First I want to say that I love Scrivener. I started using it when the windows first Beta came out. Next I’m going to explain my experience using scrivener. I think this is important because there are some things that I find really great and somethings that I find frustrating.
Okay, so for me Scrivener is my creative stage, go to program. The pluses are unlimited. I love the note cards, notation features, keyword features, etc. There’s so much right about it for creating.
But once I’ve created and it’s time to clean up the draft for submissions, I find Scrivener to be frustrating. Word’s grammar checker is significantly more powerful. Scrivener misses things like spacing after a.period and and double typed words. The dictionary is also not as good as I think it should be. I don’t expect it to be as good as Word— Word has been around a long time, but when compile a document and word finds all the things you missed you are faced with some choices:
You can swap between the two programs and manually put the changes into Scrivener or you can choose to from within Word going forward. A third option is to use Word’s grammar checker and then import the file back into Scrivener. I did this a few times, but the truth is, no matter how many times you edit a draft you always miss something. So every time I go to send something out, I make a small change. This has prompted me to abandon Scrivener for Word in the final stages.
The next thing which I find a great deal more frustrating is the compile feature itself. In the version before the final release, I found it much more intuitive. Now, I’m not sure what changes what-- I’ve tried the preset formats with some funky results. The preset for standard manuscript, for example, puts the title page somewhere in the body of the text. But is more than that. I feel like Scrivener could really benefit from some kind of dialogue with non-writers. Like go to a public place and ask people “What do you think this does?” For me, a great program is one where I can guess what things are for without reading the manual. I’ve used plenty of programs that are this way. I’m not talking about the more specialized features, but I really think compile, which is something I use regularly, is too complicated.
I love that I can break up boxes of texts. I hate that I can’t easily recombine these texts/and or work on them as a whole. Yes, it’s just a matter of a single click. But there are just tones and tones of reasons, most of which slip my mind after the moment is gone. One example I can give is that I sometimes like to change the font. I do this because font changes help me catch errors. I do sometimes work on the document as a whole and I’d love to be able to change the font on the whole thing. I’ve mentioned this before and I think someone commented that they just work on their sections. But I’d argue that part of what makes Scrivener great, is granting authors the freedom to work how they like. I happen to like to work with big picture and small picture. (To this end I currently compile the document, work with it in word. The problem arises when I want to work in scrivener again. I import the file and then must break it back up into pieces.)
Having said all this, I’d settle for being able to change the text of all the parts of one chapter. The same goes for the find feature. Being about to use the find/replace feature for the entire chapter, not just the chapter section one, before I must start over.
Finally, I hate that every time I compile, that I have to reformat in Word. I know that Scrivener is not a word processor and yet with all the formats you can export to, well I’m just a little confused. I can’t imagine trying to format a document for mobi or even a PDF. This makes scrivener not a stand alone software. I think because you offer such a large field of exports, that giving it more powerful word processing capabilities is something you should consider for the future. Again, I love Scrivener and I think as a company you’re awesome, which is why I’m sharing my experiences.