Well, it helps if you prostitute your art in the name of graphic design. 
The natural media scene here is nearly saturated and it is very difficult to make a break in this city. As for why there are so many of us here on this board, I think somebody else said it accurately: Portland has a massive NanoWriMo community, given the size of the city. We amassed enough words to get into the top 10, sometimes even the top 5, against cities many times our size. Since Scrivener was originally publicised as a Nano tool, it took off here. There also seems to be a lot of Macs in this city, too.
Ah, thanks for explaining. Sounds logical! Lots of writers, the NanoWriMo connection, and many Macs. Three more reasons to love Portland!
My sister didn’t go the graphic design route. To make a living, she teaches art and math to kids, freelance, and does quite well with it. She’s also writing a book on the art/math connection. She too found it very difficult to break into the art scene here. I have two other artist friends, one of whom has done fairly well, but she’s been here forever and has made inroads.
I’m very pleased with the new beta. I thought that Scrivener Gold was close to perfect, but you’ve surpassed that standard.
There’s one small difference between the old Draft mode and Edit Scrivenings in which I think Scrivener Gold had the upper hand, and that was showing the titles of the documents inline with the text in Draft mode. I found that very useful when writing a speech or an article with subsections, and I’m missing it greatly.
Is there any possibility that you could bring it back as a preference?
Sadly not - or at least, not without rewriting huge amounts of code. It was something I considered carefully, and it was a bit of a trade off. The way it works now allows things to be much more flexible. By working with text only, it can do much more (such as display non-contiguous chunks of text quickly). I also figured that most users will still be placing chapter titles inside certain documents, which will then obviously still appear. The way it works now means you can just compile whole chunks of text to see how they work when run together. The old draft view didn’t really allow that. The old version was actually much more buggy as well - the whole thing had to keep track of where different titles of different lengths were.
One solution is to place titles in the text of group documents. For instance, say you have a number of text documents that comprise Chapter 1 contained within a folder entitled “Chapter 1”. Now that folders can hold text too, you could just have the text of the Chapter 1 folder as “Chapter 1” in a large, bold font. Then you select the folder, hit edit scrivenings, and you have your title at the top. This is just one way of using folders. Or you can use a separate text document for it, of course, though this would hardly be optimal.
Well, it’s not an insurmountable obstacle–as you say, I can place titles in the docs. Going forward, that’s not a problem. It will require reworking some rather large projects I started under Scrivener Gold, though.
If it has made the code cleaner and less buggy, however, then it’s worth the inconvenience.
Thanks again for a great product!
I actually like it better this way. Works more flawlessly for me as a continuous text, — I normally want my titles off the page, as I write short stories (and that Great novel of course).
For that reason, I never used the old Draft but keep using the new incarnation of it.
Wow, how did I miss this?
Just downloaded the .dmg. Can’t wait to try it!
Fantastic, Keith. Thank you for your hard work. This is one of the most visually pleasing applications on the Mac ever.
A question: Will you be offering the Corkboard and the full screen writing as separate modules? Like, two separate applications…one for visually outlining ideas or to put our real index cards into digital medium (with possibility of scanning them even, though not that necessary), the other a much better replacement for BlockWriter?
Now to the tutorial…(rubs hands).
Thanks for your kind words, Musti.
Not for the foreseeable future, purely because of the amount of work I have to do on Scrivener. One day, when things have calmed down, I would quite like to release a freeware Corkboard-only app. But because Scrivener is my primary writing app, that is always going to take precedence.
All the best,
Keith
I am pretty sure there will be good demand for both the Corkboard application and the full-screen writing module of Scrivener, as a separate program.
When you export a draft, Scrivener ignores any of the “ruler” portions of the styles that you’ve created in the document. Font formatting is respected; tabs and margins are not. (Scrivener Gold worked properly here.)
I’m currently using Scrivener to edit 40 of my magazine columns from the past six years into a book manuscript. I prefer working in full screen mode, but there are two things that would make it work better for editing.
