Hi Keith,
First off, Scrivener really IS a great tool and quite versatile !
There is one thing however that I find annoying:
When you drag and drop a screenshot to a document, the picture is embedded (as a bitmap I guess) in the document’s .RTF code. This procedure blows the document up to, in some cases, several megabytes, even though the screenshots are rather small.
I understand that this is the standard procedure in all .RTF editors, but a tool like Scrivener could do better in using .HTML instead of .RTF as the basic format for documents (or formated text files).
Why not automatically save the screenshots as .jpg in a generic folder and just link them in the .HTML code? That way, you would only get links to the pictures in the text documents instead of embedded pictures.
Another method would be to use the Open Document Standard .ODT used in Open Office, which at least uses compression.
I’m currently speed-writing on a project and I simply don’t have the time to drag the images to a separate image folder. Instead I drag and drop them directly into the documents and in the context in which they belong. Which leaves me stranded with a project of 150 megabytes, though the actual manuscript is barely 100 pages of pure text.
When I’m doing the maths, the same could be done with .HTML formated documents and my project would only use up say 15 megabytes. That’s ten times (10 x) less !!
I make frequent backups of my project and so it really IS a drag over the net.
It’s simply not efficient.
My feature request would be at least to let people choose between
.RTF
.HTML or
.ODT
I don’t know, but perhaps the easiest solution for a developer could be to just switch the document format from .RTF to .ODT. That would improve things because of the compression feature.
But maybe that format is trickier to handle if you want to concatenate several documents during export. Then it would probably be easier to use .HTML, which boils down to simple text on the file level.
(Please cf. P.S. below: There even seems to be a way to shrink a regular RTF !)
Thank you for considering my feature request, which would in fact be a real improvement of your tool in terms of efficiency when saving the projects.
Kind regards
Urs
P.S.
I just found this interesting passage on Wikipedia under ‘Common uses and interoperability’ > Pictures :
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Text_Format
…
For better compatibility with Microsoft products, some RTF writers include the same picture in two different picture types in one RTF file:
-
one of the supported picture types (e.g. JPG or PNG) - it uses either the original format of the inserted graphics file (if this graphics file uses one of RTF-supported formats - such as PNG, JPG) or a RTF-supported picture type created by RTF writer in conversion from RTF-unsupported graphics file (e.g. conversion from BMP or GIF to PNG)
-
a Windows Metafile (WMF) copy of the original picture - for better compatibility with some Microsoft applications (e.g. Wordpad). The Windows Metafile copy is included without any compression.
This method increases the RTF file size rapidly. The RTF specification does not require this method and there are various implementations that include pictures without the WMF copy (e.g. Abiword or Ted).
For Microsoft Word it is also possible to set a specific registry value (“ExportPictureWithMetafile=0”) in order to prevent Word from saving the WMF copy (see link “Document file size increases with EMF, PNG, GIF, or JPEG graphics in Word” at the beginning).
…
