Are you looking for writing tools, or typesetting tools? As has already been noted, the two are not the same.
For typesetting, the two big gorillas are LaTeX and InDesign (with Affinity Publisher gaining ground rapidly).
For writing, probably the next step beyond Scrivener would be to switch to a programming editor and embrace a Markdown/LaTeX workflow. As already noted, you might also look at web authoring tools.
Scrivener has been tested with projects involving millions of words. As this thread demonstrates, âpoor designâ is an extremely subjective evaluation. The largest publicly available Scrivener project that Iâm aware of is the one used to create the manual, which weighs in at over 900 pages, but Iâm pretty sure that we have novelists and screenwriters using it for bigger projects than that.
When I click near the Spyglass, I get âAll, Text, Notes, Synopsis, Keywords, [unknown option as it just says the title of one of my page files âTheosophika - FAITHSâ], Status, Custom Meta-Data / Exact Phrase, All Words, Any Words, Whole Word / Search âFile Nameâ Only, Search Binder Selection Only, Exclude Trash, Search âIncludedâ, Search âExcludedâ, Case Sensitive / Save Search as CollectionâŠâ None of these are âInverseâ anything which would be very useful indeed.
As you can also see, something has gone awry with Scrivenerâs main and context menus as in several places it used one of my page names - âTheosophika - FAITHSâ as an option heading, instead of what it should be. I have no idea how this happened.
I know how to make various bits larger and smaller, but I want to maximise editing space and be able to visualise layout etc etc by opening pages in separate windows or tabs. Readjusting on thing just makes another thing smaller. That is my point! We live in an age of WNDOWS and TABS - I am strongly suggesting these would be a good idea in Scrivener.
As a writer I want to work on content, layout, structure, and the notes and plans for all this. I have been a professional writer for a long time and gave up on Word as it is not up to the job I want to do for this massive project. Scrivener solves some problems, but has hobbled itself by arbitrarily limiting its workspace and the functionality of using the Binder, and its Spellchecker capabilities are poor and its and Grammar checking capabilities are non-existent on the Windows version.
Your search options do not match the standard set, which does indeed include âInvert Results.â (I just checked using the Windows version.)
As I said, you can open as many Quick Reference panes as you want. Iâm afraid Iâm really not understanding your complaint about âarbitrarily limitedâ windows.
Here is what I get when I click on the Project Search options (circled in red) â note that my currently selected document is named âHauntedâ which is why it shows up in the option âSearch Manuscript: Haunted Onlyâ seen below:
If you are not seeing this, then there is a strong chance something went wonky with your installation of Scrivener, which would certainly be frustrating. You may want to re-install over the top of your current install (donât uninstall, youâll lose any customizations youâve made) to see if that repairs it.
I have two versions of the LSJ lexicons, one with nearly 3,000 pages, one with over 4,000 pages. I also have a huge Latin dictionary open and a Byzantine Greek one. All 4 were written before computers were invented! That does not mean they were not massive struggles for their writers. If people have written massive texts with Scrivener, hooray for them, but I can guarantee they wouldâve done it quicker and easier with more windows, better search options, a better spellchecker, and multiple Binders.
I am just airing some problems and suggesting improvements for this software. I used to be a troubleshooter for industry and charged people for such things! This is for free. I talk direct and clear, if people find it unpleasant, we can all close our eyes and pretend everything is just GRRRRRRRRRRR-EAT! And then be in complete denial when we open themâŠ
Even in the computer era, there are writers who cover entire walls with whiteboards or sticky notes. There are writers who use decks of hundreds or thousands of physical index cards. Iâve personally written projects for which the most valuable tool was a conference room table. Attempting to digitize projects like that seems to me to have more to do with the limits of human vision than with software requirements: Scrivener can support a dozen Quick Reference panes at once, but itâs not L&Lâs fault if your screen is too small to see them all.
