Where to next for Scriv?

Scrivener
22

simple page construction that is WYSIWYG

It’s well commented upon at this point, but just to hammer the nail in a little further, and smooth a little putty over the top if it: if anything, that is the opposite direction we would go in, in the future. I consider one of Scrivener’s greater weaknesses is that it confuses people into thinking it’s a weak word processor that should be improved (the second is maybe that it would replace desktop publishing software).

That has nothing to do with a Mac perspective, by the way. It is a fundamental, and very broad, difference of opinion on software environments for writers. There is a world out there beyond Word and its ilk, and you’ve managed to bump into perhaps one of the more visible and accessible forms of that. If you want to see where the rabbit hole goes, start searching for writers who use org-mode, Markdown, LyX and so on. Page layout is not some pinnacle everyone should be striving toward, in other words, it’s a much bigger world of preference than that.

support for using external editors especially Word

We do have a feature for that. Refer to §14.3, Synchronised Folders, for more information.

Research support – weblink management and integration; better document imports and export formats. Way, way better table support.

We’re kind of limited by our lifespans on that one. We support what we can through the toolkits we program with, and the third-party libraries we can find. :slight_smile:

Allow for shared (static) Research files that now need to be replicated in each project. That’s just a start…

I may not be entirely understanding all of this, but have a look at what exists already. It sounds a lot like what you’re describing.

Sharing – giving, in first incarnation, other user(s) read-only access to a project…

Sure, it’s something that comes up now and then as a request. But the monumental effort involved in taking a program with thousands of writable inputs and shutting them down to read-only, vs those that would actually want to share their entire project with advance readers (or whatever) is probably not so big. What’s the harm in just compiling and giving your readers something they will be way more familiar with, than a huge program with all of your inner thoughts coiled around every feature in a confusing array?

I’ll admit, there are a few authors where I’d love to see their Scrivener projects, but in most cases I’d be content to read their PDF. You don’t hand out your Adobe Premiere project files and raw footage over to advance screeners, you sit them down in front of a proper cut and show them a movie.

Better support for the Windows community…

We’ve been working on another project for a bit now, which is another way doing just what you want, just for a different program. It’s an understandable confusion, especially if you missed the blog posts and a few forum threads. But I’m guessing from your comment you didn’t look at the Mac change log, where you would have seen similar gaps, for the same reasons, just at different periods of time.

5 Likes
23

Thank you for your detailed response. I think you miss my core point though. There are many things in your app that are more complex than they should be - that’s the root of it. I think the desire to create maximum flexibility (and to NOT be a conventional word processor) has skewered your approach a bit and created pathways that are troublesome for typical (or new) users. I read this early on about the ‘learning curve’ associated with this app. I happily took that on but there are things that have almost become convention in the vast majority of text editors out there that feel a bit ‘forced’ (sorry) in Scrivener - synchronized folders being a prime example - yuck!

I understand toolkits and libraries and have implemented and used more than my share since back in the dBase days (ugh!) and, for instance, I know there are powerful and detailed table constructs out there that dwarf yours.

Please I am not trying to be argumentative and don’t really want to extend this other than to offer one user’s opinion.

One last though thought - image capturing just 10% of that market (and yes, I understand most are robot office workers)

image
image665×214 21 KB

24

You’re right, I totally did miss that core point. Perhaps it is because I have always considered word processors to be way more complex than they need to be? I do not think of things like Word or LibreOffice, or anything WYSIWYG, as the “simple” option here, so that flew over my head. From my perspective, such tools have always seemed almost ridiculous in how complicated they are for something that should be so simple, like Scrivener is. :wink:

So yeah, “learning curves”, it’s more about where you come from, I think, than anything universal or objectively defined. Scrivener is dirt basic, simplistic software from the background I come from. Its entire objective and design philosophy is immediately comprehensible by sight alone, like looking at a race track and knowing that this is what it is for. But that’s because I come from a background of software that works like it does. I was using that design language decades before it came along.

What might also be missed here is that it is not that anyone is trying to be different for the sake of being different, some people just are different, and want different things, and will naturally find themselves aligned with software that already works that way (or find themselves making software that works that way, if they can’t find anything that quite does). Scrivener is but one entry in a very long history of programs that work like it does.

I know there are powerful and detailed table constructs out there that dwarf yours.

Sorry, I didn’t clarify that point well enough, it’s not ours. That is what I meant by the programming toolkit providing a thing. Bear in mind, most of our work is done around the rectangle you type text into.

