The L&L Blog
Scrivener in App Store Best of 2016
Many thanks to the lovely Apple folk at all the stores that have included Scrivener for iPad in their "Best of 2016" app picks. It's been a great year (for Scrivener, I mean - clearly it's not been a great year for celebrities), and being picked as one of the Best of 2016 is a spiffing way to end it.
Bookmark Your Favourites in Scrivener for iOS
Drilling through a hefty binder of hierarchical files on an iPhone can be a chore, so Scrivener on iOS lets you bookmark documents to make them easily accessible. Just tap the ribbon icon in the editor footer to add the file to a special “Bookmarks” group at the top of the binder. You can also swipe left on a row in the binder and bookmark the item from the “More” menu.
Iconography in iOS (Or: Yes We Haz Custom Icons)
Scrivener can contain all sorts of different documents: whether you need to gather together notes, research, character sheets, to-do lists or, you know, some actual writing, Scrivener is a big bucket of everything for your writing project. With all those documents ready to hand, you might want to make some of them stand out a little, so that you can see them at a glance as you browse.
Finding Your Place in Scrivener for iOS
In Scrivener for iOS, the sidebar usually shows the binder (the list of files in the project). However, the sidebar can also be used to show the inspector and, on iPads, a Quick Reference editor for referring to research.
Scrivener for iOS: Exporting Single Files
A writing app wouldn't be much use if you couldn't get your work out of it. In an earlier blog post, we talked about Compile, which allows you to export or print your entire Draft folder (or a subfolder of it) as a single document, piecing together the fragments of your text into a complete manuscript.
Compiling the Draft in Scrivener for iOS
One of the principal concepts behind Scrivener is that you work with a long document by breaking it up into as many smaller chunks of text as you desire, rather than keeping it all in one long file that you have to scroll through. While the software makes it easy to work with your text in this fashion, you will still need a simple and effective method to create a single document out of all of those little pieces. In this way you can share some or all your work with others, save backup copies to text files, print out your work to paper or even quickly create a PDF for proofreading in your favourite viewer.
Scrivener iOS: Formatting Palette
Scrivener’s editor on iOS is a full rich-text environment - in other words, you have complete control over the formatting and appearance of your text right inside the editor. When you start editing a document on the iPad, a paintbrush icon appears in the nav bar at the top of the screen. Tapping on this opens the formatting palette (if you’ve used Pages before, this will be immediately familiar). On the iPhone, the paintbrush icon can be found in the extended keyboard row (the extra row of buttons that appears above the keyboard).
"I wouldn’t be able to do my job without it." Author Charlie Stross On Scrivener - And How The iOS Version Fits In.
Scrivener for iOS presents a deceptively simple appearance: there are a lot of really nifty features that only show up if you experiment.
Working with Research in Scrivener for iOS
One of Scrivener’s key features has always been its ability to keep all the pieces of your project together, allowing you to refer to research alongside your writing. The iOS version is no exception. Besides supporting iOS’s multitasking feature, so you can share the screen with other apps, Scrivener lets you load PDFs, movies, sound files, images, and webarchives right in the editor. The Recents button lets you easily flip between research and writing, and on the iPad you can view your research and text side by side.