On barely-related note: do you ever wonder if, perhaps, we’re all a little insane on this forum? Dost thou thinkest that, say, a Shakespeare or a Dostoevsky worried or cared about the sorts of niggling issues we seem to care about so much here in this forum?
I mean really. And I’m the worst offender. Today, I posted a question about document titles and why they’re underlined in the editor. And then I had to laugh at myself, thinking: “my problem isn’t that the title is underlined (good god, the horror, the horror!), it’s that I’ve got a goddamn 5,000 word article to write and I’m swimming in 20,000 words and I can’t seem to focus them.”
Thanks for the info guys. I like that mode a lot and it will come in handy. I guess I differ a bit from almost everyone else here (including Keith) but I feel like if an app is going 99% of the way it might as well go that last 1% and let me finish the formatting in there instead of having to export.
I do have Final Draft, but I much prefer writing in Scrivener. However, if I’m going to essentially have to retype my entire play/screenplay into FD to get it in format after I’m done with it… well, maybe I’ll forgo the entire Scrivener experience and just stick with FD? I guess that’s my only concern with not making this app able to export polished final drafts (even if it doesn’t do so by default and takes a bit more work at the end or along the way on the part of the user).
I’ve done some experimenting with this, and found that if I simply export into plain text and then import into a FD stageplay template, it actually works quite well. Not that you won’t have corrections to make, but this beats typing it all out again
The complexities of doing this are quite enormous. Take a look at Montage - this is all they focus on and they still have a long, long way to go (but I do think that it will eventually be a much better program than FD.) And even FD, which has been around for years, still has its problems, bugs, etc.
Hope this helps!
I’ve been thinking about this, too, but then I remembered that Douglas Adams was famous for spending hours testing different word processors on his Mac - instead of writing. I think he would have liked this place.
On topic - I’ve been spending only 1 or 2 hours with Beta 3 yet, but I’ve not encountered any problems so far - only improvements. Great work!
I’ve already stated that I’m not really interested in improving this mode any more - it is meant to be basic, as Scrivener is not a dedicated script writing program. As for the format, you can use Cmd-U or Cmd-I to underline or add italics as you want, so what is the problem? And in actual fact, you are not entirely right anyway. It depends on the type of stageplay you are writing. The UK formatting is based on the BBC standard and the US is based on Samuel & French. There are variations, but Scrivener uses the basic one so that you can hit cmd-U or cmd-I if you need to.
I think you misunderstand how this works. There is no such thing as having “documents… in different modes”. The mode affects the editor, not the document.
Hey Keith, perhaps the first time a user enters screenmode, a little pop-up tells them this…? Clearly this is going to be an issue. I can see Ulysses-like posts on this issue unless its made crystal clear upfront. Just a thought.
Hope all is well with thou. Beta 3 is awesome. I’m using it 8 hours/day now. cheers!
Keith,
First post (since any bugs I saw in beta two were already mentioned by the time I got to it), but I just wanted to say I fired up beta3 today for about 2 hours to do some writing and I was pretty massively impressed. Really happy with it, enough so that I’d like to echo the “let us pre reg for full version 1” note someone else made. This program has been phenomenal (the gold version which I’ve been using extensively lately has been great, the two betas I’ve tried even better) and I’d pay for this particular beta if it were released 1.0
Awesome job, and, of course, I’ll bug report if I see any probs (as I said, none so far). Keep up the fantastic work!
Oh, also, if you include help topics or a more detailed manual with the next beta or 1.0, I think I agree that specifying that the stage/screenplay section is supposed to be basic, it would be good as I could also see people complaining that it doesn’t necessarily follow every single formatting condition ever.
Thanks for taking the time to say you like the app, jcsilvia (and thanks to everyone who has taken the time to praise beta 3 ), much appreciated.
I doubt I will get around to any documentation for the next beta, but maybe the one after that. The focus of the next beta is getting the registration code in there, and then the focus for beta 5 will be getting some documentation written. I agree that I need to make the script formatting limiations explicit in the documentation, but documentation takes a lower priority than bug fixing etc because, obviously, one the drawbacks of using beta software is a lack of docs.
Beta3 is definitely a nice piece of work – great job!
I’d been planning to use Scrivener for essays, books, and whatever fiction I could find time for. In my eagerness to play with the beta, I’ve started to use it for technical and business documentation (manuals, policy documents, etc). The piece de resistance, for me, is the full screen mode: the implementation blows competitors out of the water.
