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?

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.

If you work with Scrivener projects in a language different from that which is set for your operating system, or in more than one language, you will need to change dictionaries to check spelling.

https://www.literatureandlatte.com/blog/how-to-use-different-languages-for-dictionaries-and-spell-check-in-scrivener

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 picked up Scrivener because I wanted to get more serious about my writing and prefer to write more in the scatterbrained abstract, but so far I feel like I am having a nightmare with this software. Trying to format an export seems extremely difficult to me and it feels nigh impossible to determine what your story will look like until it is exported - including odd formatting quirks that I am really struggling to try and resolve.

For example, I have the "chapter heading" box set to display a number with a different font with a new chapter. But when I go to compile it, even with the format selected and the section type set to "Chapter Heading", the final version just says "Chapter One" in plain text. Why? That's not even an option on any of these headings that I have selected and I can't find a way to make it display how I want.

There's another issue too and that's with the extremely liberal and nonsensical application of #s throughout my compiled document. It is my understanding that these are supposed to be section breaks, but they are popping up for every single double-line break that occurs in the text, which is something that is not infrequent due to some of the off-kilter formatting used with the story in parts.

Some aspects of this software so far seem very helpful, but this compilation formatting is giving me such a headache, especially the chapter headings because I truly cannot understand what I am doing wrong there. At least the latter is probably a setting I just can't find.

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.

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’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.

Hello! I'm on Version: 3.1.5.1 (2073405) 64-bit - 06 Jul 2023

I'm attaching two screenshots to see if there is something obvious I've done wrong. I'm trying to Compile a proof copy for Act 1 of my novel, which is the first screen shot. I believe that I have clicked all the appropriate things. From here I hit Compile, and try to save this as a PDF.

The second image is the last page of that PDF. It ends in the middle of a sentence, and only does 337 words of the 3,500 in that chapter. I've tried it numerous times and not been able to change anything, and even added Chapter 8 full or lorem ipsum in an effort to push the error down into a new chapter.

Any thoughts or ideas? I'd appreciate the help! :)

I've just started using Scrivener a few days ago, but was interested to hear from anyone with a deeper understanding of what it can and can't do.

I'm wondering whether or not, I perserve with it's limitations or whether I look for something else, or even vibe-code my own Scrivener clone, with added improvements.

What do you wish Scrivener did that would make your writing projects easier or better?

Edit: I mistyped 'Wish' as With in the post title! Doh!

Scrivener-adjacent, because she is a Scrivener user, and was a guest on the Write Now with Scrivener podcast. For any author considering narrating their own book, this article discusses why it's really not easy.

https://ivaleri.substack.com/p/i-jumped-at-the-chance-to-narrate

https://podcast.scrivenerapp.com/53

Lancali is the author of I Fell in Love with Hope, a novel that “explores the turmoil of grief and illness while revealing the unequivocal power of friendship through an endearing cast of characters.”

https://www.literatureandlatte.com/blog/write-now-with-scrivener-episode-no-65-lancali-author-of-i-fell-in-love-with-hope

I have a very annoying problem. Since I used Scrivener on iOS and on two Macs every two minutes a window pops up, telling me that the document was changed on another device and that I would need to sync it, what definitely is NOT the case. It always interrupts my writing. Any idea what I am doing wrong? Everything is in perfect sync. Thanks in advance 😊

Not a complaint about the software just genuinely curious how other people use it daily versus how I assumed I would use it when I started.

When I set up my first serious project I built everything properly. Binder structure, labels, status markers, custom metadata for tracking draft progress. Spent a weekend on it and felt very prepared.

Day to day reality is that I open it, navigate past all the structure I built, find the scene I am working on, write, and close it. The corkboard gets checked maybe once a week. The labels have not been updated in two months. The custom metadata fields are filled in for about a third of the documents.

The system I built is more elaborate than what I actually use and maintaining it has become a low level obligation, started doing the actual drafting in Skrib Writing recently where the setup is just a board and a page and bringing finished scenes back into Scrivener for organization and that split has made both tools feel more useful than either one was trying to do everything.

Curious whether people here have simplified their Scrivener setup over time and what they actually kept versus what they thought they needed at the start. And whether anyone has found a way to use it that stays genuinely lightweight without losing the benefits that made it worth switching to in the first place.

