Tuesday, August 15, 2023

My Love-Hate Relationship with Scrivener


I got Scrivener in 2020 when the lockdown was first in effect and was surprised/happy about the reasonable price. Many of my favorite writers raved about this program, so I had to try it.

While I love how I can organize and move chapters around easily without much scrolling, I hate a few things even more, which are huge time-wasters in my writing career:



  1. 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.

  2. I can't do a search. At least I could never get it to work, so trying to find one magazine market in a sea of several hundred market names was not possible.

  3. When I compiled it into a Word document so I could do final proofreading, Scrivener randomly smooshed words together and randomly messed up the formatting, which wasted 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: 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 smooshed words, 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!



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