line numbering please!

[WD]

May we have line numbering please?

[Faulkner]

I second that. Actually, I dislike line numbering but many editors, at least in science field, request them.

[KB]

Crikey, no need to shout.

I'm afraid I don't really see line numbering making it any time soon... It's a whole new kettle of fish and very tricky to implement (it means inserting an extra view inbetween the text view and the scroll view... nasty).

Best,
Keith

[WD]

[Sorry, I did'nt mean to shout I am very happy to use Scivener.
WD]

Crikey, no need to shout.

I'm afraid I don't really see line numbering making it any time soon... It's a whole new kettle of fish and very tricky to implement (it means inserting an extra view inbetween the text view and the scroll view... nasty).

Best,
Keith[/quote]

[KB]

Actually, after reading this post, I have looked into this... It would be quite nice to have line numbering for poets, I guess. I can't promise anything, because it could be very awkward to implement, and I certainly can't say when such a feature would make it in if it did, but, hypothetically, if I did look at this, should the line numbers count every line (even blank lines) or only lines with actual text on them?

Best,
Keith

[WD]

No blanc lines, only lines with actual text on them. In my writing I prefer to count by 5.
Line numbering is very usefull if you need to discuss or point out texts to others, for instance in a group of students.
Best,
WD

[xiamenese]

Hmm ... I can see all sorts of issues involved for non-poetry numbering of lines, least of all the fact that what you are looking at on screen almost certainly has different line-breaks from what you export. But I'm sure Keith doesn't need to be told that.

I would have thought that line numbering was something you would apply to your finally formatted document, not during the drafting process, and from that point of view would be best applied while preparing your document in your preferred word-processor/page make-up app.

I can only speak for Nisus Writer Pro, which has good line numbering support. I know Word does too, but I can't remember for Mellel, and I've never looked in Pages or NeoOffice ... I would think the latter does.

Mark

[AmberV]

I have been thinking of this in terms of Ulysses numbering, which is paragraph numbering, or literal line numbering. What would be the purpose of numbering soft breaks, as those are not really anything in either the editor or the export?

[Jaysen]

I have been thinking of this in terms of Ulysses numbering, which is paragraph numbering, or literal line numbering. What would be the purpose of numbering soft breaks, as those are not really anything in either the editor or the export?

Tele-editing. I just ended a call with a "person" who kept refering to the "line right there in the middle of the page". If there was a clear XXX line designation then my time would not have been wasted. For the record this was a tech call and we were refering to a manual, not a Scriv doc, but the reasoning applies. Music does this all the time. The bars are numbered and you refer to a specific phrase or note using bar, beat, fraction syntax (my folks 22.3.1/16 but there are other methods as well that all boil down to the same thing).

My personal use of this is on the compile or export, not the working display. My edit-aughter has requested numbers on the line so she can just give me a post it instead of marking up the pages. Apparently she likes to reread and finds the markup tough to deal with. I thought about a perl filter, but doing it in scriv would be much easier.

[AmberV]

Oh, I get the point of referencing deeper than a paragraph. I guess I'm just used to ¶32.3 to mean 32nd paragraph, 3rd sentence. That seems more reliable than Line 492, which is based on soft returns and is highly unstable depending upon editor width, font size, margins, and so on. If Scrivener numbered paragraphs, then that would solve the most difficult part of locating, and those aren't going to drift because one person is viewing the file on a Mac with Lucida Grande and another on a PC with Lucida Sans.

[Jaysen]

I see your point. I guess I am used to the slightly more fine grained approach from music. In retrospect I think that the music notiation that we use is closer to your paragraph notation than my line numbered notation. 13.6 would be line 13 word 6. I guess that could be 2.3.3 using paragraph, sentance, word... I think my habits come from looking at too much code....

i think that the other difference that I have is that I will not be sharing digitally unless it is a PDF. Also a throwback to my profession where only one person makes changes at a time. either way,

I guess what I am saying is that if Keith adds it I will use it no matter which numbering scheme is used.

[Wock]

BBedit shows a nice line numbering feature for reference.

But I truly see this as an EXPORT feature when compiling a final draft and not so much as a Creative feature since font, screen width, text wrap, and soft returns would dynamically changes these "references"

[AmberV]

Well, I guess that is my point. If the reference in the creative interface were via numbered paragraph (and nothing further), then it would have definite use in progress. Soft breaks and fonts make no difference whatsoever when it comes to numbering paragraphs.

What would you propose for a method of numbering all lines in export? You would have to hard-break each line at the wrap point, and insert the number in text with a tab stop set to the width of the largest number (or a soft-tab in the case of plain text export). It would be possible, with a lot of font metric calculation, but somewhat unweildy. Maybe I am missing something obvious; but I cannot think of any applications that exports line numbers embedded in the text (BASIC excepted, ha). It is always a print option, or something like PostScript/PDF generation---neither of which are done by Scrivener, internally.

[Wock]

BBEdit does it but first you have to apply a hard wrap measurement then apply line numbering. Then it can be exported or printed.

The drawback would be that you would have to have a default hard wrap measurement that is adjustable then you would have to apply numbers to each line before printing or exporting which seems rather cumbersome for a limited feature where as you suggest the paragraph numbering would seem to be more helpful. Imagine a small interface that would list the paragraph numbers in a small window (like page anchors) and when you click on a paragraph number you could "jump" right to that paragraph.

As to the line numbering you can always view the text as one long text document, copy it, paste it into BBedit and figure out the hardwrap measurements, then number the lines and print for a hardcopy reference file or PDF (maybe this could be an Apple Script?)

I like the paragraph numbering idea better because it seems it would be very useful for many different reasons.

[popcornflix]

Actually, after reading this post, I have looked into this... It would be quite nice to have line numbering for poets, I guess. ...if I did look at this, should the line numbers count every line (even blank lines) or only lines with actual text on them?

If you work that out, would it be possible to use it to indicate the last line on a page in Screenplay documents? There could be a pref that lets you specify how many lines on a page (54 usually, but 50-56 too).

Or have you worked out the page break for Screenplays, and maybe I missed the post?

Scrivener is a wonderful screenwriting tool. Showing me where my pages end would make it truly professional-grade.

As always, thanks for considering the request.