Scrivener...for Windows

[guardian_of_hope]

I know this makes the third post about writing software, but I'm hoping this will be a new slant to it. You guys really talked up Scrivener so I went to look at it. But Scrivener is only for Mac, at least, that's what I saw. Can anyone recomend a similar program for Windows? Or point out where I could find Scrivener for Windows?

Comments

[sweet_sparrow]

Scrivener is a Mac-only product, but I'm pretty sure there's a Mac-emulator for windows out there that'd let you use it on a Windows machine.

I use Liquid Story Binder XE myself and, from what I've heard of Scrivener, it's pretty similar. Doesn't have the corkboard, though, and doesn't have the sleek look Scrivener seems to have. I'm still learning how to use LSB most effectively, but I'm quite happy with what I can do with it so far. (For one thing I can put all my related-to-each-other stories in one file and I can put nearly all of my notes inside the same file with it. All neatly sorted and easy to find. I can also change the background colour to something less eyestraining than pure white.)

There's a few things I already dislike intensely, but I just need to get the hang of them. You can't search/replace whole words, as far as I've noticed. Or, at least, it's not nice and intuitively grouped with 'search and replace' if you can. And the way it hands formatting like italics is annoying as hell. It selects the previous space/word and I keep on forgetting and so type over it and have to backtrack and fix the formatting.

Minor things, on the whole, but still... I hope this helps you any! I know there's more programs out there, but I can't think of them/any right now.

[paganpaul]

Those things don't sound nice. I am glad Writer's Café handles things like that more gracefully...

[sweet_sparrow]

The thing that bugs me most is the no-full-word option in the search. The rest is just a different way of going about things. I'm not used to it yet, so I still find it annoying. *shrugs helplessly* Like with anything, try before you buy is the best choice.

[paganpaul]

Uhm... I don't get this. If you can search for part of a word, you can also search for all of the word, or am I wrong in this?

[sweet_sparrow]

I'm... not sure.

When you search a document, what you're looking for is a string of symbols (which is usually a word). In a standard search, it'll go through all occurances of the string you entered. So, say you're looking for all instances of the pronoun 'he' in your text. A standard search will return every single occurance of the string 'h' and 'e'. so it'll also return words like 'shell', 'head', 'scheme', you get the picture.

In some word processing tools (like Word), you can further define the search to exclude everything that has more letter symbols than the ones you're looking for. So, if you run the search like that, the aforementioned 'shell' etc, won't be included in the results. You've applied a filter that does so.

LSB either doesn't have that exclusion filter or it's counter-intuitively placed somewhere other than the search menu. Does that make the issue clearer?

You only notice the option is missing/not where you expect it when you actually need it, but it might be a dealbreaker for people.

[paganpaul]

Oh, right, I now see your problem. That is something Writer's Café has also, but there I can fix that by placing a space before and after the text. So when I want to search for he, I search for

" he " (without the quotes, of course, but to make it visible)

and that works. You might give that a try in LSB. I'd like to know if that works.

[sweet_sparrow]

Oooh! That's a really smart solution! I hadn't thought of that! And it'd be easy enough to search for contractions too. Just change it to an apostrophe.

It works, yes. (I'd be worried if it didn't, really.) I always just took the whole-word-only search for granted. :/ (It's curious that both LSB and WC don't have the option, though. I wonder whether that's because it's very difficult to code or whether it's because there's not enough demand.)

[paganpaul]

Great, glad it works for you.

And yes, it is a serious nuissance to program that kind of stuff (I am a programmer). There's probably plenty of demand within the user-base, but with the (compared to MS Word) relatively low sales of writer's software, other things like bugfixes and new features and releases probably take precedence. MS has plenty of people to make things like that word-search. Writer's Café is written by 1 person who also writes other software (it is part of his living).
(I know this because I translated Writer's Café and the help files into Dutch.)

[sweet_sparrow]

Fellow Dutchie! Hee!

Aaah. *nods* That makes sense. Thanks for indulging and clarifying my curiosity! ^-^

[paganpaul]

Hahaha! Wat grappig!

[sweet_sparrow]

Ik kom echt bijna nooit Nederlanders tegen online... ^-^

(Translation - well, roughly - for curious non-Dutchies: I hardly ever encounter Dutch people online.)

[paganpaul]

Er zijn er genoeg hoor... Maar ik zoek ze niet echt op.

Plenty of them around... But I am not going out to find them.

Happy writing and a great weekend to all!

[baggyeyes]

I haven't used it, but there is also Writer's Cafe, an app that runs on all three platforms. They have a limited free version, and a full version for $45. U.S.

As far as I can tell, it looks similar to Scrivener.

[paganpaul]

I use Writer's Cafe and I love it. I can really recommend it.

[tefnut]

I use yWriter, a stand-alone program. It's free.
http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter.html