Software Review: Scrivener

[fox_c]

As many probably noticed when I was writing my last contracts paper, I took that opportunity to try out a number of different word processing programs, Neo Office having been fired for poor performance after the January round of essays. The one that finally stuck was Scrivener, and the key feature that really sold me was its ability to treat papers like the projects they are, with research materials, outlines, drafts, etc all in one place. They layout and some of the assumptions betray its beginnings as a tool primarily for novelists, but it has grown some and is perfectly functional for mostly text based writing projects (I'm not qualified to judge how well it might or might not work for more formula based essays).

The best features

• In good mac style, the interface is easy to use, customisable and intuitive. As a non-computer geek, this is crucial. I don't really want to have to be digging through the depths of arcane menus in order to do something very simple. Which is not to say that it's a simple tool, it's not, but it presents things in a simple way.
  
• EVERYTHING IN ONE PLACE and openable in separate panes in the same window (see below). Makes life so much easier.
  
• outlining - it offers to ways to view these, as an actual outline or as corkboard with index cards. I don't use the latter feature as much as I thought I would, but I can definitely see how it would be useful. I've found the outline features to be much more useful.
  
• snapshots - basically a way to save previous states of a text and then revert back to it if you don't like the way a set of edits is going. Really fabulous, especially if you are a somewhat finnicky writer like me.
  
• split-panes - seriously seriously awesome. You can write in one pane and have a piece of research (which can be text, a picture, a film clip, sound, a webpage), your outline, the previous section, a thesis statement, or pretty much anything else in the other.
  
• drag and drop anything anywhere - want this section in a different place? drag and drop. This piece of research linked over there? drag and drop. So handy.
  
• typewriter view - this essentially means that the line you are writing is in the middle of the page rather than the bottom. Again a simple concept, but one that I am finding makes writing significantly easier.
  
• word targets - I am forever running over word limits. By assigning a target to each section of my work, I get a good feeling for how well I'm doing. Also, this interacts with the outline view to show you where you are to your overall word target and which sections are longer/shorter than your plan.
  
• "open externally" - Scrivener doesn't handle pdfs very well and you are quite limited in how you can change them. Fortunately, with this button you can have it open somewhere else where you can make the changes you need, which will then be reimported back to scrivener
  
  The merely cool
  
• different colours of highlighters that you can give labels to
  
• everything is taggable. Not really helpful for me, but I could see how it would be for some
  
• a scratch pad - again could be really useful, but I haven't found a way to incorporate it into my writing flow. Probably because I'm still doing lots of reading notes on old fasioned paper. If I had a way to scan these in, I would be really set.
  
  The somewhat annoying
  
• footnotes are inline just put in bubbles. It means they count toward your word target and make it pretty much impossible to cross reference.
  
• you can't really get to a final draft in this programme. You always have to export to another word processor for the final clean-up and finalise it for printing, especially to get the cross referencing right. But this makes working with Open Office (Neo Office is still fired) much less painful, since the only thing you're doing is editing.
  
• it is not immediately obvious what all the customisations are changing while you're in the preferences pane - and there is a dizzying array of things you can tweak. I just had to finally stop and go back to the default and then be more choosy about what I really wanted to be different.
  
  So it's a keeper and for once I don't dread starting my essays, at least not because writing is difficult =)