Hello all,
Beta 3 is now available for download (link below). Again I must thank everybody who has contributed to these forums and sent me e-mails, both with bug reports and suggestions for improving Scrivener. An especially big thank you to AmberV and Fletcher for all their help with the MultIMarkdown stuff (along with a thousand curses for wanting it in the first place, of course 
). The full list of changes can be found at the end of this post and in the readme file included in the download.
New users: please do make sure you go through the tutorial that is included with the download.
The link:
literatureandlatte.com/dlbet ⊠erRCb3.dmg
Beta 3 is - I hope - a major leap towards 1.0. From here on in everything is going to be tweaking and bug fixing. There will be no more major changes. With beta 3 I have attempted to address most of the issues that users have had, including (though not limited to):
- Navigation: There is now a navigation tab in the Preferences pane, where you can choose how documents will be opened by default. The factory settings are that clicking on a group file in the binder will reveal the corkboard, whilst clicking on a document will reveal its text/image or whatever. You can change this back to the old way of navigating, or you can have groups open to the outliner, and you can set whether you want document groups to act the same as âtrueâ groups (folders). This new behaviour should prevent new users from experiencing the bafflement of being confronted with lots of blank corkboard or outliner views.
-
Outliner/Corkboard/Text toolbar toggle: I heard so much about this one that I wanted to kill myself, so I finally buckled - sort of. The corkboard and outliner items in the toolbar now have an âonâ state if you are in that mode.
- Create Date - There is now creation date meta-data as well as Modified Date, which can be viewed via the inspector or in the outliner. (Note that because of this change, you may have to trash your preferences file for the outliner columns to be saved correctly.)
- MultiMarkdown - MultiMarkdown support is now built in to Scrivener, so that you can use the MultiMarkdown syntax (fletcher.freeshell.org/wiki/MultiMarkdown) in Scrivener to create a structured MultiMarkdown file or to export to LaTeX.
The main focus for beta 4 is going to be to incorporate eSellerate for registration codes etc, so that I can soon start actually selling Scrivener (heaven forfend!). Other than that, as I already said, it will only be tweaks and bug fixes.
Anyway, please do take a moment (or thousand) to look through the full list of changes below.
Let the flurry of bug reports and craven wishes begin!
All the best,
Keith
Your friendly neighbourhood Scrivener developer
Beta 3
- Fixed bug in preferences whereby opacity slider for corkboard pins did not work correctly (sliding below full opacity would just make opacity 60%, no matter where slider was).
- Fixed bug in split buttons whereby using a combination of split keyboard shortcuts and split buttons could cause the buttons and their actions to go out of sync.
- Fixed bug in full screen view whereby two-finger scrolling would not always work if typewriter scrolling is selected and the scroll bar is hidden.
- Fixed minor bug where hitting + button to add a status or label in Project Settings whilst editing another entry would reset the edited field.
- Fixed: âswap documentsâ in Layout menu is now disabled if either document is locked in place.
- Fixed: scroller in outliner view is no longer automatically hidden (because then you canât see the corner view that allows you to customise the columns, dâoh!).
- Fixed bug in Edit Scrivenings where adding a new document when the cursor is inside a group document (or a document with children) would cause the new document to get added after the group (adjacent to the group with the focus), which isnât always ideal. For instance, if the children of the group are also included in the E.S. session, then the new document would be created after them, but displayed before them in the E.S. session. Behaviour has changed so that now, in these circumstances, the new document is created as the first child of the parent document with the focus. (If the document has no children, or if the children are not included in the E.S. session, then the old behaviour still applies.)
- Fixed: Showing inspector with vertical split could cause document resizing errors (caused by trying to force-restore the inspector to its old size - we no longer try to do this.
- Splits are created with a 50/50 ratio now.
- Fixed (another) bug in contextual word count that could lead to word count being off by one (again). I hope.
