Scrivener, Dropbox, Elements and an improved process for the iPad

Posted on | January 4, 2012 | 12 Comments

When I am at home in my office, I do all of my fiction-writing on my MacBook using Scrivener. It used to be that when I was away from my office, I took my laptop with me, but after getting my iPad last spring, I decided to leave the laptop at home and do my writing on the iPad. The trick was, how best to sync my Scrivener projects with my iPad.

For a while, I synced my Scrivener projects with SimpleNote, which had a nice app for the iPad. But over time, I found three problems with the process:

SimpleNote didn’t have the clean screen editing I was looking for. It’s maximum font size was too small for me.
The way the files are organized is a bit confusing.
SimpleNote’s cloud system is proprietary for its editor.

Maybe it’s just me, but I felt there could be improvements in the process. So I went about looking for a really good text editor for the iPad and what I came up with after a fairly exhaustive search was Elements by Second Gear. Elements has the font sizes I want, the clean screen look to it, and it synchronizes with Dropbox–which means I can make it sync seamlessly with Scrivener.

Why is font size so important to me?

When I write on the iPad, I use an external BlueTooth keyboard–the very same keyboard I use when writing on my MacBook. This is so that the feel of writing is the same, even if the screens are different. But I am also more comfortable if the iPad isn’t sitting right in my face. I like setting it back a bit, and it helps to have font size that I can still read easily while I work.

Having just returned from a 10-day vacation in which I wrote using nothing but my iPad, I thought I’d share the process in case anyone else was interested. Here’s what I did:

1. Create a project in Scrivener

This is straight-forward, and particularly easy with the SFWA Short Story template I created. Nothing special here.

2. Sync the project with an External Folder

Here is where things get interesting:

You will need to install Dropbox and have a Dropbox account for this to work
The external folder I select is a folder within the Dropbox folder on my MacBook. See the screenshot below for a sample of the settings I use:

Note that the folder that I’m syncing to (first red circle) is my Dropbox folder. Any files saved and changed here will automatically be replicated to Dropbox.
While the screenshot doesn’t show it, I usually check the “Check external folder on project open and automatically sync on close” checkbox. This ensures that I don’t exit without syncing first–something I’ve done before, much to my dismay.
Finally, the format for files in the external Draft folder has to be set to Plain Text as Elements does not read RTF files
Click Sync and you’re all set

Those steps need to be done once per project. Once they are done, you can access the project in Elements on the iPad.

3. Opening the project in Elements

Elements is a Dropbox based tool. When you first install it, you configure it to work with your Dropbox account. Then when you open it, you are presented with a list of the folders and text files in your Dropbox.

I organize my projects by folder on Dropbox, so I select the folder that I want to work with, drill down into the Drafts folder of that project, and select the file I want to edit. Once you are in edit mode, you get a nice clean screen to work with. It is especially useful to have an external keyboard so that the digital keyboard doesn’t clutter your screen. With my large font settings and wide margins, here is an example of what my Elements screen looks like on the iPad:

Clicking the Information icon on the top-right of the screen will give me a word-count for the document, which is a useful feature. I can now add text, edit or otherwise update the file and my changes are automatically saved to Dropbox. If I go back into the project in Scrivener, my changes will be reflected when the Project syncs with the external folder (which is why I check that extra box in the first screen).

Over the course of my vacation, I found this an easier process than what I did with SimpleNote. I also found Elements to be a better text editor, in terms of its flexibility to my needs.

Caveats

There are a few things to be aware of:

This works well for syncing between Scrivener and any text editor you would use via Dropbox. But it doesn’t let you sync a project between two versions of Scrivener. Save yourself some time: I already tried that.
You are dealing with plain text files so any formatting you put into Scrivener will be lost when it is synced to plain text. Since I use very little formatting in my stories and let Scrivener generate the manuscript this is easy for me to work around. When I’m working on a draft, when I want to underline something, I ‘ll _use underscores_ like that, instead of actual underlining. I do the same in Elements. Once I’m back in Scrivener and ready to produce a final draft, I replace those underscores with underlines.
Elements is not free. I think I paid $4.99, but it is well worth it. It’s the only text editor I use for fiction writing on the iPad now.
Scrivener will eventually be available for the iPad, in case you want to hold out for that version. In the meantime, I think the combination of Scrivener, Elements and Dropbox works very well.

