Is it possible to buy the Scrivener 2.0 Help manual somewhere? I’d prefer a book to the PDF file, or to printing out the PDF file.
Not yet, but we will be offering this - and a boxed product - sometime before Christmas, we hope. There are some parts of the manual that still need a little polishing, and we want to get some user feedback and correct any mistakes that might have got through, before committing to a print run. But rest assured the design we have in mind for the printed manual will make it a very nice item to have on your bookshelves. 
Something that I’ve found useful was using Acrobat Pro’s “crop pages” feature to remove as much of the margins as I could from the manual, then I imported it into iTunes and I can read it on my iPad using iBooks (you could import it into iTunes without cropping the margins out, but I found that doing so makes it easier to read on the iPad). This has been invaluable, because I can see a particular feature discussed in the manual, and give it a try on my MacBook, without having to flip back and forth between Scrivener and a PDF reader. It’s almost as good as having a physical manual.
Of course an even better solution would be to have an ePub version of the manual. The manual itself says that the manual is available as a sample Scrivener project, and if I had this, I could do the conversion myself. So far I haven’t been able to locate this sample project. I assume that it hasn’t been posted because it is still a work-in-progress (or I’m really dense and it is hiding in plain sight somewhere).
No, it will go up in a couple of weeks, when Ioa has done some more work on it. We can’t post it as an .epub yet, though, because Ioa uses MultiMarkdown to write, and there is not MultiMarkdown > .epub export… Yet. That’s something that’s on the list for the future, hopefully next year some time. (Well, it could be exported as an .epub, but it would have all the MMD syntax in it so wouldn’t be too pretty to read.)
Best,
Keith
That’s cool. The PDF works well enough.
It’s not a bad idea to set up a slim margin version for digital reading. The margins are nice for printed copies, but a bit superfluous on a screen, unless you are an aesthetics and typesetting nut (which I’ll admit a bit to being
It really does make it easier to read on the iPad. I realize that not everyone has ready access to Acrobat Pro to do the cropping themselves, so I can see some value in posting a “slim margins” version on the website next to the regular one (I work in technical publication, so I do have access to all of the necessary tools).
You can crop PDFs in Preview. Preview can also merge and split PDFs and do lots of other useful stuff.
Yes, there is a crop option in Preview. However, near as I can tell, it only crops the current page to the selected area that you have manually selected. Given that the document in question is over 300 pages, that could get old real fast.
Here is another method that produces results very similar to what I can get in Acrobat Pro:
- Open the PDF in Preview.
- Select File->Print.
- Change the paper size to 5x7 (Borderless).
- Change the scale to 72% (be careful not to hit return at any point during this process, or you will send the entire document to your physical printer).
- Click “PDF” then select “Save as PDF”
This should produce a version of the manual cropped perfectly to the iPad’s screen. There are probably other combinations of paper size vs. scale setting that will work, but I chose 5x7 because the size and the aspect are similar to the actual size of the iPad screen.
If you have thumbnails visible in the sidebar, you can select all pages and perform a crop on the whole document in one operation.
Cool. Sometimes I get really annoyed at how doing advanced operations in Apple software often requires knowing the “secret formula” (so far they annoy me less than Microsoft does, so I still prefer the Mac).
I’m a new user. I’m wondering if I go ahead and pay for the download will I be able to purchase the manual separately, or will purchase of the CD will be required.
Thanks,
We’ll be selling the bound copy separately, so no worries about getting the software licensed now and picking up the book later.
Thanks.
If the manual is a PDF, you can covert it to epub format pretty easily using one of the free online converters. I’ve used them for converting book PDFs in the past for reading on iPad.
Curious, though it’s not particularly relevant to this thread: Can you read PDFs on an iPod Touch?
Yep, I imagine there are a ton of apps for that. 
The free Dropbox one lets you do it (not super conveniently, I will add, though I think I’m out of date right now with the app), which is the only one I’ve had occasion to use, but there are others. Now, whether you’d want to read a lot of a PDF on a tiny iPod touch screen is another question…
Thanks. There’s a problem, though: I don’t, at this time, have an epub reader.
Is the bound copy still going to happen?
Thanks.