- Whitespace now gets trimmed from around inline annotations (ie. annotations that get pasted in other apps or exported to RTFD - previously whitespace was only trimmed from RTF comments that can be shown in Word - whitespace gets trimmed from all footnotes anyway). UPDATE: And this was removed again, as in this situation annotations should really reflect exactly how they are in Scrivener.
- Looked at: bug where if youâre scrolling around a document and type something in full screen typewriter mode, the document snaps to a point so that the insertion point is now vertically centred, as should be expected. But if youâve hidden the scroll bar, the instant you begin scrolling again, the document snaps back to the point before typewriter mode reset the scroll point. This doesnât happen if the scroll bar is visible. This is a Cocoa bug - the same behaviour happens when typewriter mode isnât selected but you are working in the middle of a long document, and can be recreated in other Cocoa apps that do not have a scroll bar, too.
-Fixed: moving documents in and out of the trash did not update the icon in the header view (which should be semi-transparent if it is in the trash). - Changed by popular nag: About box now dismisses when it is clicked on (unless you click in the text view); previously it only got dismissed when you clicked out of it.
- Added keyboard shortcut for âLock in Placeâ (alt-cmd-L) - which now appears in the âGoâ menu as well as in the header view menu.
- Added keyboard shortcut for General Text and Screenplay modes (cmd-7 & cmd-EIGHT).
- Added âFloat Windowâ option to Window menu.
- Fixed smart quotes behaviour so that open quotes are created if typed directly after a (, { or [.
- Tried: recreate full screen .nib given that it is corrupt (causing scroll arrows not to work sometimes). Tried this, and it made no difference. Deleting and recreating the text view fixes things, but then if you mess around with the .nib file again, the problem returns. Very strangeâŠ
- Fixed âShow stampsâ should be disabled if corkboard not visible.
- Fixed preference for index card pins to appear on right, which somehow got broken between beta 1 and beta 2.
- âConvert Format of Selected Documentsâ now works if text view has focus, operating on current text.
- Changed keyboard shortcut for âPlay/pause mediaâ back to cmd-enter (which was used for âOpen in Editorâ in beta 2 - âPlay/pause mediaâ was assigned to shift-cmd-enter, but this did not show up because it is apparently an invalid shortcut). âOpen in Editorâ now has keyboard shortcut alt-cmd-O.
- Added âOpen in Alternate Editorâ (shift-cmd-O). This way, you can browse through an outline view in one view and open the selected document in the other split without having to drag to the header.
- Looked into having the corkboard/outliner slide into place but 1) this caused too many drawing bugs and artefacts to be worth the development time at this stage; 2) I didnât really like it anyway, as it slows down navigation and is somewhat distracting and âgimmickyâ. I will probably review this when Leopard introduces CoreAnimation.
- Fixed: keyboard shortcuts for zoom in/zoom out previously did not work in full screen.
- Added: navigate to next or previous container (eg. group or document with children) in binder, search results or outliner using ctrl-up or ctrl-down (note that whether this navigates only to folders or to any document with children depends on Preferences settings for âAutomatically switch back to editor view whenâŠâ
- Fixed internal assertion failure during export, which would happen if you tried to export the draft whilst there was no inspected document (eg. if the main document was set to the Draft folder, Trash folder etc).
- Fixed: if snapshots were created for a document and you then deleted all of the snapshots, you could still open the empty snapshots for that sheet. Now, if all snapshots are deleted, the snapshots file is deleted from disk so that you can no longer open it until a new snapshot is created.
- Text documents now indicate whether they have snapshots attached to them. Text documents with a curl in the corner of their icon have snapshots attached; those that have no curl do not. (Note that folder documents do not show any indication of whether or not they have snapshots - another difference between folders and text groups.) This is in part experimental: because Scrivener looks on the hard drive to see if there any snapshots for a document, it can be doing this quite a lot - this should be fine, but if this doe turn out to be too slow, this feature may be removed.
- Fixed: zoom in/zoom out keyboard shortcuts now work in full screen as they should.
