not 1800 characters, because lines with only a few words like: “‘Yes’, he said” are lines as well. So it would be a great thing to be able to determine in the preferences for a page the number of lines and characters it contains - a feature that neither Microsoft Word nor Apple’s Pages offers. In both programs you can determine the lines per page only by adjusting the upper and lower margins of a page, and then you always have to check a couple of pages whether the software did it right.

So, if you want to make a lot of translators happy, implement this simple feature in Scrivener 2.0 and make the best writing program for professional writers even better. Thanks for the great work anyway!
Thomas

11

As a screenwriter pages is key for me when writing. As I’ve been through with KB, the best way to use Scrivener is to write everything else in Scrivener and then when it comes time to write your screenplay use Final Draft 8. I keep Scrivener open and use that as my outline. I keep Final Draft open and write the screenplay in that. Would I prefer a perfect program like Scrivener encompassing Final Draft so it was all in one program? Hell ya! But it’s not going to happen. The 2.0 page layout will not be exact page numbers for us screenwriters sorry to say so more likely than not will not be useful to us in that facet. So two screens it is. Final Draft and Scrivener. Maybe one day…6.0? Our screenwriter prayers will be answered. I think Scrivener should buy Final Draft!!

Cheers.

12

This is getting to be like Ground Hog Day, themakcompany. :slight_smile:

Although themakcompany is very insistent that page layout will be of no use to screenwriters unless it is identical to Final Draft in every conceivable way (even though every text system and layout system has differences), I think 2.0’s page layout will be useful to most screenwriters, and there is no need to constantly work between FD and Scrivener as themakcompany suggests at all. But hey, anyone is welcome to work how they wish. :slight_smile:

All the best,
Keith

13

KB,

Uh-oh…Apologies! You are right. I have no reason to even think this being that I have not seen 2.0. I guess I’m just trying to prepare myself for the worst. That is wrong of me. I still have faith. Can’t wait for 2.0.

Too much cake today. Daughter’s first birthday.

14

First birthday - that’s a special day, have fun!
All the best,
Keith

15

Thanks, man.