AppFlow

Scrivener is any writers best friend. It was designed for anyone who writes long texts or documents, such as novels or research papers. The idea? The move all that clutter that builds up as you write into one place. In other words the Scrivener team tried to move all that research, those post-it’s and notes into one place.

Scrivener does not produce documents in the usual sense of a word processor, it works in projects. You don’t create a new document when you use Scrivener, you create a new project. Scrivener has been design to be scaleable to what you are writing.

Organisation

Scrivener has been designed with keeping you organised in mind. As a result of this you need to be able to keep everything in your project, and this is something that Scrivener has done well. You can keep everything from your project research to your drafts of your work inside your Scrivener project.

The Scrivener “binder” is the key to it’s success. The binder is the toolbar down the left-hand side and allows you to keep all of your documents and research organised. It has three sections: Drafts, Research and Trash. Drafts is where you draft your work, research is where you store your research and trash is the dedicated project trash can for everything that your delete.

Although by default only these three sections exist you can create more by making your own folders.

On top of the binder Scrivener has cork-boards. Cork-boards show the contents of a folder along with a short analyses of what is contained within each post. These are very useful for quickly glancing though each section in order to see exactly what they contain.

Writing

The default writing interface really is extremely simple. It has a box, and you type in it. By default all of the formatting options are hidden away where they cannot be seen in order to prevent any distractions that they may occur with formatting.

Simple things such as the font used in this mode can be changed to suit your preference in the application preferences. You can trigger the formatting bar by activating the spilt screen mode. In order to do this all you have to do is active one of the spilt screen modes. In order to do this navigate to the View // Layout menu’s. Once activated the screen will spilt and the left-hand panel will gain the formatting controls. Now click in the right panel and select something from the binder in order to change what is in the panel.

Scrivener also allows you to set targets on the go for how many words you need to write before stopping. You can do this by clicking on the small target symbol in the bottom right corner of the editor panel that you are using. It will then display a small dialogue box for you to set your goal. These goals can be set in either words or characters.

The final feature that really aids your writing abilities is the full screen mode. The full screen mode is very feature rich, meaning that you can customise it to your liking. The full screen mode offer’s the ability to change the width of your “paper” and the opacity of the background colour as well as enabling floating panels such as the inspector window.

Research

To help you stay organised when writing Scrivener integrates a solution to help you keep all of your research organised. Whether it is a series of photos or a PDF file Scrivener has you covered. Simply click and drag a file into the research section of the Binder and Scrivener will add it to your project as research.

You can organise your research by adding folders within the research section, view multiple files in split view or view it alongside your writing with split view. This simple function within Scrivener makes it much much easier to organise yourself when you write and is a well thought out and designed feature.

Compiling Your Writing

Without the compilation option Scrivener would not be Scrivener. This option is where you export the section of your writing that you want to export into another file for printing, emailing, review or publishing. In order to initialise the compilation press Cmd+Opt+E on your keyboard.

I am not going to explain this panel step-by-step as it will take far too long. What I will do is explain the basics. Start by selecting what sections you want to keep, and then selecting where you want page breaks and to keep to formatting. Then under the Formatting tab specify your formatting before selecting a format t export in (just above the “Export” button and then hit export. Done. You have successfully compiled your Scrivener writing.

Final Thoughts

Although expensive I do think Scrivener is well worth the money as if you do do a lot of big writing projects it will save you time and a whole lot of mess. If you do not write long articles, novels or books of any description I don’t think Scrivener is for you, but if you do write a lot of large texts then I really do not know what you are waiting for. You should have bought it a long time ago.