r/scrivener

I need to double-space a long document for proofreading.

As far as I remember, I always did this by using cmd-2, but when I do that it simply disappears the text and tells me the document is empty. After clicking out of it, horrified, and clicking back in, the text reappears.

I looked at Format > Paragraph > ummm - there's no "spacing" but "Line height" and "inter-line spacing" with, added beneath it, "before".

What?

Asking because my current setup looks almost nothing like what I imagined when I was watching tutorial videos before purchasing.

Bought it two years ago expecting to use the corkboard constantly, keep detailed scene cards, use the label and status system to track everything, and generally have a deeply organized binder that made the structure of the novel visible at a glance.

Current reality is that I have a mostly flat binder with one folder per chapter, no scene cards with any real content in them, labels I assigned in month one and have not updated since, and a research folder I stopped adding to about eight months ago because I could never find things in it quickly enough to justify the interruption to a writing session.

 What I actually use Scrivener for day to day is the distraction free writing mode and the compile function at the end, been doing the actual drafting sessions in something called Skrib Writing recently where the planning board and the draft live together without any maintenance overhead, and bringing finished scenes back into Scrivener for organization and compile has made both tools feel more useful than either one was when I was trying to do everything in one place.

Everything in between is infrastructure I built and mostly do not maintain.

Not complaining about the tool. It does what it does well. I just find it interesting how differently I use it versus how I expected to use it and I wonder if that is common or if most people actually use the full feature set in a way that stays functional across a long project.

What does your actual Scrivener setup look like after you have been using it for a while and which features turned out to matter versus which ones seemed important before you started.

I’m looking to start writing but I’m on a budget and have only purchased the iPad app. Will I be able to complete a novel start to finish on there, or am I going to need the desktop version to do it properly?

So, I'm currently writing my novel on Mac but I'm thinking about I'm trying to switch to Linux because I'm not happy with them abandoning support for Intel apps. But I'm wondering, does anyone else currently do this and if so, what's your experience using Scrivener for Windows... on Linux. Also, any problems opening up Scrivener files that you created on your Mac?

I like to see what my daily word count is a lot, so almost every day I check the writing history on my projects to see how much I typed. When I checked one of my projects today, it said that my word count for today was -189, despite me not typing or deleting anything today yet.

Has anyone encountered this before? I can't seem to find what would cause this negative number if I haven't deleted anything.

Basically the title. I want the editor to hyphen my long words, not to send them intact, making long stretched out lines of text. Searched the Internet - only found bits of information on this topic for mac. Is this feature for macos only? If so, it is mighty unfortunate.

I downloaded Scrivener and I want to start writing, but I don't want to spend hours tweaking all the settings or searching for themes, so I'll just get one that someone has already made if it looks good.

If possible, can you please suggest some preferences or themes so I can quickly download a .prefs and .stheme file and move on from the customization stage?

I understand we can't all agree on the best settings, so I can just manually change something later if I don't like it, but it'll be faster if I start with something that has better customization and efficiency than the default one. Thank you.

I’m having an issue with smart quotes in Scrivener for Windows. In dialogue that ends with an em dash, I’m finding that Scrivener sometimes gives me an opening curly quotation mark after the em dash instead of a closing one.

For example, I’m getting:

“Well—“

instead of:

“Well—”

I’ve found this throughout my manuscript. I tried searching for the incorrect em-dash/opening-quote combination, but Scrivener seems to treat the opening and closing curly quotation marks as equivalent in search, so it pulls up both.

Has anyone else run into this? Is there a way to search specifically for the incorrect opening quotation mark after an em dash, or a setting that prevents Scrivener from creating it in the first place?

So. Recently tried to migrate my Scrivener projects from Windows to Mac. Zipped them up in Windows, opened them back up in Mac. Both Scrivener 3.

Problem is, that completely wrecked my custom styles. Not just the styles themselves, because in that case it’d have been really easy to update it all, but the assignment of paragraph style per paragraph. It seems like transferring my projects to MacOs completely scrambled the styles of the paragraphs. And it’s inconsistent; from what I can tell, there’s no clear pattern to it.

Like, in Windows, I might have two paragraphs, one styled as “Wiki Text Body” and another styled as “Wiki Header 1”. In Mac, it might all be “Wiki Text Body” or all “Wiki Header 1“ or even a different style altogether, like ”Wiki Header 2”.

Even better, even when it SEEMS the styles were imported correctly (at least their assignments, even if the fonts and sizes are wrong), when I try to use “update a style from selection” over in Mac in an attempt to fix the font, it just updates that specific paragraph (or a handful of them) and not all the other paragraphs assigned that same style, as if they were different styles.

Now, I still have access to my projects on Windows, so what I want to know is if there’s anything I can tweak on my Windows projects before migrating them to Mac that might ensure the styles are properly retained. I’ll be perfectly happy to zip them up and transfer them over again. Because I’m *really* not looking forward to restyling well over ten thousand files, each with several levels of headers, across more than twenty different projects.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.