ScrivWatcher droplet, an easier live Scrivener preview

Note: The current (Lion-only) version of Marked in the Mac App Store has this functionality built in; this droplet is only useful for Marked users running on Snow Leopard.

I got the droplet for ScrivWatcher working, so you don’t need to run the script from the command line if you don’t want to. I made some further updates to the script¹, and the version on GitHub will stay in sync with this application as it develops, so you can choose to go either way.

Just unzip the download below and put the app in your Applications folder (or wherever). Then drop a Scrivener project on it and it will open the compiled file as a Marked preview and start watching. You can also launch the application and you’ll get a droppable window that you can drag Scrivener projects to, or put it in your Dock for easy access.

Changelog

1.3

• Script detects whether it’s running on the command line or in the droplet. If it’s on the command line, adds progress bar support for caching and concatenating.

1.2

• Error catcher for some XML parsing issues on more complex document structures
• Rewrote the whole system to cache textutil conversions and only update when the rtf version is newer than the text version. It can now handle files with many sections much, much faster.
• Turned off headline generation from page titles by default. If you want it back, you can edit the script inside the app bundle and set titles_as_headers to true. I’ll try to build a more external configuration for it soon.

1.1

• Watches project XML file so changes to sorting and order update the preview as well
• Names preview files based on project name to avoid overwriting other open previews
• Opens dragged document in Scrivener if it’s not already open