I want to write books. I donât care what the market wants to categorise its software as. Writing is Writing is Writing. In the past I wrote very structured manuals on Word, and very simple pieces on a simple text editor that were loaded into webpages. Whatever LaTex is or is not capable of, someone at some point WROTE a large book and printed it out with it. I read a lot of academic papers and a lot of books by the likes of Brill and Routledge and they look very similar in style. I guess they were written on the same software as many of the books by the likes of Brill and Routledge are simply grouped academic papers on similar topics. I would assume the publishers tell their writers and would-be writers to write on such-and-such software. I have written to some of these companies, but things are tough to get moving under the insanities we are living under right now.
For me the marketing categories for such software are only made because nothing yet is all-singing, all-dancing, which seems crazy given how amazing the software for other sectors are, like Photoshop and how universal writing is.
I lived in Thailand for a long time and have seen how different Thai script and language is to English, but I cannot imagine Thai users, say, would find it easy to pick up Scrivener and use it, because they cannot simply load their language packages into it and off they go! By not putting completely user-adjustable options for dictionary / spell-checker / grammar-checker at the heart of the software, Scrivener has hobbled itself. Similarly, I feel it is unnecessarily limiting itself with its poor user interface. I use Notepad++ a lot and it is an amazing piece of software, my favourite probably, and I barely use 1% of its functionaility. I particularly use it for searching plain text versions of my huge dictionaries - it has great options and is super fast!
Scrivener has tried to solve some of the problemâs its creator faced like I am facing now, but because he went out alone on this pretty much, he has solved some of the problems poorly and these are now hobbling the software when they should not be. If anyone finds such outspokenness rude, then they are finding insults in freely given advice and need to grow up.
I use Firefox as my browser and usually have several windows and dozens of tabbed pages open while I research. I also have at least 7 books open in Foxit, I have about 12 tabs open in Notepad++. and several books open in Sumatra Reader. I also have Google Earth open. I then have to bounce around Scrivener trying to write my notes! It is the ONLY software I struggle with, the rest are fine.
In the age of Smart Phone Addiction, the screens on all my computers are plenty large enough thank you.
Post-it notes are fine, but are difficult to spell-check and copy/paste. I prefer to use Draw.io now, though I quite liked Scapple, but it got a bit buggy when I created huge diagrams. If I had a cave wall, I guess I could make some charcoal scrawlings too. Who needs computers?
Thanks again! I have created a Google Earth file with over 300,000 placemarks, it is THE MOST unstable piece of software on the planet!!! It routinely crashes when trying to save, which for me is a complete no-no, but there is nothing elseâŠ
I have also burnt out 4 PC and one laptop, losing all sorts of stuff, so I am now the back-up king! Sort of. One day I will just find something less virtual to do. Knitting or knife-throwing, havenât decided.
You may not care, but knowing how the market categorizes things will make it significantly easier to find software that does what you want.
LaTeX is an extremely common typesetting tool in academic circles. It is a markup language and a set of tools for converting that markup into formatted text but it is, I repeat, not an editor. You can use many different editors â including Scrivener â to produce raw LaTeX markup.
I manage my lesson plans, novels, essays, poetry, scripts, computer code, notes, journal articles, and academic papersâeasily hundreds of thousands of wordsâin Scrivener and when I have issues, invariably, hardware, and far more often, my organizational methods, are what let me down, not Scrivener.
Perhaps editing your work (splitting those books into smaller books, editing them) is really what might help.
Scrivener happens to be built for that.
However, based on what you say, it isnât. In the spirit of furthering such expansive work as yours, I suggest you try something else.
You still refuse to acknowledge you are wrong. Scrivener was written by Keith to fulfill a role as he saw it. The fact it doesnât do what you want it to do does not make it poor design.
Quite frankly youâve gone past the point of being annoying to downright boorish. The fact it does not do what you want, in your way, does not make it poor design, unimaginative, everything else you claim.
It is an excellent program that thousands find fulfills their need. With any software there are always things we feel might make it better, but re-writing it just to fulfill your insistent demands for something totally different to the current Scrivener is unlikely to happen, and your endless bleating, accusing happy users of being unreasonable fanboys etc etc, is hardly likely to change the.
