Hi, I’m looking for a way to “fix” the cursor in place so that typed text extends to the right of the cursor rather than the cursor moving along the page from left to right. I know that this capability is available in plan text editors-- does Scrivener have this capability?
I don’t think you can type anywhere but the cursor position. That’s what the cursor IS: the location where typing occurs. Are you talking about typing in a right-to-left language?
I want to type where the cursor is but for the text to go to the right of the cursor, not for the cursor to go to the left of the typed text. I know this is possible in other text editors.
You can write “backwards” from the cursor by right-aligning or centering the text or by setting a right tab stop. (Format → Paragraph → Align Right for the first, Format → Paragraph → Tabs and Indents for the second.) But (in English and other left-to-right languages), the cursor will always lie at the right edge of the text.
If you are trying to write in Arabic, Hebrew, or another right-to-left language, you can set the Format → Paragraph → Writing Direction option.
Katherine
So something like typewriter scrolling only horizontally, not vertically?
Just setting the paragraph alignment to the opposite of the default for the writing order of your language should do the trick (as already mentioned above). This is rather a nice idea. A life hack for writers.
These solutions wouldn’t have text flowing to the right, though. It would flow to the left, behind the cursor.
For a language that writes right to left, setting the paragraph alignment oppositely would do just as the OP asked. For left-to-right languages like English, you are right — but what it would do is the precise analog of the request as applied to such languages.
As others did, I have assumed the OP is actually writing in a right-to-left language. Otherwise what they ask for does not make much sense to me — and I seriously doubt is available in plain text editors. If you suppose the OP is writing in English, the feature described would strictly imply that if you started typing in a blank document, the “cursor” would stay at the start position while what you typed would get added on to the end farther and farther away from the “insertion point”. What would the cursor position even represent in such a set up?
Maybe the OP will return and clear things up.
-gr
Hi, I appreciate the feedback and it sounds like what I wan’t can’t be done using Scrivener. I think the editor where I saw this capability is vi but it isn’t wysiwyg. But perhaps for my purposes I should consider it instead.
The purpose is for text markup in a way that demands less moving the cursor around: you time text, move down and your cursor position remains where it started.