I recently picked up a 2018 iPad to serve as a MacBook replacement. For that it’s proved so marvelous, I’m wondering if there’d be a way for Scrivener for iOS to take advantage of the Apple Pencil for those who own that Pencil-ready iPad or an iPad Pro.
Unfortunately, I’ve yet to get an Apple Pencil. I keep hoping to find a serious discount. But I’d be interested in hearing those who do use one suggest ways it might be helpful. I’ve looked at previous posts on the Apple Pencil and they center on adding handwriting recognition to the iOS Scrivener. I’m not sure that makes sense with L&L’s limited development time. It’d be better for such people to write in an app that recognizes handwriting and import that into Scrivener.
I do wonder, however, if an Apple Pencil might prove handy for editing an existing Scrivener document. If you have ideas about what features that might involve, feel free to post them here. If the features make enough sense, that might justify adding them. Spell checking and adding formatting come to mind.
I do a lot of editing/annotating on my iPad Pro using the pencil. I completely stopped using pen and paper about two years ago. In relation to Scrivener, I compile to pdf and open the pdf in Notability and start scribbling. I have tested a number of different apps for this but keep coming back to Notability.
I’ve been messing around with PDF annotation and think that I’ve found a solution that works. I use Notability as my default editor. It’s the easiest (from the apps that I have) for multiple-device annotation and syncing. Meaning, I can annotate the same text on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone using Notability. The problem is that the “Reload File” function in Scrivener does not work with Notability. So, after I have finished annotating an article, I save it to a folder called “Scrivener Annotated PDFs” in Dropbox. Then I upload the annotated PDF into the Scrivener project. I then have the unmarked original and the annotated version. The annotations are visible on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
This was the best I could do until Scrivener updates that Reload File function.