Where is the ‘sync with external folder’ option in the windows version? I’ve tried to use dropbox and plaintext 2 so i can write on my ipad (WHERE’S THE IPAD APP???) but it’s not working.
Don’t believe it exists yet for the Windows version of Scrivener, which is at v1.6. Mac version of Scrivener is at v2.
iOS version of Scrivener is in development. We’ll hopefully see it this year.
While Scrivener for Windows does not currently have a sync folder option like the Mac version, there are workarounds if you’re willing to use them.
Export the files of your project to a folder on Dropbox or Google Docs. You will then end up with .rtf files which can be edited using the iPad and a good text editor. Reverse the process to import the revised document back into your Scrivener project when you’re back to your regular computer.
I’ve tested this and it seems to work just fine. Good luck.
I’ve done something like that, where I opened a Scrivener .rtf directly in Word (on the same computer) and then simply saved from Word. I was always working with the same file. It seemed to work without problem. This was early in my use of S, and before I found other/better ways to do what I was trying to do. But I still occasionally find things I’d like to do in Word.
But I wonder, is there any risk that some relatively unseen Scrivener process such as indexing, or the doc.checksum file, will balk when it encounters a file with a different profile than what it is expecting?
Yes, there are a number of risks you can run in to, mainly escalating in proportion to how many of Scrivener’s features you use within the editor, which is all why we have an advisory in the documentation to not edit internal components of the Scrivener project unless you are working from a recovery stance and cannot use Scrivener for some reason.
You will always get the search index out of whack, because this is only maintained while you work (it would cost a lot of resources to keep this up to date with the disk in a two-way scenario—not so much with a small project, but consider those folks with gigabytes of PDF and text data, you just can’t be constantly rebuilding that search index). Fortunately rebuilding the search index isn’t too difficult (but I don’t recommend trying with 1.6.1 as there are some bugs in that iteration with index rebuilding that have, I believe, been fixed in the 1.7 beta).
Where things get more dicey is when you start to use the more advanced features within the editor, such as notation of all types, image links, Scrivener Link cross-references and other things which are not something Word or any other RTF editor is going to be privy to. At the least you’ll get marking drift—footnote highlights that wander off of their originally assigned text and the like, at the worst you’ll just get outright data loss, losing valuable notes and other markings.
In short, it’s not a supported way to use the software, so if you damage your project you’re on your own with it. It’s much better to just bite the bullet and use the Binder export feature to rotate data in and out of the software if you need to leave the software periodically to work. It’s a few extra minutes if that. That’s the official line. Someone clever and patient enough to research the project format’s meta-data and such may be able to find ways to get around that in limited scenarios, but unless you don’t mind wading through XML files and maintaining byte offsets—it’s just going to be easier to let Scrivener handle the dirty work for you. 