The topic title might not be the clearest. Here’s the issue (which is minor). When I have a Quick Reference panel open and edit it, the red ‘close document’ button gets a black dot, as expected. However, the black dot does not clear, even after Scrivener has auto-saved, or indeed after I manually save using CMD-S. The edits I make are nonetheless saved, as tested by closing the window and re-opening.
I presume this isn’t expected behaviour?
I’m running Scrivener 3.0, on OS X 10.12.6.
Closing the project performs a save under all circumstances, so it could still be it isn’t saved in that state and you’d lose something if it crashed. Can you think of any additional conditions that might be necessary to see this happen? I am not getting that result with the following checklist:
For me it autosaves and the dot goes away after two seconds.
Weird. Following those conditions Ioa, when I type Test the main window gets the black dot, but the Quick Reference window doesn’t.
On my other projects, however, the Quick Reference opens with the black dot already present, and after the auto save, the dot remains. The dot on the main window disappears as expected. I’m going to reboot and relaunch now, to see if that makes a difference.
Well, in the process of shutting down, I closed the new Test project, and Scrivener crashed. I’m going to reboot now anyway.
Strange behaviour persists after a reboot, except now the quick reference panel never gets a black dot, no matter what edits I make, though the main window does.
Okay yeah, I see some variation. If I open a QR panel before the project has auto-saved, then the dot will migrate to the panel, and from there it does appear to get stuck—but the project window in the background seems to be functioning normally in terms of that dot coming and going as I type and then pause.
If that’s what you’re seeing—I bet’s okay. The QR panel is just another “portal” into the data that is being controlled by the project window. If you have things set up right, like for example the card of the item you’re editing on a corkboard in the background, and its synopsis is drawing off of the text content, then as you type in the QR panel you can see the index card changing as you type. So—it’s safe and I wouldn’t worry about it.
Yes, everything is working fine otherwise, thanks Ioa
Yes, don’t worry about the black dot in other windows. I think it’s a bug in macOS, and it’s been there for some time. Essentially the black dot should be taken from the “isEdited” (YES/NO) flag of the main document (project) data. But for some reason, windows other than the main project window don’t always respect this. But it’s all handled by internal Apple code. I’ve even tried brute-force hiding the dots in other windows in the past but it hasn’t helped.
Of course, if you can reproduce that crash, I’d love to get to the bottom of that!
All the best,
Keith
Thanks Keith. If I can reproduce the crash, I’ll send further details. The only clue I had for the original crash (the report was sent to you guys using the crash reporter when I restarted the programme), was that when I switched desktop, the Quick Ref panel that I had open “followed” me, and appeared on the other desktop. This is something that I noticed in Scriv2 occasionally; Quick Ref panels would not stay on the desktop on which they were placed (I often use a second monitor).
One other quick thing. The black dot on the main window appears even if I simply change focus in the binder, and do absolutely nothing else. I presume that’s normal also?
Scrivener triggers an auto-save for quite a few things, but I’m not sure why the binder focus would do that…