You state elsewhere that Scrivener is the âONLY software you struggle withâ. Thousands of us with projects from small to very large donât struggle at all. Perhaps the issue is not a poorly designed program, rather a poorly designed user?
These opinions are my own, and I make no claim to the being those of Keith, the L&L team.
Yes, they are, and the Oracle databases that supported them â and managing the cluster of Sun Microsystems that ran the Oracle databases â were one of the most fun temporary jobs Iâve had in my career.
I assume you are referring to me, donât see anyone called Labrador man and I seem to be the only one with a dog in the pic.
Itâs a Spoodle, nothing like a Labrador, a very loving member of our family and more intelligent than some humans Iâve had the misfortune to âmeetâ. so ⊠wrong again?
There is a huge difference between âfreely given adviceâ and just arrogantly attacking the program/writer. Though I have written complex solutions, and consider myself to have a good all round knowledge, I donât presume to give Keith and team âadviceâ on how to suck eggs. I may make a wish or two for future additions etc, but if acknowledged or told it ainât going to happen, accept that.
Yes, I am a great fan of Scrivener. It is a well conceived program that hides a heck of a lot of complexity under an easy to use front end. I have successfully written four books that I would still be struggling with using any other software Iâve checked.
i once had an author send me an excel file that they,d accumulated to track their use of new words for their novel. i opened it, merely out of curiosity â it was simple⊠an alphabetically sorted list of words in column a with brief definitions in column b. i can,t remember the rest but columns c onwards were flags that showed whether the word was a character name, a place, or various other things, and in which of three made up languages they were written. i vaguely remember they,d made notes of related words â eg the same word meaning but in different languages â but i may have made that up.
i didn,t refer to it once while reading as obviously the reader of any published book wouldn,t have it either, but it was clearly something the writer found useful to their own way of working. perhaps consider doing something similar as the lack of such a tool is clearly distracting your focus⊠although my original point stands of questioning whether such a volume of invented language is truely necessary. in the case of the excel author, the fact that,d invented new words did nothing to make their story telling more engaging, colourful, or new and we didn,t pick up the book.
tl;dr â you might find a simple solution like an excel spreadsheet meets your needs better, especially in the short term
Its user interface is poor. It crams everything into one space.
Its spellchecker is poor, and its grammar checker is non-existent on the Windows version.
Its multi-purpose binder is poor and would benefit for being able to open multiple versions of it.
Its search options in the Windows version are poor.
It does not even give a proper set up option to create a series or collection of connected books, I have had to botch this glaringly obvious shortcoming.
My organisational skills are perfectly fine. I have been an risk auditor, a quality systems implementer, a business troubleshooter, a professional travel writer, and a teacher of Maths and English in secondary schools and further education. I have also worked in logistics operations managing hundreds of millions of pounds worth of stock.
If you find me boorish it is because you have leapt to the defense of a piece of software that I think could be seriously improved. My aim is to help L&L by giving them warts-and-all criticism of their softwareâs shortcomings, while yours seems to be to hang around their forum getting in a right frightful fluster when it is not really you am I interested in communicating with. Your opinions ARE your own, please keep them so, I am here to talk to L&Lâs representatives and anyone who can help me, like username scrive. If my writing or tone has upset you, thatâs your own shortcomings, not mine. Stop hanging around this forum taking offense at things that donât concern you.
Thank you but I bought Scriv to get OFF of MS Office!!! The dictionary shortcomings are botchable, but I am just saying to L&L that they need to be improved because WORDS ARE EVERYTHING to writers. I can open the Scriv custom dic with Notepad++, same as I can open the Word and the OpenOffice ones.
Excel has its own problems, though, and MS Office as a suite of programs has an arbitrary limit on the amount of spelling errors it will acknowledge and track before it shuts that down completely. It is one of the main reasons I dumped it and Word. I have THOUSANDS of new words, so managing them on a piece of separate software would be a job in itself, and I want to keep everything in one location to keep the canon of information as accurate and clear as possible.
