Using IAWriter (or anything else) with Scrivener

Last month I wrote about the interesting minimalist writing app IA Writer and concluded, ‘IA Writer would make a great cutdown interface to write a single Scrivener scene. As a way of building and manipulating an entire book… I can’t see it.’

I was wrong. Scrivener’s a very clever beast beneath the bonnet. If you want you can edit your scenes with IAWriter (on OS X) and using text editors of various kinds on PCs, iPads, Android tablets, anything that can access a folder, usually in a cloud account.

Here, step-by-step, is how.

First we need to set up a Sync folder in Scrivener. Go to the File menu and do this…

This will export all your individual Scrivener scenes as text files into a folder (stored in this case on my SugarSync account though it could simply be a folder on your own Mac if you don’t want to access things from another device). Make sure you tick the boxes for making snapshots before updating and checking for updates on opening the Scrivener file. Hit Sync, which creates all those text files, then quit Scrivener.

Now open up IAWriter (or anything that reads text files on any other device) and go to the folder concerned. Here you willl find your entire book stores as individual text files.

Now open the file you want to work with. I’ll use IA Writer’s neat focus mode which highlights the text sentence by sentence.

Yes, yes. I know. I blurred the text. This is work in progress, OK? So in focus mode I go through it sentence by sentence, revising as I see fit.

Then save the file, close it and reopen the manuscript in Scrivener. We now see this.

Scrivener has detected changes in the Sync folder. If we hit OK it will first save the old scene as a snapshot then import the revised one in its place. Afterwards it willl show us any scenes it has changed in this way.

In the right hand column (the Inspector) you can see a list of all the snapshots I’ve created for this scene. So I have access to all previous versions — and if I fouled up on something on this import I could always go back to the old one.

Some caveats…

We’re working in plain text here so formatting won’t come across into IAWriter (or many other simple text editors, whether on a tablet or not). Any paragraph you edit which contains formatted text (say italic) will lose the formatting on import. But Scrivener works on a paragraph by paragraph basis. So any formatted paras you don’t edit will retain their formatting.

IA Writer on the iPad is currently very picky about what files it will open on Dropbox (no other service I can see) and can’t be made to open Scrivener syncs.

Don’t change text files titles ever. Scrivener needs them to know how to file the internal scenes of your book.

This is very neat stuff. I may well try doing a revise in IA Writer, scene by scene, this way at some stage. Got to get to a finished manuscript first of course….

Comments

[Todd Lucas]

No Sync with External Folder function on Windows version yet. Might have made the thing useful. I'm sure that's something that won't get added will after it comes out of beta. Looks pretty sweet, though ...

[David Hewson]

It is still in beta!