| The Basics In this first part, we look at the basic features of Scrivener that you will be using most of the time. Get Oriented Main Interface Scrivener’s main interface comprises the following: • The list on the left is called the binder, because it acts as the project’s ring-binder, being where you file and organise all of your material. • The editor contains the text you are reading right now, and is where you’ll do all your writing. It can also show research documents, such as images and PDF files. • If you click on the “i” in the right of the toolbar (the strip of buttons at the top of the window), you’ll open the inspector. Th... The Binder Using the Binder The binder is the main navigation tool in Scrivener. You use it to access different parts of your project, as well as to create new sections and arrange them. (Note: we refer to each section in the binder as a “document”, but each document can contain as much or as little text as you like.) The basics are simple: • Click on a document to open it in the editor. • Click on the triangle next to a folder or group to show or hide (expand or collapse) its contents (subdocuments). •... The Editor The text you are reading now is contained in the editor. There are several ways to load a document into the editor, but the one you will use most often is to select a file in the binder, as you did to load this one. Scrivener’s editor can display a range of different file types, so let’s try loading an image: • In the binder, scroll down to the “Research” folder (you might need to expand it by clicking on the triangle next to it first) and then click on “Sunset”. • Once you’ve tested that out,... The Inspector Click the blue “i” icon on the right of the toolbar to open the inspector. The inspector will appear as a third pane on the right of the window, and it shows extra information associated with the document that you have open in the editor. At the top of the inspector you will see these buttons: # These buttons change what is displayed in the inspector. From left to right, they are: • Notes: The document synopsis and notes. • Bookmarks: Bookmarks associated with the document and project. • Met... Synopsis & Notes This is the synopsis. Label & Status At the bottom of the inspector are the label and status pop-up buttons. (This document’s label is “Blue” and its status is “To Do”.) Label and status are simply arbitrary tags that you can assign to a document. You set up the label and status tags you want to use in a project by going to Project > Project Settings… You might, for example, rename “Label” to “POV” (for Point of View) and use it to record the name of the point-of-view characters in a novel, so that you can assign a character to eac... Bookmarks Click on the Bookmarks button in the inspector header bar (the second icon). The Bookmarks pane allows you to store references to other documents in the project, on your hard-disk, or on the internet. To add a new bookmark, do one of the following: • Click the # or # button (depending on which version of macOS you are running) above the Bookmarks list. • Drag a document from the binder into the list. • Drag a file from the Finder into the list. • Drag a URL from a browser into the list. Sel... Metadata Click on the third button in the inspector header bar, the one containing the tag icon, to open the Metadata pane. Each document in Scrivener can be associated with different types of metadata. Which metadata you use, or whether you use it at all, is entirely up to you. General Metadata At the top of the Metadata pane is “General Metadata”. This contains the following: • Created Date and Modified Date: the dates on which the current document was created and last edited. • Include in Compile: i... Snapshots Scrivener’s Snapshots feature keeps older versions of your documents around for reference. To capture a version before embarking on a major edit of a document, select Take Snapshot (Cmd-5) in the Documents > Snapshots menu. Try that now (you will hear the sound of a camera shutter which indicates that the snapshot has been taken). Once you have taken a snapshot, you can edit your document safe in the knowledge that you can return to the older version whenever you want. Click on the “Snapshots” b... Comments & Footnotes Now we’ll look at the “Comments & Footnotes” pane—don’t worry about clicking on the button in the inspector header bar just yet, though. Click on the yellow highlighted text in the sentence below: This sentence has a comment attached. Note how the inspector automatically switches to the Comments & Footnotes pane, and the comment associated with the text gets highlighted. Next, click on the grey footnote directly below the comment in the inspector. This sentence has a footnote attached. See how c... Composition Mode Just you and your words with no distractions. Get Organised Scrivener’s main organisational and structural tools. Splitting the Editor View two documents alongside one another. Editor View Modes How to switch between the editor, corkboard and outliner, and how to view multiple documents as though they were a single text. The Corkboard The corkboard shows the immediate subdocuments of the selected document. To see this in action: 1. Split the editor again by going to View > Editor Layout > Split Horizontally (or using the button in the editor header view). 2. Click into the top editor so that its header view changes colour (to indicate that it has the focus). 3. Click on the “Draft” folder in the binder to load it in the top editor. 4. Make sure the corkboard is selected in the view mode control in the toolbar. Note how th... The Outliner The outliner allows you to see sections of the binder in more detail. It works like the binder, showing an indented list of documents that can be expanded and collapsed, but, unlike the binder, it can show synopses and other information—as the name suggests, it’s a great way of working with an outline of your manuscript. Let’s take a look at it: 1. Click into the upper editor pane (which should still show the corkboard) so that it receives the focus (its header bar using the system accent colou... Scrivenings The whole point of Scrivener is to make working on a long text easier by allowing you to break it up into smaller pieces. Sometimes, however, you will want to see how those smaller pieces fit into the greater whole. This is where “Scrivenings” mode comes in. There are two ways of entering Scrivenings mode: 1. Select a folder or group in the binder that contains text subdocuments and use Scrivenings mode to view all of the documents inside the folder as though they were a single text document. (... Get It Out There Section Types How to tell Scrivener what the different sections in your manuscript are. Compiling the Draft How to take all of the pieces of your manuscript and compile them into a single exported or printed document. Get Going Creating a New Project Phew! We’ve now covered all major features of Scrivener. If you haven’t done so already, then soon you are going to want to create your own project and get writing. Generally you will want to create a separate Scrivener project for each writing project. To create a new project: 1. Select New Project… from the File menu. This will open the project templates chooser panel. 