Hi Per.
Love the software. Thank you for the Word export. That's saved a lot of time and much needed for novels.
Thanks for the guidance of downloading the 3.1.1 beta. There are some limiting aspects based on this release:
Italics. This is the big one for literary writing:
-- Pasting any text that contains italics into Causality from Word/Scrivener (copy/paste) strips it of italic formatting. It means that moving any work into the software involves having to crawl through the script and manual adjust each word that needs to be italics. It promotes the possibility of errors when the manuscript needed to be exported each time we send to Editors for markups.
-- Inside beats popup window. The Italics share the same shortcut with the causality chaining I/O which means you cannot make things italic when reviewing a beat in this way. I find it useful to edit a beat in isolation so often I'm wanting to italic words in this beat popup way. When the cursor is on the regular script it seems to disable the I/O linking promoting. Maybe the same could happen in a beat popup? as the I/O linking is mainly useful in the whiteboard view only
Not able to select the text of a whole chapter:
Selecting text in the script is limited to a beat at a time. It would be great if there was also a way to select outside of the boundaries of a beat, so that the text in multiple beats can be selected for copying and pasting into other writing tools. Usage would be to get copy out of Causality (most frequently to check a chapter in Pro Writing Aid or Grammarly, as currently the only option to do this is to export the entire book. Whilst editing, I use fullscreen mode and remove the titles of the beats using the filters (so you just see whole chapters. But we are not able to select whole chapters as the selection will stop as soon as it reaches the place where a new beat begins/ends.
Script full screen mode on laptops or screens with smaller real-estate.
The horizontal split screen of script fullscreen mode has no gestures to scroll down to see the timeline elements that are below the fold. The narrow sidebar slider works and you can grab with the mouse to see scroll more of the timeline vertically, but would be great if the gestures for mouse wheel or two finder swipe could work both ways, vertically and horizontally here too as the top part is compacted which means things like the tracking dots for each character are not visible in this view without getting fiddly. Currently only horizontal gestures work in this box.
Loving the software.
These extra things would make it perfect.
best
Daniel
I just downloaded 3.1.4.
Per, you are amazing!
Italics fixed and works a treat. This really is the best software for writing out there.
Thank you. That's good to know that Italics are up there on the fix list.
In terms of dark mode, I love having the console dark like that, but in other programs like word and Scrivenier I always have the page/script section white (with the rest of the interface in dark mode). Is this something you would consider? Making it easier to write in dark mode.
Thanks
Hi,
Thanks!
The Ctrl+I/O for creating connections has a bug. It's only supposed to work in the whiteboard, where Ctrl+I is supposed to do Italics in the script, but sometimes whiteboard shortcuts are active in the script. This is some old code that wasn't well-designed to begin with, and we have to overhaul it. We may completely disable the keyboard shortcuts for making connections in order to side-step the issue while we solve it. It bothers lots of people.
In terms of Italics in clipboards, this bothers a lot of people, and we have to be better at parsing the clipboard. The difficulty is that we receive clipboard data in many different formats, and we have to individually parse each one. And some clipboard formats even remove formatting completely. This is a high priority, because it affects both novels and screenplays. Clipboard in/out has to be better across the board, including also parsing screenplay formats we receive via the clipboard.
In terms of selecting the text of multiple beats, this is unlikely to ever happen directly, because it would take significant hocus pocus to pretend that we're selecting text continuously across multiple text editors. But if the goal is just to copy/paste a selection of beats, I'm wondering if it wouldn't be just as good that you just copy the beats, and we drop the text of the beats on the clipboard for pasting into other apps. This would be easy to do, and harmonious with clipboard philosophy of populating in multiple formats.
About the timeline, I think there is a bug, but a different one. The mini-timeline wasn't supposed to show all the stuff below the fold, and a previous update has accidentally snuck a scrollbar in there anyway, with the result that it can be scrolled when touching the scrollbar, but all the other controls are disabled on purpose because it wasn't meant to be scrollable.
The mini-timeline was only ever meant for bare-bones navigation, but we're happy to revisit all that logic. It sounds the most like what we really need is configurable views, so that you can make your own views that combine things and then switch between them. Admittedly, that's a huge task on our end, and one we can't act on until we're also doing the mobile interfaces, since it all requires new thinking about how to handle showing the individual panes all the down from a smartphone, up to a 3 monitor workstation. There's a possibility of building in opposite directions at the same time here, so it needs some R&D.