At the opening screen Scrivener allows you to open a new project with a filename containing a question mark (’?’). However, the file does not save and no warning is given of it not having done so. I now realise that other programmes (eg. Word) don’t like question marks in filenames, but I think there are a lot of people who might use Scrivener who wouldn’t know this.
Furthermore, in the case that I open a new project with a filename containing a question mark, then write some text and a synopsis heading. If I use ‘save as’ to save the file without a question mark in the filename, the file is saved but when I close and open it again the synopsis heading is still there but the actual text has gone. (In any subsequent saves the text remains, just not the first time).
Hope this makes sense. By the way, I really like the software - it has made me think seriously about a book I simply could not organise adequately without it.
The question mark not being acceptable is a aspect of the underlying filesystem (presumably NTFS), and not an aspect of any programs in particular.
That said, Scrivener should prevent you from using one of the disallowed characters in file names: \ / : * ? " < > |
I think as a furthermore on this, if possible, Scrivener should use the APIs provided for file open/save dialogs provided by Microsoft in Windows, instead of having its own rolled interface that attempts to mimic the standard Mac dialogs. But that’s my personal opinion.
I do agree that, while Scrivener mimics the Macintosh behaviour very well, it mimics it a little too well; it doesn’t flow as well with the standard Windows Workflow as it should be.
Of course, Lee has put in a lot of work, but mimicking the Mac mannerism isn’t going to do justice for people who are not used to it. Not criticising you or anything Lee, but it’s just an observation that I might think is worth bringing up.
As near as I can tell, judging from buttons that don’t have code attached, it’s not something he’s doing on purpose, the mimicing of the Mac layout is something that comes as a part of the program’s design interface that he’s adapting.
For instance, and I could be wrong, the way that preferences saves in the option dialog is incredibly unintuitive for a Windows user.
Manage --> Save Preferences
instead of “save and go back to my document” like most programs I’m familiar with, that’s for saving a preference profile that I can later import back in. Defaults presumably restores system defaults, but there’s no actual “save and go back to my document” option – apparently option preferences save as soon as I change them. Which is so far from what normal Windows behavior is that it puzzled me for a bit, especially considering that I can’t figure out a way to do “undo what I changed this time when I opened options but don’t take me back to the system defaults” the way that “cancel” would “normally” do.
But the buttons and the way they work might be, instead of something he deliberately did to “mimic” Mac, a part of the interface design that he just “attached” code to.
Excellent feedback folks regarding filenames. I will fix this. Thank you.
The dialog box for Options - agreed. This has been raised and I’m going to add an OK button so that Windows users get some intuitive feedback when closing out on this Window.