“Two page” or “2-up” view is a standard feature of Word, LibreOffice, and is apparently available on the Mac version of Scrivener. It lets you easily view and work on a document in two columns, which is perfect for larger monitors.
Note that last we heard the official stance is that Scrivener 3.0 for Windows is aiming to have initial feature parity with features that existed in version 3.0 for Mac. If the two-page view was added to a post 3.0 build of Scrivener for Mac, then it may not be considered in-scope for the 3.0 release for Windows. There are some cases where we already see post 3.0 features that have been added to the beta, but that’s happening on a case-by-case basis.
You can see all the same text and more if you don’t split into columns. 2-page view would waste space for margins and give a deceptive semblance of WYSIWYG, which isn’t a part of the Scrivener design or recommended mindset.
The fact remains that this was added to the design on the Mac, so on those grounds alone there is no argument for it not being in the Windows version on merits of design. I also I don’t quite follow your argument, since the alternative to filling the horizontal space with “pages” is filling the horizontal space with background colour—surely filling that space with text would be using that space productively rather than wasting it.
As for whether it is deceptive, I am more inclined to agree, though I would point out that the intention of the design is purely aesthetic—some people feel more comfortable writing into a paper metaphor rather than a long spool of text, even if it has little to do with the output. Whether that can be easily misconstrued is another thing.
It doesn’t exist in the Windows version yet primarily on account of technical issues. The page view implementation is very fragile, as I’ve heard it described, and better thought of as a “theme” for the standard “long spool” editor, rather than an actual model of pages that text is inserted into. Lacking that, laying out “pages” in an A/B stack isn’t feasible since all we’re doing is drawing buffer elements that cut into the single-column text editor.
Thank you Amber for your explanation and your advocacy of the issue. While it isn’t a huge deal for me, the frank truth is sometimes I get SOOOOO BOOOORED writing one way, I just want to switch it up and be able to do it a different way. Plus, I do actually like being able to see everything in “book form”, even if it is a pseudo rendition. I generally compile to PDF or EPUB when I want a more bonafide perspective.
On a somewhat related note-- is there any way to gen up a virtual Mac instance on a PC (or Linux) host so I could run the Mac version of Scrivener? There’s no way I can afford a new Mac, but I have lots of PC’s running both Windows and Linux.