- Backup Project To⊠now has âBackup as ZIP fileâ as an option.
- Backup Project To⊠now remembers the backup directory from the last time you used it for the current project, so that you can choose a location for backups for your project once and then donât need to waste time browsing back to that folder every time you use Backup Project ToâŠ
- Fixed - Move Down lost its keyboard shortcut (shift-cmd-D) in beta 2 because this key was assigned to âinsert dateâ. âInsert dateâ has been reassigned to shift-alt-cmd-D.
- Added âcards acrossâ setting to corkboard contextual menu.
- Updated word frequency panel to compare all words to the most commonly used word, so that the bars do not all now appear empty (ie. the most-used word will fill the bar).
- Added âNavigationâ preferences. These allow you to decide how the corkboard and outliner should behave with the binder. For instance, you can set it so that whenever you click on a document that has no children, the corkboard or outliner will disappear and switch back to the editor rather than show you an empty corkboard/outline. This should reinforce the notion that these modes are individual document modes; ways of viewing individual documents rather than full binder-navigation tools. In conjunction with the new ability to use ctrl-up/down to navigate between groups in the binder, and how the navigation buttons now remember the âmodeâ a document was in, this should make navigating between documents and groups a little more intuitive. You can also set selecting groups automatically to take you to outliner or corkboard mode, so that, should you wish, the browsing behaviour of groups and documents can be completely different.
- Added: alt-clicking on check buttons in the outliner (ie. âinclude in exportâ and âpage break beforeâ will now apply the change to all visible items (note this will therefore not apply to sub-documents that in collapsed groups - make sure you Expand All if you want to apply to everything).
- Changed: âSplit document with selection as titleâ now does not delete the selected text, but instead selects it in the newly created document so that the user can just hit âdeleteâ if this was the behaviour they desired.
- Looked at: cursor wobbles up and down on carriage return in typewriter mode. Minor NSTextView bug - the same can be seen in TextEdit in similar circumstances; typewriter mode just makes it a little more obvious. No action required.
- Moved âTypeâ column in outliner view to after âsynopsisâ column by default - the âTypeâ column is not ideal as the first column (which has the disclosure triangles), as the images can sometimes move into other columns. (This is a bug with Appleâs implementation of image cells in the outline column of outline views.)
- Fixed - position of scroll arrows in full screen did not respect System Preferences - arrows would get drawn (buggily) at bottom of text view even if System Prefs had them set to top and bottom.
- Fixed - scroller will only appear when actually required when typewriter scrolling is selected (previously it would show even if there was no text).
- Added paperback page count to Project Statistics. Note that the algorithm is slightly different to the single-document paperback page count for speed purposes. The project one (which only counts draft documents) takes the character count and divides by 6 (the traditional publisherâs word count), and then divides the result by 350 (assuming 350 âwordsâ per page). The document page count is a little more accurate in that it takes all the text, puts it in a monospace font in a fake text view, goes through every line and then finds the line with the most characters on it, divides this by 6 and then multiplies the result by the number of lines before multiplying by 350. This gives a more accurate count that just dividing the character count by 6 (apparently). You really wanted to know that, didnât you?
- Navigation now saves viewing mode. ie. If you have the corkboard selected, and then select another document and change to text mode, if you navigate back using the âbackâ arrow, it will switch back to corkboard, and if you then navigate back forward it will switch back to text. This should make for a smoother and more intuitive navigation experience.
- Enhanced: switch documents between splits now switches view modes, too.
- Fixed: word and character count columns in outliner view are no longer editable.
- Added: uneditable columns in outliner view (eg. the âtypeâ icon column) can now be double-clicked to open the selected document (for consistency with corkboard behaviour).
- Fixed: Find Annotation now finds the next annotation rather than the current one if the cursor is inside an annotation.
- Changed âspellingâ toolbar icon so that it nows shows the guess panel instead of toggling spelling-as-you-type.
