I’m a French writer and copy-editor, and I have developed over the years, for my personal use, and before hearing about Scrivener, a word-processor for my writing practice. When I got Windows 8, I thought my personal software wouldn’t work anymore (it’s in old VB6 and quite difficult to install—I’m an amateur), and that’s how I discovered Scrivener, and I was happy to see that it had most of the features I had implemented in my own software. And yours is far, far better, of course.
There are just 4 things I miss:
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A better treatment of French typography:
French adds an unbreakable space (ASCII 160) before these 5 signs: ?;:!» and adds an unbreakable space after this one: «
In Options/Substitutions, one can automatically use “«abc»”, but without the unbreakable spaces, it’s actually useless. -
Random word/phrase generators:
It’s easy to develop and pretty helpful to stimulate the writer’s imagination. It’s like the Name Generator, but more supple and applied to any kind of word list.
I have lists of possible conflicts, lists of places, lists of nouns, adjectives, verbs, proverbs, fears, character traits, etc. In my software, I just have to select “A Noun”, “An English Surname” or “A Fear” in a menu, and a noun, an English surname or a phrase describing a fear is added in my text where my cursor is, and then my imagination can use this prompt or just dismiss it, but it’s always nice to have this possibility at hand, like a flint to ignite imagination.
If Scrivener users could create their own lists as .txt files, add them in a directory and then have Scrivener randomly select one, two or three words in the selected list(s), it would be great and a rather unique feature compared to other word-processors. There are tons of lists on the Internet, and Scrivener users could even exchange lists they have created. -
Stylistic searches:
search options to find sentences containing a negation, a question, quotation marks, parentheses, participles or gerunds, passive forms, or having more than x words (to spot sentences that are too long), or using weak words (“have”, “do”, etc.). Instead of formulating a complex and incomplete search with “start with”, “contains”, etc., users would just have to press a button named “Negative sentences”, “Passive forms”, “Weak words”, to find all the concerned sentences… Another rather unique feature, and really useful when you’re at the rewriting stage.
And if the results are presented as a “concordance” (a list of all the sentences found), it’s even better, because you can see at one glance all the contexts where you have used a certain expression. It’s also useful for linguists.
In order to make it available in any language, a little .ini file containing all the automated searches (regular expressions and word forms) should be editable by the users, who could then share their “search syntax” with other users speaking their language. -
And finally: a timer in the “Project target”, so that one can choose “Writing 30 minutes” or “Writing 100 words in 30 minutes”, for example.
Thanks for reading these little suggestions, and thanks for creating Scrivener
Alex