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Some way to highlight text (preferably through a hot key). Currently, it appears that the only way to highlight text is to exit full screen, highlight it, and return to full screen.
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Because I’m editing, I like having the ruler visible in full screen mode so that I can do some formatting as I edit. Every time I mouse up to the ruler, however, I get bit by Fitt’s law, because the menu bar appears immediately. As far as I’m concerned, the menu bar does not need to appear at all, but if it’s going to, I think it should appear after a slight delay–not long enough to annoy somene who’s trying to trigger it, but long enough to be able to toss the mouse to the top of the screen and then move it down onto the ruler elements before the menu bar appears.
Overall, I remain very pleased with Scrivener.
del
Except that the Highlight command in the menu bar does not highlight a selection–all it does is pull up the submenu where you can change the highlight color.
Aha! In checking to make sure I was stating that correctly, I tested everything in the submenu and discovered that “Toggle Highlight Color” does not, as the phrasing seemed to indicate (to me, at least) toggle the highlighter between different colors but, instead, applies the highlighter. So there is a key command for highlighting.
I’d suggest changing “Toggle Highlight Color” to something more obvious, such as “Apply Highlighter” or simply “Highlight Selection.”
(I think part of my confusion stemmed from the fact that, on my machine, at least, there’s no check mark next to the current color in that submenu. Assuming this isn’t a problem with my setup, there should be a check mark.)
Perhaps “Toggle highlight?” Because if you just say “Highlight selection” the menu item ceases to make sense when attempting to remove a highlight. Oh, and I second Maria’s request on toning down the brightness of those highlighters a bit.
Strange, becuase the code is the same in both. 
I can’t recreate this - everything works as expected. Do you have “Use export text formatting” checked? If so, the ruler and font settings will be overridden by those defined in the Export Settings under View > Project Settings. The ability to have different export formatting was something often requested, and the checkbutton in the Export Draft sheet turns it on by default. If you uncheck that, Scrivener won’t touch your formatting when you export.
I’ve changed the title of the toolbar item to “Toggle Highlight” as per AmberV’s suggestion. As she pointed out, it has to be “Toggle”, because it can remove highlighting as well as add it.
Well, you won’t be able to choose your own highlighting colours, that is going a little too far at the moment. Look at it like this: Scrivener comes with five highlighter pens. It used to come with none. However, maybe I will tone down the colours to something a little more subtle, perhaps by making the current colours semi-transparent.
The menu provides extra options that many users may require. For instance, Go > Go To allows you to navigate between documents whilst in full screen. There are various text options available under the Text menu that do not have keyboard shortcuts. You can view your snapshots. The speech feature is available through the menu only… and so on. And unfortunately there is no way of adding a delay, as the popping down of the menu is done through a system command that has no options for this. That said, I don’t find too much of a problem with this; all of the controls in the ruler are available, it just means getting used to avoiding the top of the screen with the mouse. I’m not saying it’s ideal; just an unavoidable annoyance in the current set up.
I was thinking about this last night, and came to that same conclusion–until I remembered that, in fact, the title of menu items can change dynamically. So you could have “Apply Highlight to Selection” when the selection is not highlighted and “Remove Highlight” when the selection is highlighted. That would avoid any confusion.
As for the menu bar, I understand the dilemma. There are other programs that apparently override the system behavior to provide a delay–I just wish I could think of some right now.Â
I know I’ve run into this situation before, however. If I can find some examples, I’ll let you know.
That does the trick. Thanks!
Agree on the choices themselves being fine. One nice thing about them is that they match the five standard highlighter pens that can be purchased at any office store. Chances are, many of us already have informal systems based on the colours of these pens in our hard-copy editing. That we can transfer that system over to Scrivener is nice.
And here I was, thinking the delay was too slow. 
My question: When have we ever had the benefit of Fitt’s law with the ruler anyway? I for one am used to having to aim at GUI elements in the ruler.
By the way, I love this thread. It has gone from praise to beer to highlighter pens.
Minor niggle - when choosing “use small size” as a toolbar option, the “add” button does not shrink.
Nice beta. Reading the tutorial is a must.