- Updated split view menu so that selecting the current split type (if horizontal or vertical) will close the split (so that you can now toggle the split using shift-alt-cmd-A or shift-alt-cmd-U).
- Fixed bug where application would hang with the spinning beach ball of death if you tried to view a synopsis tooltip (eg. in the binder) when the synopsis contained only whitespace (essentially an Apple bug, but worked around).
- Moved some items from Go menu to View menu.
- Added âReveal in Binderâ to View menu and added keyboard shortcut (alt-cmd-R).
- Added âopen on secondary screen if possibleâ option to full screen preferences. If this is selected and you have multiple screens, full screen will open on a different screen to the main Scrivener window. You can then refer to documents in the main window whilst editing in full screen mode. This should go someway to compensating for the lack of multiple windows in Scrivener for those with more than one monitor (note that multiple windows will not be supported). This feature is partly experimental at the moment - be sure to report any bugs or oddities when using full screen like this.
- Enhancement: batch keyword assignment is now possible. If you drag keywords from the keywords HUD onto a selection of documents in the binder, search results table, outliner or corkboard, the keywords will be assigned to the whole selection, not just the document onto which the keywords are dropped.
- (Hopefully) fixed bug where emptying trash could cause an application hang when the trash folder was selected in outliner mode with lots of items to delete.
- Added progress indicator to Empty Trash sheet.
- Added toolbar item for switching between screenplay and general text modes.
- Fixed bug whereby dragging an item into the slot directly before itself would actually move the object before the previous object - this was the cause of the corkboard sometimes seeming to jump around when you clicked on a card, too.
- Added âwhole wordâ search operator to search menu.
- Enhanced: set selection as title and âsplit with selection as titleâ now replaces newlines with spaces when creating the title (note that neither can accept more than 50 characters).
- Fixed: âDuplicate documentsâ is now disabled unless binder/outliner/corkboard is selected (could previously be used when editor had focus, but it still operated on the binder selection rather than the editorâs document).
- Fixed: bug where dragging and dropping a group of documents ONTO a folder or item would copy the items in in reverse order.
- (Hopefully) fixed minor bug where full screen text view would not be scrolled to the cursor point when entering full screen mode.
- Fixed: widths of columns in references table is now saved between sessions.
- Fixed bug where in Export Draft sheet where hitting Print would cause export progress bar to appear with a partial progress, when the progress bar should only be displayed when exporting to file.
- Workaround: if a QuickTime file is embedded in text and the text is viewed in more than one text view at a time and then swapped for a different document, the application can crash. This is evidently an Apple bug (duly reported, Apple Bug ID# 4753855), so until it is fixed within the AppKit the text view will no longer accept QuickTime attachments. Thus, the text view now only accepts image files being dragged in (including PDF). Other file types just become links when dragged in. Note that this only applies to the main document - you can still drag QuickTime files into the notes area. It is highly recommended that you delete any QuickTime attachments from pre-existing text.
- Internal improvement: changed app delegate to use IBOutlets instead of string comparators, which will make localisation more reliable when the time comes (in the somewhat distant futureâŠ).
- Got rid of contextual menu in web view, which did nothing anyway.
- Fixed minor bug where inspector would say that there was nothing selected sometimes when a split was closed.
- Default colour for binder and notes returned to white rather than light grey (you can change these colours in Preferences anyway).
- Added âpxâ/âpixelsâ after margin fields in Preferences to clarify the measurement unit (ie. pixels).
- Removed expand/shrink document view feature for the time being, as it was not very intuitive and only worked on the main document (not on the split document). The user can expand/collapse individual elements very quickly using keyboard shortcuts anyway, and get much more âexpectedâ results.
- Fixed âinsert current dateâ now uses Scrivenerâs default text formatting if inserted into an empty document (instead of Helvetica 12 point).
- None-image attachments now get stripped from text on import (to avoid the Apple QuickTime bug which can cause a crash when text has QuickTime attachments).
