I’m a new scrivener user working with the Windows beta.
Can someone tell me what is that ittle progress bar that displays a percentage in the top right corner of some (but not all) of my text screens. I can’t find any mention of it in the manual or the tutorial.
TIA
oldrafe
Welcome to Scrivener and the forums!
There’s no mention of the progress bar there because it’s supposed to just be a quick thing that disappears so most of the time you shouldn’t even see it. It’s just a progress bar for loading the document in the editor, but there’s a bug where it sticks sometimes–notably when importing Word files with special formatting, so if you’ve done that I’d suggest importing them again after stripping all the special styles and see if that fixes the issue. I’ve also seen the progress bar stick sometimes after merging lengthy documents, but I think that’s probably less common than the import issue.
Thanks Jennifer,
All the files where this happens were imported from RTF and originally came from WordPerfect. There was no special formatting in any of them as far as I know, although a few did go through Word on their way to the import process.
I can’t see any pattern to distinguish those where the percentage bar got hung up from those where it didn’t. Some got hung up at percentages in the 80s, and a few as low as the 20s or 40s. But there is no other problem with those files as far as I can see.
Re-importing those files would be a headache because some have been edited significantly. I would have to go through them again line by line.
So I’m wondering whether that bug that hung up the percentage bar is likely to give me more troube later with those files. IOW, can I safely ignore the whole issue? Or perhaps I should just copy each edited file that got hung up and see if the copy loads cleanly.
(BTW, you helped me earlier on my importing, via the Support page, where I signed as RS)
oldrafe
Is the progress bar still visible on the page? That’s the glitch I was talking about, that sometimes it just doesn’t go away and continues cycling through, hopping back to 0 and progressing again, etc. The page itself does load, and certainly if you’ve been able to work in them then you shouldn’t have any problems continuing so long as you can ignore the progress bar in the corner until this is fixed.
Hello again, then. 
Sure I can ignore the bar as long as I know it’s not doing any damage to the file. I guess it was just my old newshound curiousity that led me to ask about it. Just thought it was something I should know about.
Thanks again,’
oldrafe
Jennifer, here is some more detail on the progress bar glitch I experienced. It might be helpful to your team.
It turned out that two of the files where the progress bar had stuck were research files that did have some unusual formatting, namely back tabs that produced paragraphs in which all the lines except the first line are indented. As these were research notes, I didn’t bother to remove the tabs before converting to RTF and importing to Scrivener, and I had not edited them in Scrivener or even scrolled all the way down through them.
After getting your last message I looked at them again, and scrolled down to see if I could find where the format problem was, and I discovered (in both these cases) that in fact the file had not loaded completely. IOW, the progress bar was telling me that the file had not completely loaded. I thought I would indeed have to import those files again until I discovered that just scrolling down past the point where the loaded file ended brought me the complete file. And once that happened the progress bar disappeared except for that split-second blink at the beginning.
I then tried scrolling all the way down the other files that had a blocked progress bar, and although they had apparently been completely loaded (and in fact had been edited) I think perhaps some hidden format command was holding them up. Scrolling through them to the end removed the blocked progress bar.
So I have no more visible progress bars, even after closing the project and reopening. And I now know how to prepare the research files I still need to import.
Maybe the glitch is not that the progress bar doesn’t go away but that Scrivener has difficulty opening some files completely and the progress bar is just reporting on that.
Best,
oldrafe
Hope this is helpful.
Thank you, that is quite helpful!