Then why not use these programs to clean up your text? I know everyone wants every program to do everything they can possible think of, but often (most often, I would say) it is a good idea to delegate to each program what it is best suited for. I don’t use Scrivener for extremely precise text manipulation because it lacks TextMate’s power in that area. I certainly do not think Scrivener should have TextMate’s feature set just because I do use these tools on a regular basis. TextMate is just part of my work flow.
I find people coming from a certain mindset have this belief that an application should do as much as possible without any external help. This is precisely the sort of mentallity that leads to massive applications like Word—the stuff we are all trying to get away from because it hampers the creative process to have so much power floating around.
Right, which just happens to be a core focus of Scrivener; writing books and other large projects of that nature. That it can be used for other things like blogs and articles is a testament to its flexibility, but you will not find an email client for sending drafts, or a blog engine for posting to the internet, and so forth. It was primarily designed to make the process of crafting a large document into something a little more simple than dealing with huge and unweildy files in a word processor.
The export/compile feature is meant to be an integral part of the Scrivener workflow. You seem to want to avoid that and prefer copy and paste—that’s fine we all use software differently, but when you are using an application in a manner which isn’t quite what it was designed for, you do often run into these kinds of things. You either work around it, or use something more suited to the task.
I happen to use it for more than just books, but when it doesn’t do something within the realm of what I’m twisting it to do, I don’t get all infuriated because it doesn’t have a built-in calender for my journal entries, just to mention one example.
Yes, and I don’t think many of them are concerned with technicalities like the nature of line breaks. Most send an RTF or DOC file with the formatting set up a certain way and that is that. If the editor requires a certain font/look, they set up the compiler appropriately.
Which of course brings up the question of whether or not you considered attaching RTF files. This is how most authors handle things, it seems to me. See, what boggles my mind is that Scrivener actually does have a number of good ways to handle what you need (and will have more in the future). You seem entirely unwilling to use any of them however, and then proceed to fault the entire application, developer, forum, and even nebulous sociological patterns because it doesn’t do things precisely the way you thought they should.
Certainly, you must have some conception of the fact that nearly everyone uses a slightly different process to do things? If every single possible human interaction were anticipated and developed into a work flow, all applications would be these huge, overlapping, largely useless tangles of preferences and menus. Certainly you must recognise that an application must do a certain amount of “mental herding” in order to strike a balance between the things that really do need separate functions, and the things that are just variations of existing functions.
That depends on your definition of intelligible, I suppose. When I copy and paste out of Scrivener, it pretty much looks exactly the way it was when I started.
Really? Funny, I seem to work entirely within that framework and it never once struck me a kludge, or appearing as though printed upon used toilet paper. I consider artificial spacing to be a silly notion, though. Why on earth would anyone want to display space that isn’t actually there? Plenty of people do, though. It is acclimation, I suppose, and hardly a universal declaration. I cannot stand working in documents with micro-spacing so you can barely tell what is going on. Give me big, fat, literal spaces and I’m happy.
Not all authors have the same precise demands in equal amounts of vitriol!
Here’s a hint: Keith will often challenge a user to defend their request. But as an aside, most of your requests were a bit “out of scope” from what I saw.
Obviously every single request that is made in the wish list forum cannot be included, or the application really would have a calender, and a blog posting engine, and an email client, and a database for tracking submissions, and a citation manager, and an InDesign module, and a mind mapper, and sketch pad, and a complete WebDAV based concurrent version tracking system, and a Final Cut Pro module, and a PDF editing kit, and a Photoshop module, would export to the undocumented Pages specifications, would export to the undocumented Word document spec, would allow the user to give PowerPoint presentations from within the Editor, and that’s just mentioned a few of the many requests that have been posted. The software would be a nightmare of bugs and hacks and kludged features. Trust me, nearly everything in that list are things that other people have often just as hotly demanded that they and every other professional writer on the planet needs.
If we cannot explain a rationale for why the feature fits into Scrivener, or get all hot and huffy after round-one of the “why do you need this”, then the feature generally falls by the wayside (though not always!)
Anyone that has been around on this forum for a while or has seen Scrivener go through a development cycle knows that Keith is not only extremely open to suggestions, but usually ends up finding a way to implement them in a way that benefits the software in an integrated fashion. So don’t let the intial interrogations fool you. Even if your request has merit, it may not always speak for itself. I know I’ve had a few which were initially dumped on and then after I explained it in a different way it made sense and now they are a part of the application.
In my experience the opposite is true. Most software forums are filled only with the people who have come to complain or hotly demand their own pet peeves. You’ll get the scattered praise here and there, but it is always the exception. The Scrivener board is almost the exact opposite. Your type of post is awfully rare, here. Further, if you look at critical reviews and customer feedback on version tracking sites, you’ll find Scrivener enjoys a nearly 100% unanimous approval rating. This is exceptional for even really good software, and I think a big part of the reason for that is the openness of the developer which has fostered the culture on this board.
Truly, if every professional writer out there needed to be constantly converting their text from rich text friendly to plain text friendly, and that was such a critical thing, I think it would come up a bit more often. Keith’s 99% figure largely fits in with what I’ve seen around here. I think you are the second or third person that has even asked about it, and once they figured out the other methods or had them explained, they were largely satisifed.
Food for thought.
