Hi All,
Firstly, thank you for the excellent feedback. The quality of excellent descriptive posts, screen shots, and sample files has been fantastic. This really is invaluable to us.
I’ve also noticed considerable effort by many of you kind folk loitering around the forum posts and providing guidance to each other, which again is invaluable to all of us. Thank you.
To be honest, I’ve cruised yesterday and today, I think my mind was a mush in the wake of beta 1.3 and I needed to step down a few gears to re-focus. In light of that, I’d like to step away from code this week and get a handle on all the current bug posts to date and consolidate a succinct list of known bugs and missing features and publish them as an announcement on this forum for all to see in a central location. I want to do this as I’m finding it difficult to focus on two things at once; I am male after all. I’m hoping it will also help slow the duplication of reported bugs and provide a clearer view for all of us.
I’m not sure how we could do this, but once the core RTF bugs are fixed, which I’ll write a few paragraphs on in a moment, if somehow we could work out a way efficiently to vote on the order of fixes - that would be rather cool, and would enable us to deliver the most desired (demanded) functionality in the order you wanted them. I’ll let you all work out a cunning strategy - or at the very least tell me that it’s a really crap idea.
Okay, rich text format (RTF) and why I want to deal with this next. Scrivener is a writing tool, and writers write, right? We need to get this perfect as soon as possible so you can write effortlessly, focused only on expressing your thoughts without being distracted by the program you’re using. This is fundamental in my mind, and often why you can’t go past pen and paper for the ultimate flow.
The problem we have at the moment is that Qt, the C++ framework Scrivener is built on, uses a cut down version of HTML as its editor engine. What this means is that when text is cut and pasted into Scrivener from HTML or Word etc. stray characters are often augmented and remain invisible in the Qt editor - this is the first problem and is a Qt problem that we need to fix. We have decided to bypass this altogether and augment the Qt source code so that all pasted text is first filtered through our own RTF parser. We have not started this work yet, but plan to soon.
The second issue we have is what happens upon exporting or saving a Scrivener document to disk. First the editor text in memory is converted to RTF by our own RTF writer (as Qt does not support RTF out of the box) and when that same file is loaded or imported into the editor it is then parsed through our RTF reader and then loaded into memory for the editor to display. We have many issues with both the reader and writer at the moment and need to re-write large chunks of the code which we have started to do. Interestingly, this was one of the few pieces of work that I farmed out to an expert Qt programmer for 12 weeks to meet the Sept 25th deadline. We are paying for that now and are no longer using these ‘expert’ services. Instead we are fixing many design flaws ourselves - I hate the saying, but my father was right again when he said, ‘If you want something done right, do it yourself.’
The good news is that all this ‘expert’ code is not lost and we fundamentally understand the problem. It’s not like we’re scratching our heads wondering how to fix this. It’s simply a matter of head down bum up and get through it. We have about four weeks ahead of us to remedy all these import/export/pasting and editor issues such as tables, weird line spacings, and hidden characters etc. that many users are reporting. You’ll not get your double spacing features without it either.
So, the reality is that 1.4 will be a huge leap forward, but is probably a month away. After that we can have some fun and start prioritizing which bugs and missing features get fixed first, so we have time to work this all out. If all this takes us until the end of Feb/Mar (which I’m not for a minute suggesting this is likely) then I really don’t care, Scrivener, like writing, is a passion for me and I just want to remain focused on making Scrivener for Windows the best it can be.
Lee