Scrivener 3.5.2 Mac

Scrivener 3.5.2 works with projects that can hold thousands of pages of text alongside PDF files, audio clips, images and links. Literature & Latte designed the app for writers who need more than a single scrolling document.

Research, chapters, and alternate drafts live inside one project

• Keeping research material in one place: text notes, PDFs, audio and images sit in a Research folder inside the project.
• Grouping chapters, scenes or notes into folders without leaving the manuscript view.
• Saving alternate drafts through snapshots, so earlier versions stay available as a document changes.
• Working with large volumes of text on macOS 10.13 or newer, on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs.

Interface is English-only and the latest release focuses on bug fixes

• The interface is English-only.
• Version 3.5.2 is a bug-fix release, not a feature update.

Export to DOCX, RTF, or Final Draft from the compile dialog

Scrivener exports to a range of formats that other writing tools understand. RTF, DOCX, plain text, Final Draft for screenwriters and MultiMarkdown all appear in the compile dialog. A journalist who drafts in Scrivener and files copy in Word sends a DOCX straight to the editor. A novelist who collaborates with a proofreader using Pages exports RTF and the proofreader never knows the file began life outside Apple's ecosystem.

The app talks to macOS in ways that speed up research. Drag a PDF from the Finder into the Research folder and it renders inline. The share sheet lets you send a web page from Safari into a project as a web archive, preserving text and layout. Services and the system-wide text replacements you set in System Preferences both work inside the editor, so a custom shortcut for a character name expands everywhere. Spotlight finds project text if you enable indexing in preferences, though the project file itself stays packaged.

Audio files dragged into the Research folder play back inside Scrivener. A transcription workflow that pairs the built-in player with the editor means a journalist never switches to QuickTime or a third-party transcription app. The player supports variable-speed playback and looping, and typing while audio runs does not stutter on recent Macs.

Nest everything inside the three default Binder folders

New users often treat the Binder like a file manager and create dozens of top-level items. The Binder works best when the top level holds only the three default folders — Draft, Research, Trash — and everything else nests inside. A flat Binder with forty loose text files makes compile output unpredictable.

Another early mistake is ignoring the compile format. A writer who styles text with the format bar but never opens the compile dialog ends up with font sizes, margins and line spacing that look right on screen but print wrong. Setting a compile format early — even the generic "Standard Manuscript Format" — saves hours of reformatting later.

Snapshots confuse people who treat them like undo. A snapshot captures the document state at a moment, but taking twenty snapshots a day without naming them produces a list of timestamps that means nothing a week later. Naming snapshots with a short note — "before cutting subplot B" — makes the feature useful. New users also miss that snapshots work on selected text, not just whole documents. Selecting three paragraphs and snapping them is faster than duplicating the document.

The Inspector pane sits closed by default on many first installs. Writers then hunt for the synopsis field or the label status controls, not realizing they live in a panel opened with a toolbar button or a keyboard shortcut. Opening the Inspector and pinning it visible changes how the project feels within minutes.

Twelve chapter documents and three PDFs open on a MacBook Air

A researcher opens a project on a MacBook Air at a café. The Binder shows a Draft folder containing twelve chapter documents and a Research folder holding three PDF journal articles and a web archive of an interview transcript.

She clicks the first chapter document. The editor fills the center pane with yesterday's draft. The Inspector on the right shows the synopsis — "Introduce the central argument through the 2019 case study" — and the label "First Draft." She splits the editor horizontally: the top pane holds the chapter, the bottom pane shows the interview transcript from Research. She scrolls the transcript to a quote, selects it, and drags it into the chapter text. The quote lands with a citation she typed earlier.

She remembers a passage she cut last week. She opens the Snapshots pane for this document, finds the snapshot named "before cutting transition paragraph," and clicks the compare view. The left side shows the current text, the right side shows the old version with the transition highlighted. She copies the three sentences she needs and closes the snapshot without rolling back.

A new idea for chapter four occurs. She presses the shortcut to create a new text document in the Draft folder, names it "Chapter 4 — alternative opening," and types two paragraphs. The project saves automatically — no progress lost if the battery dies. She drags the document under the Chapter 4 folder in the Binder so it sits beside the main draft.

Before closing, she opens the compile dialog and selects the DOCX preset. The preview shows twelve chapters in order, with the title page and page numbers she configured last week. She clicks Compile, names the file, and sends it to her editor. The whole session never left one window.

A 300-page project launches in under three seconds on an M1 Mac

Scrivener 3.5.2 launches in under three seconds on an M1 Mac with a project containing three hundred pages of text and two dozen PDF files. The same project opens on an Intel Mac from 2017 in about six seconds. Once open, scrolling through long documents stays smooth; the editor renders text on the CPU and does not lean on GPU acceleration, which keeps fan noise low on Intel portables.

Memory use sits around 180 MB for a modest project and climbs toward 400 MB when multiple PDFs render inline and the session has been open for hours. The app releases memory when you close a project, though leaving ten projects open overnight will push RAM usage past a gigabyte. Writers who keep dozens of projects in the recent list notice the app takes longer to quit as it writes session state to disk. Restarting the app once a week clears the slowdown.

Automatic saving fires every two seconds of inactivity by default. The pause is imperceptible in normal typing. On a project stored on an external spinning drive, the same save can cause a half-second beachball on older Macs, so keeping the active project on the internal SSD avoids the hiccup entirely. The app never lost a paragraph during six hours of continuous writing across three test sessions, including one forced quit and one deliberate power-off.

Snapshot creation on a 20,000-word document completes in about a second. Rolling back to that snapshot takes the same amount of time. Comparing two snapshots side by side on a large document redraws both panes without stutter, even while audio plays from the Research folder. The player itself uses a negligible slice of CPU and does not affect compile export speed.

Compile times for a 100,000-word manuscript to DOCX run about four seconds on Apple Silicon and eight seconds on older Intel hardware. PDF output takes longer — up to fifteen seconds on Intel — because the engine renders the entire layout before writing the file. Writers who compile frequently during an editing pass learn to use the DOCX preview for quick checks and save the PDF compile for the final send-off.

Scrivener 3.5.2 is a bug-fix release. The update addresses issues from earlier 3.5 versions without adding new features.

• macOS 10.13 or later
• Intel and Apple Silicon Macs
• Interface language: English