A Caveat When Saving DSE Projects

[jwjb]

I just love DSE and am finding it so helpful as I develop my latest story where it is helping me work through the developing story dramatics in a way I have never been able to heretofore and I just wish there was a way to import all of this directly into Scrivener for draft development instead of having to manually copy and pasting all of this information.

Well that is for another day so onto another topic, A Warning When Creating Gists by James R. Hull was a great post and really has saved me from disaster in not only successfully saving Gists, but also in successfully saving my DSE projects too and has helped me with the understanding of why some things are not saved when you think they might have been saved.

For example, I notice a number of things seem to not save, autosave, etc unless you actually quit out of DSE where I have not posted on this behavior before as I attributed it to the way the software was developed and documented, but on second thought after not seeing this in the documentation I thought it best to post this in case other new DSE writers come across the same thing working through their projects so will document the latest occurrence of this behavior in this vein.

That is, I noticed that changing my IC in ‘Players’ from ‘Complex’ to ‘Guardian’ was not reflected in all the places it should have been throughout the ‘StoryGuide’ and ‘Reports’ until I quit and restarted DSE.

It goes without saying my MO is to 'command + S" every time I make any change, however slight and have set ‘Prompt to Save every 5 minutes’ via ‘Dramatica Story Expert > Preferences > Files > Prompt to Save every 5 minutes’ just in case, but it is hard to know for certain when something is truly saved within DSE or not.

So henceforth, a best practice might be to quit and restart DSE whenever you have made a fair number of additions, edits, etc just to ensure they have been saved.

[jwjb]

Interestingly, even after quitting DSE a number of times, changing my IC in ‘Players’ from ‘Complex’ to ‘Guardian’ was not reflected in all the places it should have been throughout the ‘StoryGuide’ such as in ‘Character Synopsis’ below.

But it does change in ‘Reports > Standard Reports > All Characters’ correctly as below.

So I am not sure how to correct this except by just referring only to the ‘Reports’ generated reports and not the ‘StoryGuide’ generated reports.

Incidentally, my specs are below for your reference.

[keypayton]

Dear jwjb: This is backing up a little bit, in response to your statement, “I just wish there was a way to import all of this directly into Scrivener for draft development, instead of having to manually copy and paste all this information.”

Well indeed, there is such a “way”! By going to your DSE “Reports” section, and choosing the “All Illustrating” report option, you can view a report containing all Dramatica’s headings, as well as all the illustrations you have put in for the various parts of your storyform.

Then you can select all the text in that Report, copy it, and paste the whole batch into Scrivener!

OR, you can export the “All Illustrating” report (or any of the other reports) into a Word rtf file, and then copy and paste all your input from there to Scrivener in a single fell swoop!

As to your other issue (I guess with Apple’s El Capitan OS): I don’t have a clue on that; I use a much older Mac. Best Dramatica wishes,

Key

[jwjb]

Thanks @keypayton for your response in the Dramatica Technology forum which answers my Import Dramatica Story Expert into Scrivener question I posted in the Scrivener for Mac OS X Technical Support forum where I will cross post this response there as well for other DSE and Scrivener users.