First, let me say I LOVE Scrivener for draft writing and conceptual work. It’s outlining ability and compile options are fantastic. Yes, I know it takes time to learn this package but the investment is worth it. And I won’t revisit the DPI issues and the other things I know the programmers are working on for the next version. (waiting with bated breath)
Just want to comment on one major usability factor that could stand some work:
Obviously, most writers will be moving back and forth between Scrivener and Microsoft Word. (as intended) And I realize that Scrivener is supposed to be a bare bones editor. No problem there.
The PROBLEM lies in the fact that the Scrivener editor behaves so differently in the way it handles text editing, that it becomes painful to move back and forth to Word. The behavior of paragraph marks, character styling, tabs, and many shortcut keys seem needlessly different from the Word standards. It makes it very hard to keep the two programs straight in one’s mind.
I’m constantly struggling to properly remove formatting from text pasted from the Internet. In Word, CTRL+SPACEBAR removes character formatting, in Scrivener, that shortcut is used for single spacing. Why not have the most COMMON keyboard shortcuts between the two be similar?
Obviously the key in draft writing is to work fast. Keyboard shortcuts are critical. Editing behavior becomes habitual. Every time Scrivener uses a different behavior or convention from Microsoft Word, our writing productivity goes down.
So just please try to not be different just for the sake of being different. I love Scrivener so much, that I want to use it for as much of my draft writing as possible, but editors demand Word files, so it’s inescapable that most writers will be forced to use both writing tools.
EDIT: I just discovered a section in the manual on keyboard shortcuts:
This is interesting, and to my knowledge, non-standard Windows convention. You SHOULD DEFINITELY expand the keyboard shortcut section in the manual and help to clarify things for users. For instance, some keyboard chords do not work, even if they don’t conflict with other key combos. (Is it only Ctrl+G that will work in a chord??) Will the first key in a chord only work if that key is not used somewhere else as a single key shortcut? More detailed explanations in the manual would be very helpful.