Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Farewell Scrivener

I shall miss you, but I can no longer wait for the iOS version. I need to write wherever I am with whatever I've got. At work, at home, on the go.
In the meantime I'm switching to Plain Text. It is a great, simple, little app with word and character count. The syncing is bulletproof and near instant without the typical delays and slog of conflicted files common to so many other writing apps I've tried.
Now I can write on my iPhone, iPad or my PC by keeping my files and folders organized in Dropbox.
The disadvantage of all of this is that PlainText is, (who could have guessed?) plain text only, so I'm using Notepad now, rather than my beloved Scrivener when I'm on a PC. Have heart though; it's only through the first draft.
I write my chapters as individual files with the # symbol between scene breaks for when the time comes to import into Scrivener. Using Import and Split, my scenes import as individual cards within my Chapter Folder in Scrivener. Make sure you import as UTF-8 or your import will be messy. Once you've got it in there you also have to convert it to your default text style. Next is editing and markdown.
It's not perfect. Perfect will be when I have an iOS version for iPad and iPhone that syncs with my PC. Until that day comes I will continue the struggle to perfect my workarounds.