29th NOV - LEE'S UPDATE

Firstly, an apology for my limited forum engagement last week. I simply wanted to focus on addressing bugs, especially with the 12th Dec 2010 expiry looming.

The good news is we have managed to address many of the RTF issues already and we’re hoping to release beta 1.4 mid next week. So, we’re roughly a week and a half ahead of schedule here. I will provide a full update on what has been fixed this coming weekend. However, suffice to say we should have a large proportion of the RTF, import, export and compile bugs fixed. There will be a host of other smaller fixes that I know have been bugging some folks such as:- ability to select more than 20 characters of auto-synopsis text, the vertical split screen short-cut, split screen tool-tips, an Exit instead of Quit, there’s also more export formats supported:- postscript, open office document, jpeg image etc. There will be many more both on the import and export side however, they may or may not make the next beta, the most obvious being doc and docx - it’s too early to tell yet.

There’s also been a lot of demand for a swag of Word like shortcuts such as:
http://www.computerhope.com/shortcut/word.htm
All of these are fairly trivial to implement in the editor, the only tricky part is the mapping to the most appropriate keys for Scrivener and Linux users will unfortunately need to adopt a Windows paradigm for their usage if they wish to employ them.

Other folks have expressed concerns around support for foreign language characters (mostly RTF bugs that will be resolved within the beta). Let me state for the record though that it is my intention to make a native Scrivener version for the following languages in 2011 after the 1.0 product launches:- French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese Simplified, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. We have already built the platform to cater for this and built a translation program that translators can use to translate every Scrivener text element and shortcut of the interface; we are simply limited by translators. I currently have offers from Portuguese and Russian Scrivener beta users to translate the 500 or so elements and the tutorial. So, if you are interested in translating Scrivener into your language simply drop me an email and I’ll contact you sometime after March 2011. [lee AT literatureandlatte DOT com]

We’re also looking into the installer to incorporate a live update function that will automatically check for updates and install them either silently or via a prompt depending on what you select in the Options dialog. We have now been verified and certified by Verisign as well and can now digitally sign all our code. This should stop a lot of issues with untrusted software being picked up by user’s AntiVirus detection software etc. upon install.

Well that’s about it for now, it’s going to be another huge week.

Lee

That’s a fantastic amount of work. I am especially enamoured of the auto-updated function.

Thanks for the update!

Many thanks for all the hard work that is going into this…

Much appreciated… I would never have done nano without it!

Sounds great Lee - your hard work is appreciated!

Actually I think a lot of those already work and/or are used in linux. And we’re a resilient bunch.

Thanks for the update and all your hard work.

Thanks very much, Lee (and the rest of the Scrivener crew). I already love Scrivener for Windows and am sure that I will buy it and use it for all my nonfiction and fiction writing once the program is in full release.

Just to say with others, that your hard work really shows, and wins nods of appreciation.

The fix list for 1.4 sounds a very healthy portion. Your package should really move Scrivener ahead.

Thanks again, Lee and team.

Regards,
Clive

Someone should buy you guys a round for being a week ahead of schedule. That’s impressive!

I agree with the rest.

In other news, I’m only 15,000 words away from finishing as a win on Nano. That’s just about too many words to write in … well (gulp) a day, (my current record is 10,000 in one day) however…coming this close at ALL is TOTALLY an awesome delight

I am eager for the RTF compile fixes, because I have several people who now want to read my novel, and obviously they don’t have Scrivener so I need to compile it into some other form.

Never the less, still very pleased with the program. Thanks for the update, buddy!

New update means more scrivener breaking time!

Everything’s looking great, Lee.

Just one question, though, regarding the foreign character support. The fact that you’re intending to produce native versions for all those languages in wonderful, but I hope that doesn’t mean you’ll neglect support for foreign characters in the English language version. I’ve said this countless times on this forum already, but foreign characters are very important for writers of sci-fi and fantasy, since many of our conlangs and names employ them. (I, for instance, incorporate things like ė and ̀̀ś in my novel, and I’ve been worried about support for that. I’m very unfamiliar with encoding standards and all that Unicode vs. RTF vs. whatever jazz, but it’d be wonderful to see support for things like that in the English Scrivener.)

Thanks again for all your hard work! It’s really paying off!

Awesome Lee!

I can do Greek localization, if needed. I assume the non-latin characters wouldn’t be a problem with your text engine, as long as the user has proper typefaces installed?

Fear not, they will be supported - I believe they are called diacritical marks?

In terms of other future support i.e. post 1.0 - there’s a lot we could do such as the following:
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/InsertSpecChars.htm

That’s good to hear.

I really need to figure out more about this topic. The diacritical marks I use aren’t common at all, and I’m not even sure they’re part of any language I know of. They exist, however, and in some programs/fonts, I can display them without a problem, while in others they appear only in a weird font/size, and in others still they don’t appear at all. Sadly, I don’t even know where to begin to look for information on this sort of thing. I’m not even sure what I’d search for in Google… character encoding?

It’s times like this I wish I just wrote regular old fiction, where things didn’t have fancy letters and names didn’t get any more complicated than Bob or Sam. sigh

Can you post a screenshot of some of the characters or email the image to me lee AT literatureandlatte DOT com, and I wee what I can find.
Lee