I got
Scrivener back in the spring when the lockdown was first in effect and I was surprised and happy about the reasonable price. Many of my favorite writers rave about this program, so I had to give it a shot.
While I do love how I can organize and move around chapters easily without much scrolling, I hate a few things even more, which are huge time-wasters in my writing career:
- I can't make the screen bigger without making the font bigger like you can in, say, an Internet browser when you increase the screen print size.
- I can't do a search. At least I could never get it to work, so trying to find one market name in a sea of 230 market names was not possible.
- When I compile into a Word document so I can do final proofreading, Scrivener has randomly smooshed words together and randomly messed up formatting, which wastes a lot of time. So my text might look like this:
Writer's guidelines canbe found on thewebsite.
I am also a
proofreader on Fiverr and have been since 2013. I used to get so frustrated when book projects would come to me for proofreading as shown above quite often: it's because a writer has put their trust in Scrivener and exported, then sent it straight to me. And when I receive it, it's a formatting nightmare with words smashed together and extra spaces inserted.
If you can overlook these things, give it a go. If you can't, just keep using Microsoft Word like I do. Shrug. I'd love to hear from Scrivener to find out what I'm doing wrong and if this happens to anyone else.
Update December 2020: I went through the manual and tried many different ways to compile my book into a document that was how it should be (including hyperlinks). Doing "Custom" then choosing the "Times 12 pt" option from above and the "RTF" format from below worked the best, but there were still the smooshed words and missing periods and extra spaces in every single file I compiled, no matter how I compiled it. I went back to the original Scrivener document to see if the mistake originated with me, but nope. GLITCH.
Update: I got this in my email inbox recently so I'll definitely let them know what I like and don't like. I'm truly hoping these are easy fixes for a programmer and that I can go back to Scrivener with open arms and lots of writing ideas!