There are a few things that caught me off-guard. The first is the font preference for General Text Attributes: changing this does not change the font of existing text, so at first I thought the preferences were not being saved/applied – perhaps a mention in the tutorial or eventually the help file.
The second is the corkboard, which does not seem fully functional (pins and status do not appear) … I’m assuming this is in a known bug, as the pins worked in a previous beta.
The third is having multiple projects open, then exiting and starting Scrivener: only the most recently-opened project is opened. This is by design, judging by the wording of the Preferences checkbox, but it is disconcerting the first time.
Ok, got the praise out of the way, the problems out of the way, now for the inevitable wish list:
A Text->Convert option to remove line breaks. I imported a 70-char wide email and ended up removing the line breaks in an external editor.
A way to select all text in multiple documents (or in Edit Scrivenings) and apply font changes. Based purely on my whim to switch from the default font to good old Courier … after importing all of my files.
An Applescript dictionary. This is obviously a very involved process and not worthy of a version 1 feature (possibly not worth doing at all). Still, the ability to access (even read-only) the Scrivener binder/group/text contents and metadata from something like DevonThink would be very nice.
Thanks again for all the hard work! I am eagerly awaiting the release version.
Right. Since each document can have its own font and style settings, globally wiping everything out if you change the default might not be what you want to do (and what would be done with snapshots?). You can manually change documents you have selected in the Binder using Edit/Convert Format of Selected Documents. This can be done to as many documents as you want, at once.
They are working for me. Do you perhaps not have them turned on? It is the default state in new projects for them to both be turned off. Check in View/Index Cards, and see if there is a check beside those two items.
How the text attributes apply will certainly be mentioned in the Help file when I write it. The current behaviour is certainly the most desirable - preferences should not change the format of saved documents, but only apply to newly created ones.
Like AmberV says, this is just a view option. Just hit Cmd-P and Cmd-S to see them both. Pins should probably be on by default, now that I think about it.
Yes, this is by design.
Not sure this is really Scrivener’s job. Do you just mean removing newlines?
This is already possible, though not in Edit Scrivenings for reasons mentioned in previous threads (search on “Edit Scrivenings”). Just select the documents you want to convert, and then go to Edit > Convert Format of Selected Documents… You can choose to convert them to the format you have set in your Preferences for default text attributes or to the export format set up in Project Settings. And actually, this works if you are in Edit Scrivenings, too.
Aha! I missed that one in my search through the menus, my eyes must have assumed it was another version of Covert to File. That does the job.
That worked, thanks – I was looking in the Preferences. I see to recall them being there previously, but I could be mis-remembering. And yes, I skipped that part of the tutorial, thinking I had read it many times before
Cmd-Opt-P and S, it turns out.
Yes, that’s what I mean. I took a look at Find/Replace, and didn’t see any indication that metacharacters/regular expressions were supported, so I bounced the text into Textmate and back. Since Text->Convert has an item for consolidating whitespace, it seemed a natural place to look for it.
Anyways, Scrivener is for generating content, not text processing. If there is a way to find/replace tabs and newlines currently, great; if not, it’s not important.
To get rid of extraneous line breaks, spaces and other text annoyances, go to devon-technologies.com/download/index.html and click on the free “WordService,” which will place a command called Format in your Services menu. Select the text you want to clean up, click on Format in the Services menu, and you can reformat to your heart’s content.
Geez, I’ve had that all along and never realized it. I used to use TextSoap but they charged too much to upgrade and I don’t use it enough to warrant it. This is too cool. Thanks for the tip, brett!!
Sorry for the slow reply, things have been pretty hectic of late and I’ve had to cut down my online time. In answer to your query: I suspect that Dostoevsky had much better reasons for being insane than I do - I bet he would have loved to worry about keyboard assignments instead of firing squads. As for Shakespeare, there’s no way to know, but I’m guessing working in a very commercial theatre gave him enough niggling issues to fill his day. I try to remember every day that worrying about process and method as much as I do - and that’s a lot - is a luxury.
The only way I ever get anything done is on deadline. If other people weren’t counting on me I would fiddle all day long on things like line spacing or the weight of artificial snowflakes- there’s something oddly reassuring in having the luxury to decide something is important when it isn’t. It gives me the illusion of control and the hope that somehow I will be able to steamline things so well that my process a nd my work will be stress free.
But in my heart of hearts I know that the stress IS my process. Give me time and I’ll fiddle and plan perfection, take it away and I’ll improvise something that’s more than good enough, for me at any rate.
Hmmmm…maybe If I had a firing squad or a royal command to meet, I’d write better.