Please I am not trying to be argumentative and don’t really want to extend this other than to offer one user’s opinion.

Oh, same here. And to clarify, I only mean to point out that there are a lot of different types of software out there, and that this is a good thing.

As for the stats… I think maybe another part of the confusion here is that we don’t want a significant fraction of 1.2 billion users. I think it is okay to be happy with making a program for a group of people that like programs that work that way. If a lot of people like that too, then great, if not, well, some of the best software out there in my opinion is stuff with only a handful of users. Nothing wrong with that either.

10 Likes
25

We live in a world with too many choices - on all platforms at all entry & exit points - with churn rates that are staggering. Along with that is a user and subscriber base that is less and less understanding of the tech behind it all; and, of course the loss of attention spans…

I see this same topic in this thread on all the forums for all the great products I use - Scrivener, Obsidian, and Aeon Timeline. In all three of these, in my world, I see folks that early adopted, dug in & learned, and flourished with the extensive features. These were & are folks that spend months, if not years, writing a missive, researching a topic, or creating, planning & managing a project (or plot) timeline. Most of these folks do not inhabit these forums; they just do their good work and choose (wisely) not to engage.

The vast majority of folks coming into these products now do not spend lengthy time in a disciplined manner on anything. Their scope is a very short window on a never ending treadmill; they’ve lost the ability to dive into any complexity. Hence the churn.

Now that I know all these particular apps, I admire their design, am grateful for the power & flexibility, and appreciate the low price of using them.

I use AI (Claude) extensively for research purposes and code generation & automation for extract, transform, & loading of data between the above apps and a handful of others; it is fun and creative.

It bothers the hell out of me when I have a rare conversation with chatgpt via edge about a topic (as a check against something I’m doing with Claude) and after I get the validation I want, the bot will ask “where would you like me to publish this…”.

I am not a fan of adding AI features to creative apps. For shorter works, I will definitely kick the tires of the new app that is being developed by L&L because I know it will address a need in a way that is well thought out from a “thoughtful writers” perspective.

I have no answers to the dilemma(s) in this thread, but I will say, the few younger folks I work with that do dive in and have, for some miraculous reason, a sense of what it means to live deliberately with a “slow work” approach to learning & life; they are the folks we should be aiming to please (the significant fraction); the rest is just the noise of churn.

I get “faster” and “easier” and “automated” but, at what cost?

3 Likes
26

FWIW, this lament is several thousand years old, across many different cultures. The “next generation” is always superficial and impatient; “the past” was always thoughtful and introspective.

You’re right, in that our current culture does not particularly encourage thoughtfulness. But IMO that makes it more valuable, not less.

4 Likes
27

The young can’t know how stupid they are. And the old can’t remember they were young. Sounds like a badly designed feature that works just good enough to keep us going and mad about it at the same time.

3 Likes
28

That is the one of the limitations with company-based boards – don’t get me wrong they are a powerful and worthwhile asset, and you should take pride in yours – but they are only filled with fans and users who have already drank the lemonade and have ‘adaptive’ processes that may or may not be optimal or could be better. You lose your objectivity. I am guilty of it myself. So, let me give this one last explanation that I hope will be concise enough.

IMO there are two top-level processes that happen. We write and then we want to do something about it. The first part should not be concerned with anything other than the fluid capture of thoughts and words and should, and I know you no longer believe this, it should act like a modern-day word processor. It is, after all, what I am doing – processing words. No, I am not talking about AI or all the extended enhancements that are out there. Just the core features that support writing: spelling, dictionary, thesaurus, minor grammar management (unlike maybe most of you all I do not have editors, so any minor help is a huge time saver later), etc.

THEN comes Scrivener. You will get no argument from me that word processors suck at everything else and you have done miraculous things to overcome that; bravo to you all! Please, though, just give me an editor that resembles the (writing) functionality I have become accustomed to (for better or worse – see above) over the last 30 years or so. Have you all stopped using word processing? Do you write your letters to Grandma in Scrivener?

That’s it. It’s all I wanted to put in this “suggestions area”. Sorry if previous posts clouded that.

A quick, out of place (smile) tech thought: I think, again IMO, you could greatly enhance your app with some level of document attribute management so that individual documents can retain values that would allow them to stand away from global controls. As an example, so that Page View would not affect 500 documents in the project.

