The Great Big Scrivener Survey

[KB]

@owl

I’ve used Scrivener and loved it for years now (on all its platforms) and enjoy reading the posts here but rarely comment, however it’s been bothering me that I gave some wrong answers in the survey.

I went through the entire thing saying I didn’t use Scrivenings as I’d no idea what it was . Now I do. I use Scrivenings all the time, I just didn’t realise what it was called. Like someone said much earlier in the thread, it’s so familiar to me that I never thought about it having a name. Maybe I did know once, and I definitely know now, but not when I was filling in the survey. So I’m sorry for my ignorant (and wrong) ‘I never use that feature’ responses. I find it very useful and use it all the time. I hope that there weren’t too many like me giving the wrong answer because we never learned the proper name

Thanks for filling in the survey! There’s certainly nothing ignorant or wrong about your responses - this is proving to be an interesting learning experience for us (me!), as it exposes some mistaken assumptions on our part. I now realise that I should have added an “I don’t know what this is” checkbox for the features, which would have shown us areas we needed to publicise more or explain better. You live and learn! A great thing about the survey is that it’s led to users such as yourself, who don’t normally post, getting in touch. I’m looking forward to reading all of the comments entered into the survey’s comment boxes. (Oh, and the good news is that “scrivenings” is so fundamental to Scrivener that even if everyone said they didn’t use it, I wouldn’t remove it. )

[devinganger]

@KB

(Oh, and the good news is that “scrivenings” is so fundamental to Scrivener that even if everyone said they didn’t use it, I wouldn’t remove it. )

Scrivenings is the single feature that drew me to Scrivener. The rest is nice, but scrivenings was transformative.

Came for the scrivenings, stayed for the compiler.

[AnmaNatsu]

@KB

Oh I hope you don’t feel like you need to defend anything - this thread went a little astray, but it’s useful to know that “scrivenings” isn’t necessarily a known term even for users who’ve been using Scriv for a while. Out of interest, do you use the feature? This is when, say, you select a folder, or several different documents, and then select the “multiple page/document” icon in the segmented control in the toolbar (on the left of the corkboard icon), so that you see a number of documents in the editor as though they are a single document (with dotted line dividers between each document by default). I’m just wondering if it’s something plenty of people use without knowing the name of. (It ended up getting called “scrivenings”, by the way, because anything else we came up with - “multi-doc editor mode”, “multi-section mode”, “multiple documents” - was either a mouthful or ambiguous, and “scrivenings” has a nice self-deprecating sound to it: “I’m just working on my scrivenings…”)

Yep, once I knew what it referred to, I realized I do use it some, especially if when I’m reading over chapters that have sections and when I’m checking cohesion between chapters or sections. And yeah, I can totally understand it being hard to name, especially as you wouldn’t want it to be confused with Compile.

[Jaysen]

@devinganger

@KB

(Oh, and the good news is that “scrivenings” is so fundamental to Scrivener that even if everyone said they didn’t use it, I wouldn’t remove it. )

Scrivenings is the single feature that drew me to Scrivener. The rest is nice, but scrivenings was transformative.

Came for the scrivenings, stayed for the compiler.

I figured you would like the ability to split and reorder then merge more than complier. I’m a simpleton though and only need compiler to get things to RTF. Word does my formatting because… winblows user base at the office.

[devinganger]

@Jaysen

@devinganger

Came for the scrivenings, stayed for the compiler.

I figured you would like the ability to split and reorder then merge more than complier. I’m a simpleton though and only need compiler to get things to RTF. Word does my formatting because… winblows user base at the office.

I’ve written thousands of pages of technical books, whitepapers, and articles in Word over the years of my career as a Microsoft IT SME and consultant. Word’s outline mode actually is decent enough (and has been for years) that you can easily move content around and re-arrange as long as you’re using the proper header structure from the get-go.

However, before that I was a UNIX sysadmin, and thought I never really got deep into troff or TeX, I did get exposed to systems like DocBook that encouraged you to split structure vs. markup. Scrivenings and the compiler really speaks to that bias for me – set up the Binder however you need structurally, set up the Compiler to produce consistent styled output, and Scrivenings to help bridge some of the navigational gap when dealing with a deep structure.