Scrivener
http://www.literatureandlatte.com

Thank you for downloading Scrivener. Please take a moment to read this document before installing.

What is Scrivener?

Scrivener is software for Mac OS X aimed at writers of all kinds - novelists, short-story writers, journalists, academics - who need to gather together disparate items of research and who are working towards creating and organising a (possibly very long and) difficult piece of text.

Requirements

To run Scrivener, you will need Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or above. Scrivener will not run on systems running anything below Tiger because it takes advantage of several technologies that were unavailable prior to Tiger for viewing PDF and media files among other features.

Installation

1. To install Scrivener, just drag the Scrivener icon from the corkboard window into the Applications folder on your hard disk.
2. You can now Eject the disk image.

If you like, you can drag Scrivener from your Applications folder to the Dock to make it accessible without having to browse to the Applications folder.

Note that if you have ever used Scrivener Gold (an early, freeware version of Scrivener), it is strongly recommended that you delete it from your computer before installing Scrivener. If you don't do this, the spotlight importer, services and new .scriv file icons may not work correctly (although Scrivener itself will work fine).

Also note that you will need to reboot your computer for Scrivener's clippings services to appear in the Services menu, and you may need to log out and back in again for Scrivener documents (.scriv files) to be recognised by the system.

Getting Up And Running

When you first launch Scrivener, you will be asked if you want to enable auto-updates (recommended). If you do, whenever you launch Scrivener, if there is an active internet connection it will check to see if there is a newer version available, and if so will give you the option to update Scrivener without exiting the program.

Note that when you first run Scrivener, no window will open - you will just be presented with the application menu at the top of the screen. You will need to create a project using File > New Project to create a workspace. If this is the first time you have used Scrivener, however, you will most likely want to open up the tutorial first (see below).

Tutorial

To get you up and running as quickly as possible, Scrivener comes with a tutorial project. It is strongly recommended that you go through this tutorial the first time you use Scrivener, as it provides an interactive overview of the main features. To open the tutorial, launch Scrivener and select "Tutorial" from the Help menu. Once the tutorial project appears, click on the document entitled "CLICK HERE TO START" in the list on the left of the Scrivener window to begin (if it is not already selected). The tutorial should take around half an hour or so to complete, after which you will be a Scrivener aficionado, ready to begin your own project and import any existing work. Please refer to the Help file (available by choosing "Scrivener Help" from the Help menu) for more detailed descriptions of Scrivener's features.

Extras

On the Scrivener DMG (disk image), along with Scrivener itself and this readme file, you will also find an Extras Installer. Double-click on it to install several extras for Scrivener. These include project templates, export settings and script formats (such as stage play and comic script formats). All of these extras are installed into the ~/Library/Application Support/Scrivener folder.

Troubleshooting

If Scrivener crashes on launch: Scrivener requires QuickTime to display certain media files. If QuickTime is not installed correctly on your system, Scrivener may crash when it is launched. You can check to see if this is the problem by trying to launch QuickTime - if that crashes, too, then you know that is the culprit. To fix this issue, just re-install QuickTime on your system (you may need to download it from the Apple website first). Note that this issue often arises when migrating data from one machine to another using Apple's Migration Assistant - for some reason, the Migration Assistant often seems to mess up the QuickTime installation.

Please see the online FAQ on the forum (see below) for more troubleshooting tips.

Updating from Earlier Versions

File Format
Note that Scrivener 1.10 and above uses a different file format from previous versions, so when you first open an older project in 1.10 or above, you will be asked to update the project to the newer format. There was a bug in all versions of Scrivener prior to 1.10 which means that if you try to open a newer project in a pre-1.10 version of Scrivener, the older version of Scrivener will mistake the newer file format for an older file format, try to update it, and irreversibly corrupt it so that it cannot be opened in any version of Scrivener. (Fortunately, before trying to update, it will make a backup of the project which will not be corrupted, so if this happens to you, be sure to restore the backup.) This has been fixed in 1.10, but because of this it is strongly recommended that you delete all previous versions of Scrivener from your hard disk so that you do not accidentally open newer projects in older versions of Scrivener.

Templates
Because the file format has changed, your old project templates will need updating. The path for project templates has also changed, so older project templates will no longer be found. To update old project templates:
1. Go to File > New Project...
2. In the New Project Binder assistant, click on the "Templates..." pop-up button and click on "Import Template(s)...".
3. Browse to ~/Library/Application Support/Scrivener/Templates and select the templates you wish to import.
4. Click on "Import". They should now appear in the New Project Binder assistant.
5. One by one, select a template, copy its description text, and create a new project from it.
6. Choose to update the project when you are prompted to do so.
7. Go to File > Save as Template...
8. Enter the title of the template exactly as it was before.
9. Paste the description text into the description text field.
10. Click OK. (You can now delete the project you created in step 5.)
You can now safely delete the ~/Library/Application Support/Scrivener/Templates folder (project templates are now saved in a folder entitled "ProjectTemplates" rather than "Templates", to differentiate them from other template types).

More Information and Feedback

If you need more help, would like to leave feedback or would just like to discuss Scrivener's features, please visit the forums at:

http://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum

There you will find other helpful users, lively discussions about Scrivener, writing and literature in general, and a user-maintained FAQ (which you can find in the Tips & Tricks section).

You can also contact me directly at support@literatureandlatte.com.

Note: Please ensure that you have gone through the tutorial and checked the Help file before requesting support.

About the Developer (That's Me)

Because Scrivener is a relatively new piece of software, you may want to know a little about its developer (i.e. me) just to get some idea of whether or not Scrivener has a future - which will obviously be very important to you if you are thinking of using it for your valuable writing projects. So let me be completely up front here: I am not a "professional" programmer - that is, it is not my day job. Which isn't to say that I've just hacked Scrivener together, either. I developed Scrivener because I've always been trying to write "The Novel" but always end up with lots of disparate notes, odd scenes and ideas rather than anything "whole". So I wanted a place where I could gather it all together and organise all my material without having to write and rewrite index cards, shuffle them, lose them, paperclip them to scenes,  lament that the words that no doubt express my true genius have been lost under a coffee ring, shuffle papers in a ring-binder, extract them from the cat... Well, you get the idea. I created Scrivener because, although there are a lot of good writing tools out there (see the links page for a selection), none of them really had everything that I wanted. I had dabbled in programming for years, and I wanted this tool so much that I designed it, spent a year teaching myself how to program using the Cocoa frameworks that are native to Mac OS X, and then put it all together. And then it went through a cycle of beta-testing and I tore it all apart again (the earlier version is still available for free as Scrivener Gold) and rebuilt it (we have the technology...). And here it is. What I am trying to say in a rather prolix fashion is that I am first and foremost a user of Scrivener, and that Scrivener does have a future and is completely native to OS X. In fact, it will have a future so long as I use Mac OS X and try to write novels (and I can't see myself giving up either). This has two main implications:
1) Scrivener's future is bright - even though it's not my main job, neither is it a side-project. It is my main writing tool and it is therefore in my own best interest to ensure it is the best tool it can be.
2) My main priority won't be adding new whizz-bang features but using it myself. So - please judge it as it is right now rather than for what you think it could become. But all of this links back to 1) - I will continue updating it as I use it, and of course, all feature suggestions will be seriously considered and evaluated. In fact, user suggestions have already made Scrivener into a much better program.

And Finally

I hope you find using Scrivener a pleasurable experience, and welcome your feedback.
Keith
keith@literatureandlatte.com

Version History

Please see http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivChangeList.html for the full change list and version history.