.txt file formatting and syncing

Scrivener Wish List
1

First of all, thanks for Scrivener 2, I’m absolutely enamoured with it. Secondly, I’ve searched the forum, but don’t seem to find a discussion of what follows, so please forgive me if I suck at searching…

I use Scrivener as the central point for assembling and generally managing my manuscripts, but in practice, I find I do most of my actual writing (the whole “being-in-the-zone” thing) away from my desk. For that, I use a combination of Dropbox (to get everything to talk to everything else), and an iPad with iA Writer (fantastic app for just pumping out lots of words) and Notebooks (which has an almost Scrivener-like depth to its organisational facilities) in order to keep notes, research on the go, and so on.

I installed Scrivener 2 today (before, I was using 1, then 1.54. When the iPad arrived, my workflow was strictly one-way, going from iPad to Scrivener, with all later revisions happening in Scrivener) and so I immediately spent a couple of hours messing around with the syncing feature.

I admire how clever S2 is at noticing which parts of a document have actually changed, and then only updating those parts of the rich text, but I was wondering, would it be possible to add a few functions to the text processor that kicks in during sync?

I noticed one already has the option to strip or insert double carriage returns when syncing, to make life easier in the various iPad text editors. How about adding simple formatting? Personally, I don’t care about fonts etc, but a basic indication of bold and italic (for instance, bold and /italic/ could work as delimiters or, in order not to mess up things separated with a single slash, maybe something like bold and //italic//) would be really helpful, as it would allow the author to add emphasis where desired. Perhaps something like the MediaWiki heading syntax for chapter titles, like =Title= ==Sub-heading==, but I don’t care so much about that.

S2 could then add the extra characters when syncing out, and convert them into their rich equivalents when syncing in, and we’d have “semi-rich” editing on the iPad despite Apple’s refusal to free up their rich text editing APIs.

Anyway—I thought I’d ask… In the meantime, thank you again for a fantastic product!

André

2

Scrivener already has support for a plain-text engine, MultiMarkdown, which is just Markdown with some extra stuff for making complex documents. Markdown is a lot like Textile or wiki syntax, as you describe it. Italics and *bold, and simple header declarations like “# Chapter” with the number of hashmarks in front denoting outline depth. Unfortunately none of this is wired up to the sync system automatically. There is a File/Import/MultiMarkdown File... which will scan for those headers and convert the text to chunks, recreating the outline structure as it goes. Most of the other tools are really the other way around though, for MMD authors. There is a Format/Convert/Bold and Italics to MultiMarkdown Syntax which actually does the opposite from what you want. :slight_smile:

However on compile everything goes in the direction you want. Plain-text formatting gets converted to a variety of rich text, typeset, or hypertext formats. Again, this doesn’t help you out directly. What I guess I’m saying though is, the tools are there, they just aren’t automated. You can go from plain-text basic markdown style markings to an RTF file rather easily, but not through the sync engine. We’ve thought about making a tool that goes the other way, basically a Format/Convert/MultiMarkdown Syntax to Bold and Italics, but have put it off because this would lead to a cascade of requests for more and more markdown syntax to be converted—in effect making it a time sink.

Keith will have to examine all of that when he has time, if he wants to. We are in a feature freeze right now until 2.x is stable and all major bugs are fixed. Working into next year, new features will be examined for feasibility.

To summarise: I think you make a good point that iPad, like the AlphaSmart, and other ultra-portable plain-text environments definitely do benefit from a simple marking system like this. Scrivener does accommodate these workflows in ways that hardly anyone else is doing, but not in an automated fashion. So, hopefully until these things can be looked at more closely, you’ll find the existing tools to be good enough for now.

3

Thank you for the prompt reply. I understand about “feature creep”, no problem. With S2 out right now, it’s my birthday and Christmas rolled into one already, no worries! :slight_smile:

Who knows, maybe next year Apple will come to their senses and say “Oh what the hell, let them have RTF editing,” and then the whole thing becomes moot.

While I’m crying out for more text-file features, here’s another idea: including the synopsis in the text, like this:

-----SYNOPSIS-----
this is the synopsis in the text file
-----BODY-----
And here is the actual text block.

This way, if you’ve planned out your document ahead of time, you can take the synopses with you and write to them on the road, as it were, and yet not lose them when you sync back with the mother ship…

I’ll go away and stop making suggestions now. :wink: