I have been enjoying the IOS version but have run into what amounts to a deal breaker for me.
I wanted to select a sentence, cut it, and put it somewhere else. All of course fairly straightforward stuff. On IOS, however, I find it virtually impossible. The selector just runs away, usually scrolling down at great speed. If I hold the iPad flat and place my finger with great care it can be done, but this involves too much of an interruption in my workflow. Add to this the way the keyboard obscures half the screen whether you want it to or not, just exacerbates the problem.
I can find no way of resolving this. So while I can write away, I cannot, it seems, consider editing. So I may as well just stick to the laptop.
A method to make the task livable:
Select material, then use the arrows in the extended keyboard row to increase/decrease the amount of the selection. Experiment.
ETA: In order to use the method, the initial selection must be made using the selection tool located in the extended keyboard row. Thereafter, as long as you remain in that document, the arrow method will work if you use the formatting pallete to select. (Scrivener 1.1.1 (964))
Another approach that may be workable is to use the fluid Zoom capability (pinch gesture) to alternate between large-scale and finessed selection movements. This is a technique I’ve long used on websites, rather than sitting there and waiting ten minutes for the selector to gradually auto-scroll to the bottom of the page, just flick the page down tiny, select a big chunk and zoom in on the ends to get the positioning just right. Easy peasy.
Speaking of zoom though, would you say you tend to use a lot of it? I see in this screenshot, that’s fairly zoomed in, in my opinion. I’ve never noticed anything wrong here, but I use around 1.0 or 1.1 zoom as I prefer very small fonts. At that scale, the speed is appropriate, at a much higher scale, it is a bit difficult to control because the same speed means 20 lines at once instead of 2 (to throw out some arbitrary numbers).
I do use zoom a lot. It agrees with my eyesight.Thanks for the tips, though. I just tested decreasing the zoom in Scrivener and you’re right, selection is more controllable.
On the other hand, that’s opposite to my experience on websites. I usually have to zoom larger to get the selection tool to accurately select my target. If I don’t, it tends to start and stop at whatever words and lines it’s in the mood for––at that exact moment. Okay, it doesn’t like to start at the beginning, go to the end. Dagnabit! Now it wants to skip the last line/paragraph! I swear it laughs at irritated me.
Selecting text in websites has always been an absolute bane, no matter what platform! It’s almost as bad as PDF.
At any rate, hopefully we can get this optimised for the higher zoom scales, because I do agree it’s pretty jumpy that way, and seems to start scrolling a bit before it should.
That’s not necessary. The problem of the screen auto-scrolling like a maniac on one’s iPad during a selection procedure goes away immediately if you turn off Typewriter mode, as someone posted in a different thread. I’m posting the answer here so that people will see it here as well if they’re reading this (similar) thread.
Actually, the crazy selection issue is still a problem even with typewriter mode turned off. I have it turned off and my curser and highlight is all over the place and rarely am I able to just select one word without taking an entire paragraph with it. The only way to really avoid it is using an external keyboard and that’s not always helpful when you’re out and about and you have a keyboard like mine. I am hoping this is on the list of fixes if/when there’s an update. I do not have this problem with any other app I have, including Ulysses and Pages.