- HUD tables and text views now use blue text selection colour regardless of System Preferences - otherwise, if âsilverâ is set as the selection colour, it is indistinguishable from the grey background of the HUD controls.
- Added: you can now create new documents whilst in full screen mode.
- Fixed: merge documents no longer overrides locked in place.
- Correction: Previous beta release notes stated: âEnhancement: When a folder is selected and its contents are used for Edit Scrivenings, the text should update to accommodate any documents that are added to that group, or any that are moved out of that group.â This is not actually the case, and nor should it be. Edit Scrivenings takes all subdocuments of a given folder, including subdocuments of subfolders, and adds them to the compiled text. If you add or remove documents, you will need to refresh the Edit Scrivenings session manually. This is because there are four different types of Edit Scrivenings session (edit all content, edit selection, edit exportable or unexportable content). Edit Content is the only one where the whole contents of a folder is shown, but they in actual fact all work the same - so it is not possible for the E.S. session to make a decision on whether or not a document should be added to or removed from the session. Nor should it: if you have a document view âlocked in placeâ, it may be that you want to keep the old contents as is there, then swap documents around in the binder and have them as a new E.S. session in a different view for comparison.
- Added (by popular request): There is now an option in Preferences for a fading (âauto-hidingâ) scroll bar in full screen. The auto-hiding scroll bar assumes the colour of the text, whilst the standard scroll bar, which does not auto-hide, looks like the ones in iPhoto etc.
- Added more control to the inspector - âMeta-Dataâ and âSupporting Materialsâ have now become âMeta-Data (with Keywords)â, âMeta-Data (with Notes)â and âNotes & Referencesâ. The only real change here is that you can now swap the keywords for the notes if you want, meaning that you can view synopsis and notes at the same time. Accordingly, the keyboard shortcuts for the three inspector modes have changed from cmd-3 and cmd-4 to cmd-6, cmd-7 and cmd-8. As the latter two were previously used by text modes, the text modes keyboard shortcuts have now changed to cmd-3 (General) and cmd-4 (Screenplay).
- âDuplicateâ now duplicates chid documents.
- Duplicated files now have their titles appended with âcopyâ, âcopy-1â etc.
- Split icon in header view is now blank if in the main view if the split is enabled, to indicate that clicking it will destroy the split and not create a new one.
- Fixed bug where screenplay mode does not work in full screen.
- Added âcreated dateâ field to outliner. Note that because this has necessitated internal changes, you may find that the hidden state of columns (in particular, the âModified Dateâ column) is not saved properly between sessions. To fix this, you will need to trash your defaults (com.literatureandlatte.scrivener) - sorry! (But hey, itâs a beta.)
- Created date can also be viewed in the inspector. The date field label is now a pop-up, which allows you to choose whether you wish to view the created date or the modified date. (NOTE: created date will only work for new documents. For existing documents, the created date will be the modified date at the time you open beta 3 for the first time.)
- Added keyboard shortcuts for all highlight colours - cmd-ctrl1 to cmd-ctrl-5, with cmd-ctrl-0 clearing highlighting.
- Added âMake defaultâ button for label and status in Project Settings. The bold item is the default, and all new or imported documents will use the default label and status when first created.
- Added some more checks in preferences for what fonts are available, to try to avoid the âblank interfaceâ bug that can occur when default fonts are not installed (usually missing Optima and Chalkboard fonts cause this).
- Added preference for changing notes background colour in full screen (note that there will not be the option to change the font colour or selection colour in full screen notes!).
- Added ellipses after âNew Projectâ and âExport Draftâ in File menu, as is standard.
- Fixed full screen mode so that it no longer exits if the escape key is hit whilst the alt/opt key is held down, so that auto-complete (alt-Esc) can now be used in full screen mode too.
