Hi,
The document text line being displayed at the top of the Editor changes after any of the following actions:
The editor shouldn’t jump to a new location in the document after these actions.
I believe these are all new in 1.9, as I’m sure I would have noticed this behavior before.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Jim
Is it possible that Typewriter Scrolling got turned on somehow? Format > Options > Typewriter Scrolling. In the Manual, it’s section 15.3.4.
Toggling the inspector or binder changes the width of the editor, so it will affect the display of the text there. When the text shifts to accomodate the new editor size, what text is currently at top of the viewing area may change. This isn’t new to 1.9, so unless I’m misunderstanding what you’re describing, my guess is that you’ve either previously usually had the document scrolled to the top when performing these actions or you’ve had a right indent set so that the text is wrapping there and not at the edge of the editor, thus changing the editor width hasn’t affected the text flow.
Thanks for the replies.
DavidR - Typewriter scrolling is off.
Jennifer - I reverted to 1.8.9 and did some testing, and you are as usual correct. View/Hide of Binder/Inspector and copy/paste of text behave as oddly in the old version as in the new. Oddly in that most of the other Windows apps that I work with seem to do a better job at keeping the text being displayed at the top of the screen in place, regardless of resizing the doc text area or copy/paste operations.
Particularly with copy/paste, Scrivener occasionally takes some really unexpected jumps around the document. I would expect that the result of a copy/paste operation would leave the cursor at the end of the pasted text, and that the screen would display the pasted text where the cursor is. Scrivener does seem to always leave the cursor where expected. But sometimes the displayed text will jump to some other unexpected location in the doc, for instance to the top of the document. Pressing one of the arrow keys will then jump the displayed text to the current cursor location, so easy to workaround, but it’s still unexpected.
Look, don’t get me wrong, Scrivener is great. I’m at the point where I almost forget that it is there, where I am just writing, and Scrivener is just an extension of my fingertips. But the scrolling/jumping to new points in the document is unpredictable to me, and like reading fiction that has occasional flaws that jar a reader from their reverie, Scrivener’s similarly jars my writing process when it behaves unexpectedly to me. Perhaps it is behaving as expected for a Mac app–I’ve never worked on a Mac–but not to my Windows experience.
But since Scrivener has apparently been doing this for quite some time, I must assume that this is a feature and not a bug! And will continue to work around the behavior when it does pop up. Thanks for listening.
Jim
I was playing around with this and was able to recreate the copy/paste jumping that I was whining about above. Here are the steps:
1 Launch the 1.9 Tutorial.
2 Edit a document long enough for multiple pages, for instance Step 20. Document Templates.
3 Highlight a random sentence and click Add Comment to create a comment.
4 Scroll down from the top of the document and Copy/Cut the text that has been commented and Paste it anywhere in the document (other than the first displayed page).
5 The editor will jump to the top of the document, but the cursor will be at the end of the pasted text.
Is this expected behavior?
Thanks,
Jim
Hi, was just following up to see if you were able to recreate this, and whether it is expected behavior?
Thanks,
Jim
Sorry, I haven’t gotten to checking this one yet, but it is on my list to follow up later today.
OK, I tried in a few projects besides the Tutorial, adding a comment to a single word or a complete sentence, selecting only the commented text or a larger area containing the comment, then scrolling at least halfway down the document and pasting, but I’ve not been able to reproduce the jump you’re talking about. Each time I tried this, the insertion point remained at the end of the pasted text and the editor didn’t scroll at all.
Any chance you could make a short screencast showing the behaviour? I may be missing a part about where to cut or paste that seeing it would clarify.
Thanks for trying, Jennifer.
I haven’t done a screencast before, so will figure it out and then share here.
FWIW, I tried also, and got the same results as MM.
DavidR, thanks for testing this!
JimRac, thanks for giving the screencast a try. I’ve used the simple program Jing for making short screencasts and automatically uploading them for sharing via a link. You do have to create an account, which gives you some server space for uploading the videos, but it’s free and the whole program is pretty straightforward. An online search will no doubt turn up other options.
Thanks for doing some testing too!
I have also found that this jumping is not consistent. Once I have found that magic combination that causes it to happen every time, I will post more specific steps based on modifying the tutorial, with a screencast if necessary.
In my experiments I saw another possible issue, having to do with comments not copying consistently. I will also share steps for that, if I can replicate it and it wasn’t user error.
Jennifer,
You were right about Jing, very easy to use.
Here is my very first screencast ever of the “jumping” issue: screencast.com/t/5c1H8by2
I used a fresh copy of the Tutorial. When I paste the commented text, Scrivener jumps to the top of the doc.
Truthfully, I cannot see a pattern yet for when the jumping occurs and when it does not. I copied different lines until I was able to consistently replicate the issue.
Also, while playing around with this, I noticed another possible issue. When I am finished with the paste operation, I expected to see two comments in the Comments pane, but as you can see in the screencast there is only one. Both of the commented texts in the doc are associated with the single Comment in the Comments Pane. Is that right?
I hope you find this useful. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Jim
Thanks for the screencast! That did help, and I’ve tracked down at least the scrolling issue to a problem of including both a carriage return and an inspector comment in the copied text. I’m still working on what’s causing the problem of the comment not reliably pasting (in other words, yes, it should have appeared again in the inspector when you pasted, but it seems to be just moving the comment from the original location to the pasted one), but I’ve reproduced it a handful of times and will keep worrying at it. 
Thanks Jennifer, glad it was helpful!