Does anyone have any ideas about how to get autodata from Scrivener? (There’s no Scrivener API as far as I know.) I haven’t given this a lot of thought, and I figured I’d ask before reinventing the wheel.
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Is it wordcount that you care about? Can Scrivener automatically publish a document to a secret URL like Google Docs does?
Not sure. I don’t think so.
It can sync to RTFs in Dropbox (and I’m doing that anyway), so that would work too.
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Oh, right, so the answer is yes, thanks to Dropbox, since you can get a shareable link to any file in Dropbox.
Now we just need to fix up scribeminder.com (which is high on our list to do for other reasons) and I think you’ll be golden! Tagging #UVI and cc’ing @apb.
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I would love this. But I think the real answer is no, not automatically, not if you are trying to track actual word count.
The Scrivener files stored in the Docs folder of any single project include references and notes, so checking the rtf’s in the folder isn’t really a measure of the words that you wrote. Here’s a snapshot:
3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and 14.rtf are my actual “scenes” but 11 and 14 are heavily duplicated (as I revise by copying and editing). The total files, even if you just get the numbered rtf files, is not really indicative of what I wrote that day, I don’t think.
I was thinking about setting something up to write a quick file to Dropbox though - there’s easy to use export presets and you can specify that it should only include text in the “manuscript” folder, so your notes and cut-and-paste websites etc don’t get counted. This would be particularly good as I could count “finished words” that made it to my manuscript folder, rather than everything I considered and noted (a personal requirement, because I fast draft like a demented monkey with a casio).
There’s an inbuilt “project statistic” thing that counts words in total (limited to manuscript or all files) and words this session. Now I’m wondering if there’s some way of getting to that info.
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Love the way you’re thinking here. It would also be pretty amazing to have this Just Work for writers who would be intimidated by setting up automatic exports and scripts and such.
So here’s an idea to possibly get @apb excited about for scribeminder:
If you point scribeminder to an rtf or pdf file it extracts the plain text and counts just those words. If you point scribeminder to a whole Dropbox directory it counts all the words in all the files with the specified file extensions. The “with the specified file extensions” part might be important if you have, say, both rtf and pdf versions of the same document in the folder.
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Not really a solution, but Emacs’ Org-mode is an awesome tool many compare to Scrivener, and (shameless plug) my Emacs Beeminder client already has some Org-mode integration.
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Can you do an export of Scrivener through Applescript maybe?
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You’re right. I forgot about all of the notes, etc. It’s quick enough to
enter it manually, so it’s not a big deal. I’ve just been trying to find an
autodata source here and there to scale back the total friction on my
(far-too-many-but-I’m-not-gonna-stop) goals.
Thanks for brainstorming this with me.
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