Scrivener 1.50

A project management tool for writers.
Scrivener is a great and very useful project management software for writers that acts like your own little writing shed at the bottom of the garden, where you have cork notice-boards, ring-binders, photos, clippings paperclipped to jottings, notebooks and more. Scrivener goal is not to try to tell you how to write - it just makes all the tools you have scattered around your desk available in only one application.

Focus on Writing
Scrivener provides access to the full power of the OS X text system: add tables, bullet points and images and format your text however you want. Define ranges of text as footnotes and they become footnotes when you export or print. And because the way you view your text onscreen may not always be how you want to see it in print, Scrivener makes it easy to format the printed or exported text completely differently from what is onscreen - leaving you free to focus on the actual writing.

Refer to Research
No more switching between multiple applications to refer to research files: keep all of your research - image files, PDF documents, movies, sound files and web pages - right inside Scrivener. And unlike in other programs that only let you see one document in a window at a time, in Scrivener you can view a research document in one pane and compose your text in another right alongside it. Transcribe an interview, make notes about a picture, or just refer back to another chapter, all from within the same program.

Corkboard
The cork notice-board is one of the writer's most familiar tools. Before Scrivener, though, the index cards were not connected to anything (other than ideas, of course); any changes to the order on the corkboard would have to be replicated manually in the draft. In Scrivener, every document is attached to a virtual index card onto which you can jot a synopsis. Use the corkboard to shuffle these index cards around - which is instantly reflected in the structure of your draft.

Outline
The outliner is another way of viewing the synopses and meta-data of the documents in your project. Restructure your work easily; get an overview of the project so far and what still needs to be done; check how many scenes have Jack as the point-of-view character; read and edit an overview of a scene, a chapter or of the whole draft.


Main features of Scrivener:

Edit Multiple Documents - Create limitless documents in the same project and edit them separately or merge them dynamically and edit them as a whole.

Corkboard - Virtual index cards store a synopsis for every document you create. Storyboard and rearrange your project by moving them around on the corkboard.

Outlining - A fully-featured outliner helps you take control of the structure of your work.

Keywords - Use a powerful keywords system to keep track of characters, themes or ideas.

Full Screen Editing - View your text in full screen for distraction-free composition.

Export - Export your finished draft to your favourite word processor for final formatting, including support for footnotes, annotations and images.


Limitations of Scrivener:

30 days trial period.

What's New in This Release:

Fixed a bug whereby paste events were not accepted from Bookends if it was the very first time you had opened Scrivener and you had chosen to view the tutorial from the first run panel.

When selecting Help > Tutorial, you are now prompted to save a copy of the tutorial to a location of your choosing regardless of whether you have write permissions. This should prevent problems with multiple accounts on the same computer, and also make it easier to reset the tutorial to a "vanilla" copy without having to reinstall Scrivener.

Scrivener once more has a start panel, based on the ones in iLife. The panel will only appear if you have no projects open, so it should be unnoticeable until it is needed. Hopefully this will reduce the number of support e-mails I have to answer explaining that Scrivener has not failed to launch, it is just that there is no window until you create a new project...

You no longer need to hold down Control or Option whilst clicking on Save to force the search strings and QuickLook data to get saved. Just doing a manual save will now save this data automatically. It is not saved during auto-saves, though, for speed reasons. It is saved when the project is closed regardless, and if the project closed improperly (e.g. because of a crash), the search strings are rebuilt and restored when the project is reopened. This means that manual saves will be a little slower than auto-saves, but that should be fine.

Renamed "Take Snapshots of Selection" to "Take Snapshots of Selected Documents" and "Take Snapshots of All" to "Take Snapshots of All Text Documents" for clarity.

The .scriv extension no longer appears in the project title bar (above the toolbar).

Auto-generate synopsis now accepts multiple selections (that is, if you select several ranges of text and then click on Auto-generate synopsis, the synopsis will be populated with all of the selected text, each range separated by a newline).

Version number is now displayed correctly when using Get Info on Scrivener in the Finder.

Renamed "Open/Close Primary/Secondary" quotes in Typography preferences to "Open/Close" and "Open Alternative/Close Alternative" - hopefully this should avoid confusion (and pedantry!).

Smart copy and paste (Tiger & Leopard) and smart links (Leopard only) are now optional, via the Text Editing pane of the preferences.

Fixed bug whereby doing a keyword search from full screen would return to the main window with no results and nothing entered into the search field in the toolbar.

Tweak to way licence info is found to aid businesses and academic institutions which require all users of one machine to be registered without having to enter registration details for each user. As a side-effect, this now means that deleting your preferences file will not necessarily delete your registration info.

Added toolbar icons for Take Snapshot, Take Snapshot with Title, and Show Snapshots

Improved the way QuickLook and CoverFlow preview information is stored (Leopard). A synopsis is now generated for blank items in CoverFlow previews. The contents of the Draft folder only is displayed if possible, but now if there isn't enough in the Draft folder, the first ten items of the whole binder (excepting special folders) are displayed.

Move left/right/up/down now works even if the field editor has the focus.

Improved start panel logic.

Fixed serious bug whereby trying to backup a project over the top of the current, open project would delete the project entirely.

The start panel is now optional and can be turned off via General preferences.

When the import of a web page fails, Scrivener now gives a (hopefully) more useful message, recommending the user to try saving the web page as a .webarchive from Safari and importing that way.

If attempting to merge more than 5 documents, a warning is now displayed informing the user that the action cannot be undone.

Fixed bug whereby Scrivener links did not survive copying and pasting. (Scrivener now uses the same custom pasteboard type for copied text containing links as it does for text containing footnotes or annotations - note that this means that pasting text containing links into a table can cause odd results because of certain pasting override limitations with the text system.)

Added Persian (modern) to Typography preferences.

Added support for compiling draft to .docx or .odt format.

Updated registration panel so that the text now matches that received in confirmation e-mails (i.e. "serial number name" and "serial number" instead of "user name" and "registration code", which apparently befuddled some people).

You no longer have to hit return after changing the project or session target.

Added "space" item to "customize toolbar".

Fixed security hole in 1.12 beta 1 licence registration.

Fixed bug whereby slashes were not getting replaced with underscores in default date extension to the project title created by Backup To...

Snapshots panel now uses text background colour set in Preferences.

Preferences no longer allow negative values in fields such as editor width or margins.

Added "Unregister" button to registration panel for customers who need to enter corrected details.

Improved Backup To... so that the backup project will not try to synchronise search strings when it is launched.

Fixed bug whereby synchronising search strings on large projects could eat up so much memory that the Scrivener would hang.

Added message explaining why synchronise search strings panel appears and giving the user the chance not to open the project at all in case they are opening a project that is also open on another networked machine.

Media background preference can now be set to any colour rather than just a shade of grey - uses Pages background colour by default. Also renamed to "Editor background".

Added preference for invisibles colour.

Updated "Purchase" menu item (and "Buy" in trial panel) to point towards store with educational licence option.

Added ability to import OPML documents (a single OPML document will be imported as several documents, retaining the hierarchical structure of the outliner).

Added ability to import and export to Final Draft File Converter format (FCF). This is now by far the best way of getting files in and out of Final Draft, and should make exchanging scripts between the two programs much easier.

Added "Total Words" and "Total Characters" columns to outliner - these show the accumulated statistics; that is, the "Total Words" of a folder will show the total word count for the folder and all of its descendants.