- Added âProject SearchâŠâ to Find menu. This just brings up a utility panel with a search field that does exactly the same as (and is synchronised with) the search field in the toolbar. That way, if you prefer to hide the toolbar or have it as text-only, you can still access the search feature. (If you use the toolbar, you will never need to use this, of course.)
- Added keyboard shortcuts to Project Search (cmd-ctrl-F) and Find Annotations (cmd-ctrl-A).
- Added frame state-saving for keywords HUD, full screen inspector HUD, annotations finder and search panel.
- Changed âShow Keywords HUDâ action in keywords action button menu in inspector so that it only shows the keywords HUD if not visible; it no longer toggles the HUD on and off (as it shouldnât).
- Added âStage Play (US)â and âStage Play (UK)â formatting to the Text > Mode menu, and a modes popup button for the toolbar. Note that this really ends the script formatting features for 1.0. These modes are basic and are not substitutes for dedicated scriptwriting software such as Final Draft or Montage. However, they should be enough to facilitate the drafting of scripts in Scrivener.
- Added âHighlight Finderâ to Find menu. This allows you to search for particular highlight colours in your text. You can also assign meaningful names to each highlight colour if you so wish, rather than âYellowâ, âOrangeâ etc, which will then appear in the highlight menus.
- Improved Annotation Finder so that you can now only return annotations that contain a specific term if you so wish. This way you could place certain tags inside annotations for things such as bookmarks and only search for annotations with specific tags.
- Added âTake Snapshots of Allâ feature. This will take a snapshot of every text file in the project - use it sparingly, as being too liberal with this would be an easy way of growing your project size! (Please donât ask for some way to roll back all documents to a given date - it ainât gonna happen!)
- Outliner and Corkboard items in toolbar now show visual indicator when selected.
- Updated the way the date is displayed in the inspector so that it now uses System Preferences to determine the localised format.
- Added âClose Windowâ to File menu and updated shortcut of âClose Projectâ to avoid confusion.
- Both import and export now use UTF8 encoding for plain-text. If you require a different encoding, please convert in a different app.
- Changed RTF formatting of footnotes and annotations to use UTF8 rather than ASCII. This should improve support for international character sets, though we may have to revert to ASCII if this causes any major problems.
- Title in header view of currently focussed split now has an underline to indicate focus (note that the underline will disappear when you edit the title).
- Changed âInsert Dateâ to use long date as defined in System Preferences.
- (Hopefully) fixed bug where double-clicking words or phrases in the main text view and then dragging them elsewhere would not insert the necessary whitespace in a smart fashion as is expected.
- Navigation history is now remembered between sessions.
- References table will now automatically create the description for files dragged in based on the file name instead of always using âURLâ by default (though it will still âURLâ as the default for web URLs). Of course, these can be renamed manually anyway.
- Added âZoom to Fit Windowâ item to Window menu.
- Added keyboard shortcuts for zoom window and show/hide toolbar menu items.
- Added âHighlightâ and âSet Selected Text As Titleâ to contextual menu in text view.
- Added âConvert Bold and Italics to MultiMarkdown Syntaxâ item to Text menu (under âConvertâ).
- Added MultiMarkdown Settings sheet to File menu. If you are not using MultiMarkdown (or if you donât even know what this means), just ignore this as you will never need it.
- Added Import MultiMarkdown File to File menu. This will take a MultiMarkdown file and split it up based on the structure, and attempt to recreate that structure in the Binder automatically.
- The Project Settings keyboard shortcut has been reassigned to alt-cmd-comma, so as not to interfere with the system cmd-period shortcut which allows the cancelling of sheets and text auto-completion.
- Added some extra checks to file deletion processes during Empty Trash, so that if files cannot be deleted from disk for some reason, an error message will be displayed and the problem files will not be removed from the binder.
- Changed default text attributes to Optima 13pt, 1.2 line spacing multiple, 8pts between paragraphs (thanks to AmberV for recommendation).
). So far, you should take a week off, at least.
Just trying to spread the meme.