Custom Template Icons

When creating a project template, you can either choose an icon from a preset list or provide your own custom icon. This icon will represent the template in the New Project templates chooser panel.

If you intend to distribute your template to other users and want to provide a custom icon, you must ensure that it works well on different displays. This can be complicated on the Mac, since Retina displays use artwork twice the size of regular displays. If you provide only a single image, the icon may look fuzzy on Retina displays (or too big on regular displays if you provide a Retina-sized icon).

Follow the steps below to ensure that your custom icon works well on all displays:

1. Select a preset icon to use as the basis of your custom icon. For instance, you may wish to choose the "Blank" icon as a blank canvas.
2. Click on "Save Image..." and select a save location.
3. Navigate to the location in the Finder where you saved the image. If you selected one of the built-in images (such as "Blank" or "Manuscript"), a folder will have been created containing two .png image files. The first is the large image intended for Retina displays, and the second is the smaller image intended for regular displays.
4. Open both images in your image editor software and customise them to better represent your template.
5. Once all of your changes have been saved into the .png files, return to Scrivener and select "Choose..." from the bottom of the icon pop-up menu in the Save As Template panel.
6. Choose the folder containing the two .png files that you have edited. Scrivener will combine the two .png files into a single image that will work correctly on both Retina and regular displays.

Note that you can also select single images when using "Choose..." rather than a folder containing differently-sized images, but this will result in icons that do not look good on all machines (although this is perfectly fine if you don't intend to share the template). When a single image is selected, it will be resized to 128x128 pixels to match the other template icons. When selecting a folder, no automatic resizing will be done, as it is assumed that the images inside the folder are intended for different displays.

When a folder is selected containing images for different displays, Scrivener will incorporate them in order of file name, assuming the first is the larger image for Retina displays and the second is the smaller image for regular displays. Retina display icons should be 256x256 pixels at 144dpi, and regular display icons should be 128x128 pixels at 72dpi. You do not need to worry about any of this if you start by exporting one of the preset icons, however, as the files created using "Save Icon..." already have all of this set up correctly for you.