Text drag and drop not always working

My wife and I are both using Scrivener 1.0.2 on Windows 7 64-bit Home Edition HP computers. I helped my wife import a long manuscript into Scrivener, but when she started editing the document, she couldn’t drag and drop selected text (e.g., a sentence) from one location to another. I’m working on some documents in Scrivener in which I can drag and drop text with no problem. However, I verified that it was not possible to do so on my wife’s computer.

For example, I would highlight a word by double clicking on it, then put the mouse cursor over it and click and hold the left mouse button. On my machine, the cursor becomes a vertical bar that you can then move with the mouse. Releasing the left mouse button causes the selected text to be placed to the right of the vertical bar. On my wife’s machine, I can double click to select a word and left-click-and-hold, but as soon as I start to move the mouse, instead of the pointer changing to a vertical bar it becomes a circle with a slash through it, as if I were dragging the text off the text-edit pane.

After some experimentation, I was able to get text drag-and-drop to work on my wife’s machine by starting a new project from scratch using the Blank template rather than the Fiction>Novel template. I created a test document using the Novel template and it exhibited the drag-and-drop problem, so it’s possible that the problem is specific to the Novel template.

Anyone have any ideas on what is going on here?

-John

I have the same problem. However, it is even more weird. Sometimes the drag and drop works, sometimes it doesn’t. Same document, same computer (Mac, Lion). I don’t even have to close and reopen the program to have both results! It sure would be nice to know how to fix this.

Marielle Miller

John - I haven’t been able to reproduce this error, including in a new project from the novel template (in 1.0.2), and as it sounds project-specific, I’m wondering if it would be possible for you to send a zipped copy of a sample project displaying the drag and drop problem to support AT literatureandlatte DOT com so that I could try it out and see it for myself?

Marielle - When you click on the selected text to drag it, are you waiting for the cursor to change to an arrow? That should ensure you’re in the drag mode rather than still selecting. Otherwise I’m not quite clear what you’re seeing when you’re saying that the drag and drop sometimes doesn’t work–are you able to drag the text but not drop it in certain areas?