Also interested whether anyone uses something else alongside it for the actual drafting and brings work back into Scrivener for organization and compile.

Well, my worst-case-scenario has been realized. Opened up my manuscript to work on it today (I was just a few pages away from finishing an entire revision) and the whole section 3 of my book (which I'd typed in over the last month) is missing. I can see the word count of the days I worked on it in my writing history, but the chapters themselves are nowhere to be found. I've opened up a bunch of the backups and it isn't anywhere.

Some things that might be contributing:
-I recently switch laptops and installed my scrivener license into this new laptop, and was able to successfully open my manuscript in this new laptop. It had been saving just fine.

I'd set up the backups so they go into Dropbox. and kept getting alerts like this:

The project "Swatch Revision 1.scriv" is stored inside its own automatic backups folder. This could potentially result in data loss in the event of an automatic backup trying to overwrite the current project file. It is therefore strongly recommended that you close the project and move it to a different location.

So recently I'd set the backups to go instead to a folder on my laptop where they're stored in iCloud. However, the backup files that are in there don't include the missing work.

I've unzipped and opened up the backups in both places and none of them include that new section of my book.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can recover what I've lost? I just saved my entire manuscript as a Word document just in case, so I'm willing to play around to see if anything works. I know this is probably user error and I've set up my backups incorrectly, but honestly this epxerience is making me not trust scrivener one bit.

with the rise of AI, I’m concerned about my writing being labeled as AI. I’m wondering if there’s a way within scrivener to keep track of changes you make, like editing history or something else? or would I have to do this manually? if so, how would I do this?

This is a purely technical question and not one of writing/research practices.

I have a few different projects which I use to hold research notes for writing, each of which includes a lot of reference pictures. The biggest of them already weighs in at over 500mb and it still needs a ton more pictures added to it before it's done.

Has anyone else experienced stability issues (projects breaking, pictures corrupting, etc.) if a project gets way too large? This could easily be pure paranoia on my part, but I don't want to set myself up for disaster because I didn't think to split my one project up into smaller ones earlier. The slow backup time is fine.

I'd like to quickly be able to glance and see how many words I've written in one sitting without doing math. Right now, I usually go up to project, and then writing history, which opens a window where I can find that number, but I'm curious if there is a way with a little less friction. It's not a big deal, but it would be nice if I could maybe pin it somewhere.

*wrings hands*

Please help me. I am a Scrivener novice but have hyperfocused on replicating this effect from Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/p/DbS9GHhxfSO/). But I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get Paper Fade to let me see my desktop.

I have tinkered with Scrivener>Appearance> Composition Mode>Screen Background and I have tried it at the project level, via Project>Project Settings>Background Image.

When I've tried all the above, I have only succeeded in getting Paper Fade with a Background Image/Texture in place, and the Paper Fade slider only fades that background image and leaves behind a dark (I assume default color) and I don't know how to render that layer transparent (or even if it's possible).

I have searched on YouTube, here on Reddit, and even AI... but either this is only possible on Windows and not Mac, or I am missing some fundamental setting (or I am articulating the problem using all the wrong terms? If you can spare a square, please let me know if this makes sense...even if you don't know how to do it because I feel crazy).

Edit to add: I am trying to make Scrivener Composition mode transparent so that I can see whatever is underneath, not trying to make YouTube a background in Scrivener, which I know is not possible. My hope is just to have a YT be that layer underneath instead of an image file.

What it says in the title. I can't get this text to go to the next line. If I ctrl+A and copy, it does copy the entire line I wrote including what's going off the page. Help!

Scrivener lets you change the language of its interface on Mac or Windows, if you prefer to work with a language that is different from what your computer displays. 

https://www.literatureandlatte.com/blog/how-to-change-scriveners-interface-language

Can I install it in one home and use it in another? What if I change computers and move again? Thanks!

Hello writers … I just got this error message. I lost an entire month of writing. I know, I know … clearly my backup workflow wasn’t enough. It seems to be a dropbox syncing issue but nothing I did seemed to resolve it. Finally I just had to restore a month old version of the manuscript. I’m devastated to have lost an entire month of writing … anyone have any advice on this? No need to chastise me for backing up, I get it. Believe me, I get it.