I have recently purchased this incredible piece of software for use on my laptop.
I then bought a tablet recently and wondered if i could install Scrivener to this and work on my project while out and about to save carrying my laptop around.
I have synced my projects to Dropbox no problem and thought I could work on my draft on my laptop at home, then close it down and open the same project via Scrivener on my tablet while away from home without the laptop, then sync my project back to Dropbox to then open on my laptop when i get home and carry on.
To clarify: I want to use Scrivener on both my laptop and my tablet using the same backup (though obviously not at the same time!).
Is this possible? I have tried to get the tablet to open the project files but they do not recognise .rtf files that had been synced to Dropbox so I cannot seem to work on my Scrivener projects via the tablet.
I have spent considerable time searching the internet about this issue and I am no clearer on it.
Can anyone confirm this? as it stands now, I have removed Scrivener from my tablet and simply use my laptop for working on my draft, and use Libreoffice on my tablet for editing the .rtf files to then sync back to Scrivener when I get home.
Does this make any sense? my apologies for any confusion!
What operating system is your tablet running? The choices that I know of are iOS (iPads), Android, and “Windows Mobile”, which isn’t the same as the standard PC version of Windows, though it might look similar.
So far, there are versions of Scrivener for Mac, iOS, and the desktop version of Windows.
Okay, so you need to install the Dropbox sync software on both computers, so that it produces the Dropbox folder on your hard drive. Once it’s all synced up, then you can open the project on each device using Scrivener. Don’t try to use the web browser to access it; that just won’t work for something as complex as a Scrivener project.
Thank you for your reply.
I have Dropbox installed on both devices and all is well, the problem is that Scrivener on the tablet will not open the saved .rtf files that are saved to Dropbox.
You shouldn’t be opening the .rtf files directly. You should see a “your project name here”.scriv folder and inside that a “your project name here”.scrivx file with other folders as well. Double-click on the .scrivx file, and Scrivener should launch and load that project.
Your project is made up of everything in the .scriv folder, including all the sub-folders and their contents. If you didn’t put all of that into the Dropbox folder in the first place, then the project isn’t whole.
Edit: It just occurred to me; you’re not using “External Folder Sync”, are you? You don’t sync Scrivener projects with other computers running Scrivener that way. You move the entire original project to Dropbox and open that.
I think we have isolated the problem!
I am using the External Folder Sync. I thought that was how you sync on multiple computers!
I will reinstall Scrivener on the tablet and try again, I did realise it was looking for .scrivx files but could not find them, presumably because I had not “saved” my project to dropbox in that way, only used the External Folder Sync to dropbox.
So, to clarify: I save the project using the “save as” option and choose my Scrivener dropbox folder, then after closing Scrivener, open Scrivener on the tablet and select the saved .scrivx file from dropbox to open my project?
Edit: All works perfectly now! my projects load fine on both devices and now I can work on my draft while out and about!
Thank you for your help!
Out of curiosity, what is the external folder sync for then?
My understanding is that it is a way to share individual documents from your project with others, via a cloud service. Your collaborators would not need Scrivener. They would edit the docs using whatever tool, and save them back to the cloud, and then when you fire up Scrivener, it integrates their changes back into your project.
See section 13.1 of the Scrivener User Guide for more info.
External folder sync exists so that you can edit the individual files that you sync that way with applications that do not understand how to read Scrivener projects. It’s useful for tablet OSs (think Android) that don’t yet have a Scrivener app, but which can read a folder full of documents and edit them. On iOS, “Index Card” and “Plain Text” were two such apps that some used before Scrivener for iOS came out. Some probably still do.
Note that since you used “Save As”, now you have two copies of the same project on the hard drive of that machine. Be sure to archive the one not in Dropbox; you don’t want to do work in that one by accident and think you’ve lost work when you open the Dropbox copy on the other computer.
Right-click on the .scriv folder of the original and select Send To->Compressed .zip archive (or similar) if such an option is available.
Brilliant! thank you for the explanations! I have set the backup to dropbox too but will make manual saves to my external hard drives too just in case!
For now, I think I need to revisit the tutorial and user guide!