29

One quick note. I am 70 so I am not sure of the origins of all the “young people today” stuff. It also makes you sound old and jaded. I for one take great pleasure in watching and helping young people (including my 5 grandchildren) where I can. I have also spent hundreds if not thousands of hours in Scrivner and am a retired programmer. Am I odd? Sure, that’s why I write. Young and foolish? Not so much…

3 Likes
30

Scrivener is best at doing just what you seem to lament is missing—just writing.

Write first in scrivener, the process of which does not need any “modern day features” whatever that may mean. As was pointed out, some of the best writing tools like Obsidian and Ulysses use markdown and certainly would not resemble the “writing functionality” you are looking for.

After your work is complete and compiled it is time to use a modern/old fashioned word processor to get your formatting right. Or simply go straight to something like Vellum which is what I do. No need for word or Librewiter or anything else.

Most of the time people struggle with Scrivener because they are looking for a more traditional editor which it’s thankfully not.

There are dozens of apps out there much more suited to what you are looking for.

6 Likes
31

And I would NOT write a letter to my grandmother in Scrivener, unless that letter was long form in excess of tens of thousand of words. That’s what Pages, Mail, Text Edit, Word, LibreWriter, etc are for.

4 Likes
32

Yeah, see my priorities are entirely different. For me, an ideal editor for writing looks a lot more like this, and has actual text editing commands as opposed to the basic arrow key and home/end stuff you get.

And yes, that’s what I would write a letter with. In fact I’m writing this post to you right now in something like that. I will copy and paste it over into the forum when I’m done (or to be more precise, I won’t be doing that how you expect, not the agonisingly slow word processor way of doing things, I will hit a macro sequence, \cb that copies the entire buffer to the clipboard in one shot). I use Scrivener’s folder feature to write first drafts using such editors. I understand that for some reason you don’t like using a watch folder, which I don’t entirely understand, but again I think that’s a possible solution for what you’re talking about, if you want to give it a try.

In short I think we both agree that its text editor could be better, but what I’m trying to illustrate here is that we both have extremely different ideas of what it could be, instead. Fact is, it probably won’t change that much, again because we aren’t spending huge amounts of resources on the editor itself but rather the software around it. Changing our focus to become a text editor programming company would mean sacrificing time for any of the things most people associate with what makes Scrivener so good.

I think it is also fair to say that if I had my way, and the Scrivener editor turned into Vim, most people would abandon ship. That’s again why we have integration features though, so that people like yourself and I with strong opinions can have our ideal writing tools for drafting and our ideal encapsulating interface to work with those writings.

Anyway, I hope you receive this in the spirit it is intended, as robust discussion and not tempers flared or defensiveness.

As an example, so that Page View would not affect 500 documents in the project.

And I think that’s a very good example of how changing the software toward that approach would only make it more confusing. People already confuse the page view feature with a print preview, despite the documentation being adamant about it being purely an aesthetic choice for those that enjoy the psychological satisfaction of filling up a page. Giving sections of text “document settings” would be a hard right turn away from what a “document” even is (the text field of a node in an outline).

As for all the young and old people stuff, XKCD has an excellent “comic” on that effect (but then again, XKCD has a comic on every possible topic).

5 Likes
33

Sensible policies for a fairer world!

Boo!

2 Likes
34

AmberV I couldn’t agree more. There is always middle ground especially surrounding “suggestion”. If someone didn’t occasionally tug in other directions the ship might sail straight but it sounds like a boring trip.

I have a process and it works for me (part of it was imbedding a Word icon in Scrivener so that I can visually mark (check-out) text sections I have moved (back) into Word for edit. I change the icon back when I bring it back in. The movement back-and-forth can be a bit wonky on formatting, but I have learned to accept what it is. Tables, well, we will let that dog sleep, and I have made postings in the appropriate thread with the same overall intent.

I look forward to any and all updates you plan to add to your excellent app! Just remember if you need someone to manipulate the rudder sometime, I am happy to help.

1 Like
36

My theory is that this characteristic is partly responsible for the migration of humans throughout the world.

“My cave, my rules!”

“Fine! I’ll go live in my own cave in the next valley!”

5 Likes
37

I own a license for Word, but it is just because I have to own it for work. I wouldn’t write with it. When I have to open it, I’m quick in quitting it as soon as possibile.

So no, I wouldn’t want Scrivener to get inspiration from that patchwork of a program.

My ideal UI for writing? This one:

image
image4608×2592 213 KB

6 Likes
38

“I see you’re reporting on Allied shipping movements in the North Atlantic. Would you like to use the same keyword as yesterday so Bletchley can construct their crib more easily?”

1 Like