Awesome program, I use it every day. I’ve used similar applications going back to CopyWrite around 2005, lots of work in Ulysses but Scrivener really feels like home. I have but two small feature requests that for my uses would make the program perfect. Okay, one small and one large, but I thought I’d try!
I use one (backed up!) project for all of my poetry-related work: thoughts and journaling, ideas and scraps, and poems (using the awesome snapshot feature to keep track of drafts.
My wish list:
Disconnect the line numbering from the ruler. I must have line numbering on (and particularly appreciate it in full screen mode), but have no use for the ruler. In fact, in full screen mode, the ruler is quite distracting. To my knowledge, the only way to show line numbering is to have the ruler visible as well.
I’d love to re-arrange the inspector panels. Because I use both document notes and snapshots extensively, I’d like to have both of those visible at the same time. I know that’s very much a personal style thing, so arranging the panels through preferences would be great.
Thanks for all the hard work, and being open to suggestions.
One little hint for frequent inspector usage is the HNJMKL sequence. All of the inspector panels are bound to those letters in order (they make more sense if you look down at the keyboard), with the Ctrl-Opt-Cmd modifier sequence. So CoC-H is your notes and CoC-K is snapshots. They have two states. The first reveals and the second focuses if the pane is already revealed. This way if you are writing, and notes are open, you can hit CoC-H and immediately be typing in the notes field. If under the same conditions you wish to select a snapshot, CoC-K+K will show the snapshot pane and then focus you in the list so you can arrow key between snapshots (likewise stuff like CoC-J+J,Enter will jump to Keywords and enter a new keyword). CoC-E gets you back to the editor, by the way.
Ah, no unfortunately nothing to help you out there. The problem is that the line numbering gutter is an extension of the ruler so they can’t be separated. Keith did try to make line numbering something independent before, but it was fragile and prone to getting out of whack when editing. So really all I can suggest is the Cmd-R shortcut that pops the whole thing up when you need it and then tucks it away when you want a more minimal interface. That works in full screen as well (as do these other shortcuts—snapshots excluded—by the way, they just pull up the appropriate floating inspector rather than the regular sidebar inspector).
Thanks, Keith, for the consideration. Line numbers are perhaps my top personal requirement (though I may be alone in that) and if I could have them without the ruler, I’d be a phenomenally happy and content user!
I should preface this by saying this poetry-related feature request is probably much more labor intensive than it’s worth, but I was encouraged rather strongly to at least submit it, by another Scrivener user.
When working in established forms with fixed meters, I find it very useful to work with the poem proper in a pane on the left, and a “scratch pad” on the right, where I work out lines and do scansion, to ensure that I’ve kept the meter properly. As it is, this gets difficult to read fairly quickly, with unstressed syllables in lowercase and stressed in caps (bold or similar could also be used, but it doesn’t help much), using pipes to separate feet. I’m certainly not after any kind of poetic meter check (computers are rubbish at counting syllables), but being able to clearly mark feet and stress would be very useful to me.
Could you post a screenshot of a typical worksheet approach like this? Maybe on a well known poem if you would rather not share one of yours. I think I grasp where you are going with this, but some of the jargon is unfamiliar to me. Two things that come to mind are inline annotations and highlights. Both can be stripped out of the document when compiling, and so are very useful for this kind of mark-up.
I think if I were doing this I would just put an acute accent over the stressed syllables (one of the advantages of using a Mac is that it is so easy to insert accents). Anything that is not stressed doesn’t need a mark.
Computers never seem to have been good at handling poetry, though. Simplicity itself to mark the scansion with pen on a piece of paper, but with a computer …
Iambic pentameter, 5 feet, each unstressed then stressed. Caps represent stressed syllables. Yoinked it from cummingsstudyguides.net/xmeter.html, which provides more examples of other meters.
I considered highlights, but since I need to mark both feet and stress, I need at least one more mark. Accents, mentioned above, would be a pain for me (Windows), but beyond that, for visualization I want the whole stressed syllable marked.
It’s true. That said, at the moment, I’m holding myself to iambic pentameter (as above), as opposed to just listening for a scan that’s pleasant and fits. The 10 syllable line, for some reason, just doesn’t work in my head, and I have to go through a LOT of iterations to get a quatrain I like. Doing it on paper would mean a ton of erasing/a ton of pages. I’d like to avoid the tormented writer look, with a thousand wadded up sheets strewn around my workspace!
Not a poet, so mostly just spitballing here, but would combining highlighting and underline work? Say, highlight every other foot and underline the stressed syllable? or bold/italic/font colour on the stressed syllable?
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