Comments on: Scrivener – A Writer’s Paradise

By: Writing Tools for Mac OS X | Tips by Tony

Writing Tools for Mac OS X | Tips by Tony — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 22:27:22 +0000

[...] Scrivener – A Writer’s Paradise (The Apple Blog review) [...]

By: Freddy Fishbone

Freddy Fishbone — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:20:53 +0000

It’s a great app but it is a big problem that you can’t get a page count. Not just for students. I’m a screenwriter and i have to make a pdf everytime I need to know my page count. Which is pretty often when in the final editing stages.

By: Scrivener software for writers - review » Get Creative On A Mac

Scrivener software for writers - review » Get Creative On A Mac — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 04:41:46 +0000

[...] an excellent review Scrivener – A Writer’s Paradise | The Apple Blog: “Writers who write anything that is long would love Scrivener–novelists, researchers, [...]

By: Saket K

Saket K — Thu, 22 May 2008 12:48:57 +0000

Nice Review! I think, though, that you yourself provide the answer for why the 'drawbacks' exist. You say "But it isn’t really a word processor you will need a different word processor if you want to have a final printable draft of your work." Scrivener is meant for writing and not for any other Desktop Publishing functions. Often, applications like Pages and Word provide DTP functions for regular users who might not be interested in paying for Pro publishing packages like Quark and InDesign. But this does distract from the main purpose of a writer, and that is to write! Scrivener's full-screen mode is set-up to provide distraction-free writing. Everything can be blanked out so there's just you and the page. No menu items flashing at the top, no edges of other windows in view. A lot of writers find this highly useful when they actually want to get some writing done. Thus, it is intentional that you need to expressly leave full-screen mode to switch to other apps: the idea is to make it harder for you to goof off!! If you don't like that...you can always just write in the regular view. The lack of lay-out, text-wrapping around images, etc. is also because Scrivener is meant to let you focus on writing. Most professional writers just turn in text to their publishers who have people to do the lay-out work. If you really want to control some more lay-out options, look into Scrivener's MultiMarkdown support. This will allow you to do some basic lay-out work and then have that exported to RTF file format or to LaTeX (for the especially geeky). For another helpful review of Scrivener (the 1.0 version), check out 43Folders.

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 21 May 2008 18:22:35 +0000

@Josh Pigford: If you’re a writer, Scrivener most certainly IS a core app. I spend most of my time in it, and about 1 hour a month in iPhoto. Conversely, for a photographer, Scrivener is probably useless. But then, for a photographer, iPhoto is likely to be ditched in favour of Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture or another professional app. iPhoto is a nice little app for people who want to play around with digital snapshots. Which makes it, perhaps, less “core” and more “silly” than apps that help people get their work done. But then, what’s wrong with a bit of silliness?

By: Mark XM

Mark XM — Wed, 21 May 2008 08:57:30 +0000

I too am a huge fan of Scrivener. Most of the work I do in it is editing translations, where I can have the original in one split of the window and the translation I’m editing in the other, and also preparing lecture and class materials for my students. Although Scrivener was written originally with novel writing in mind, one of its great strengths is its flexibility in both what you can use it for and exactly how you use it.

That said, Scrivener doesn’t pretend to be the answer for everyone’s needs and style of working, which is why Keith gives links to other applications like CopyWrite, Ulysses, Storymill and others on his site.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 20 May 2008 11:52:52 +0000

I use CopyWrite and even though it hasn’t been updated for a while it is still a strong writing app. One of the things that’s nice about CopyWrite is that it is cheaper and has less bloat. Some of the features are simply bloatware for me. I just want a very simple writing app so I can focus on my writing and CopyWrite works better for me.

By: John Johnson jr.

John Johnson jr. — Tue, 20 May 2008 09:58:05 +0000

@Matt: Indeed a page layout view seems to be coming in the next update. What’s important to add is the fact that this update will, despite of it’s numerous new and improved features, not be a full new version number. Meaning: It will be free for everyone who owns the current version!
@Honza: The Final Draft people cooperate with Scrivener’s Keith Blount which will result in a very improved Final Draft support.
@all: It doesn’t matter if you are writing one huge piece of text or only small ones. The moment you are having any kind of research material – docs, pdf, pictures, movies, audio files, whatever – and want to keep it right with your text Scrivener is the one.
And one other thing: The support is awesome. The users are as close as possible to the programmer. He is extremely helpful, responds very fast and ist just a nice guy.

By: Honza

Honza — Tue, 20 May 2008 07:32:35 +0000

While it sounds great for novelists (and I’ll give it a good try out before I write mine ;-)) I think for screenwriting there are more suitable tools out there, e.g. Final Draft.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 20 May 2008 05:33:32 +0000

A couple of comments regarding your listed drawbacks.

1. You can pre-load documents before going into full-screen mode, and then toggle between them using forward/back buttons. It takes a little forward planning as you need to know which documents you are likely to work on before you start in full-screen mode (which is not always possible), but it may be a useful work-around for some.

2. Page layout views has been a common request, and last I heard Keith was looking into this for the next release. So the option may become available in the future for those that require it.