Comments

12 Responses to “Scrivener, Dropbox, Elements and an improved process for the iPad”

Pete
January 5th, 2012 @ 5:43 pm

Although I haven’t used it with Scrivener, I use Notebooks for iPad as my main writing tool when working on the iPad. As far as structure goes it works similarly to OneNote. You make Notebooks as the top level folder. Within each book you can make your notes or nest things further and make more books. It supports plain text and RTF files. I’ve used it to keep a journal for this year with an entry for each day and each entry coming out to a page or more of written text. I find it works extremely well and it integrates into Dropbox very cleanly.

I agree with you on font size and Notebooks allows you to change the font size as well as the background. It also supports word count, not just for the current document, but gives you a total for all the notes within a folder. I tried using Pages, but Notebooks has a much better feature set and the file management is far superior.

Eventually I will bring all the writing tools together and see how they work together.
Jill
January 8th, 2012 @ 4:31 pm

I’m new to the Scrivener for Windows but have an ipad. Can I use elements? Can’t find the sync option in Scrivener for Windows.
Thanks,
Jill
Libby
January 9th, 2012 @ 1:41 pm

Good advice – many thanks. ?
But my project saves in rft format and i cannot find where you select plain text. .can you assist please?

Many thanks
Jamie Todd Rubin
January 12th, 2012 @ 7:59 am

Libby, see the first screenshot in the post. Toward the bottom, I’ve circled the setting for changing the output from RTF to plain text. This is the only place I know of to change the setting–and it is for the Mac version. I’ve no experience with the Windows or Linux versions.
More iPad: Using Scrivener and Pages… « Todd Kersh's Blog
February 1st, 2012 @ 9:10 am

[...] his Blog site, and some key experiences he suggested I found quite useful. SimpleNote and Scrivener Elements and Scrivener Share this:TwitterFacebookLike this:LikeBe the first to like this [...]
Todd Kersh
February 2nd, 2012 @ 9:00 am

I was similarly working on establishing a remote writing capability on the iPad that could conveniently work with Scrivener on my home-based Mac. I’ve started with Pages on the iPad, Scrivener on the Mac, and using Apples neophyte iCloud as a connection (really more of a store and forward capability). While I’ve not done any real work towards a novel, my experiments in file exchange going each way seem to work fine. So that is another possible combination…
Marion Spicher
February 17th, 2012 @ 11:13 pm

I’m a new i pad user, and have been looking for a way to utilize it for writing and transferring the work to scrivener or Microsoft word for the Mac. Your post is exciting, passed along to me by my daughter in Austin TX. I’ll experiment with your method. Thank you for taking the time to give us a hand up!
Richard Baldwin
April 29th, 2012 @ 3:11 am

Hey Jamie,

How’s it going? I have a question for you: On your SFWA short story template, do you find when you open the document in Word or TextEdit that the word count text is set a half inch further in from the left of the page than the text margins? I modified the short story template that came with Scrivener, have been finding this problem, and haven’t been able to find any command or preference that might fix it. So far I’ve had to manually change the table parameters in Word after every compile. If your template doesn’t have this problem, could I grab a copy off you?

Anyway, good article, and I’ve been quite happy with Elements so far myself, so thanks for pointing it out.

Cheers,

Rich (from Codex)
Jamie Todd Rubin
May 2nd, 2012 @ 11:48 am

Rich, sorry for the delay, this comment got past me somehow. You know, I have never notice that, but I will take a look at it and if it’s that way on my machine, I will see if I can find a way to fix it. Stay-tuned…
adventures with an iPad: Scrivener and Elements | Jennifer Willis
May 3rd, 2012 @ 1:00 pm

[...] doing my own set-up, I mostly followed Jamie Todd Rubin’s excellent instructions, though there was still a bit I had to figure out on my own. For instance, in Step 2, the [...]
Rachel Cobleigh
May 11th, 2012 @ 9:51 am

THANK YOU for posting the details and how-to of this workflow! I’ve been hunting for a good iPad/Scrivener writing workflow for weeks and until your post, wasn’t able to find one. Elements is bare-bones and is exactly what I need and no more. (I’m eagerly anticipating a Scrivener iPad app, but until then, this will do.
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May 14th, 2012 @ 11:03 am

[...] been) is Sync an external folder. The basics of how to do this are pretty simple and this post from Jamie Rubin puts it all together nicely. At the guts of it, you’re just telling Scrivener to look in a [...]

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