2. Choose a project template from one of the categories (e.g. novel, screenplay, thesis). 3. Click “Choose…” to specify a l... All Set One last thing to note before I leave you to it: Scrivener auto-saves your work so you don’t have to worry about saving manually. Every time you make an edit to the project, Scrivener schedules a save, which will occur after a couple of seconds of inactivity. You can, however, force a save at any time by selecting File > Save (Cmd-S). And that’s it: you are now all set to start using Scrivener. If you want to go into more depth or explore a little more, look at the “Going Further” section. I rec... Going Further Dip into the topics in this part when you are a little more at home in Scrivener. Remember... Remember that you don’t need to read anything in this section to start using Scrivener—”The Basics” will get you up and running with everything you need to know. Just dip into this section whenever you feel like learning something else that you can do in Scrivener. Searching Learn about the various ways of finding things in Scrivener. Referring to More Documents Open documents in more splits and in other windows. Quick Reference Panels As well as being able to split the editor to view more than one document, you can open documents in their own windows, allowing you to have as many documents in a project open on screen as you want. We call these windows “Quick Reference” panels, because you can use them to open, check and edit documents without affecting the main window. Let’s start by opening this document in a Quick Reference panel so that we can keep it open while we open some others: 1. Click the “Quick Ref” icon in the to... Copyholders In “The Basics”, we saw that you can split Scrivener’s editor in two to view two documents alongside one another. However, each of the two editors also has a “Copyholder” associated with it. A Copyholder is a secondary editor that can be displayed inside an editor so that you can refer to another document. It is not a full editor in itself, in that it cannot display the corkboard, outliner or scrivenings modes; it can only show the content of a single document. With two editors open each showing... Writing and Editing Learn more about Scrivener’s writing tools. Styles Styles allow you to save and apply formatting to text. For example, you could create a “Block Quote” style with an indent and a smaller font than the rest of the text (Scrivener in fact provides a “Block Quote” style by default). Scrivener remembers the style associated with a section of text. This way, if you change the formatting of a style, Scrivener can update all text that uses that style to use the new formatting. Applying Styles To apply a style, do one of the following: • Select a style... Page View You can switch to page layout view to view your text on virtual pages in one of the following ways: • Click on the “View” toolbar item and select “Show Page View”. • Go to View > Text Editing > Show Page View in the main menu. Note that the pages you see on screen may not match what you see when the text is compiled for print or export. The concept of pages is largely meaningless in Scrivener, because you work on the different parts of your manuscript in smaller pieces and can completely chang... Revision Mode Revision mode allows you to use a different text colour while editing or revising your text, without having to change the colour again every time you click into a different part of a document. • To enter revision mode, select one of the colours (“First Revision”, “Second Revision” and so on) from the Format > Revision Mode menu. • You can set your preferred revision colours in the “Editing” pane of the Preferences). • In revision mode, no matter where you click in the text, when you start typ... Document Links Document links work much like web hyperlinks, except that they link to other documents in the project. To create a document link: 1. Select the text to which you wish to apply the text. For instance, try highlighting “document link” in the next sentence: ⁃ This is a document link. ⁃ (You don’t have to select text. If there is no selection, the title of the linked document will be inserted with the link applied to it.) 2. Either: ⁃ Go to Edit > Link to Document and choose the document you wi... Inline Notes When covering “The Basics”, we saw how we could add comments and footnotes to text that are displayed in the inspector. Another way of adding footnotes and comments is to insert them inline. The text of inline annotations and footnotes appears right inside your text (as opposed to inspector comments and footnotes, the text of which is hidden away in the inspector). Whether you use inspector or inline footnotes and comments is entirely up to you (you can even use a mixture of both). Inline footno... Setting Targets You can set three types of word and character count targets in Scrivener: 1. Draft target: the total number of words, characters or pages you wish to write in your manuscript. 2. Session target: the number of words or characters you wish to write during the current writing session. 3. Document target: the number of words or characters you wish to write in a particular document. Draft Target Anything you type in documents inside the Draft folder counts towards the Draft target. To set it: 1. ... Scriptwriting Mode Scriptwriting mode is available from Format > Scriptwriting > Script Mode (Cmd-8). When in script mode, the footer view will show information on the various available script elements. • Select Format > Scriptwriting > Script Mode - Screenplay from the main menu now. ⁃ The word and character count will disappear and you will see a pop-up menu appear on the right of the footer view saying “General Text” (this just means that the currently selected text isn’t recognised as a part of a screenplay)... Typewriter Scrolling By default, composition mode uses “typewriter scrolling” (you’ll be notified of this every time you enter composition mode until you tick “Do not show again”). With this enabled, newly-typed text will remain in the vertical centre of the screen so that you don’t have to crick your neck by looking down all the time. Typewriter scrolling works like this: • When you type text in a new document, when there is enough text so that the line you are typing on would be lower than the middle of the scree... Organisation Tools Using Collections, splitting and merging documents, and some more cool things you can do with the outliner and corkboard. Collections Collections provide a way of keeping different lists of binder documents around. There are two types of collection: 1. Arbitrary collections. You can add any documents you want to these and drag and drop to have them in any order. ⁃ Suppose you are reading through your manuscript and realise that a number of sections have problems in them that you are going to need to solve. You could create a collection called “Problems” and add any problematic documents to it. You could then open that collec... Using Bookmarks for Project Notes In “The Basics”, we learned about how Bookmarks can be used to store references to other documents. In this section, we’ll learn how to use them in combination with Quick Reference Panels as a powerful way of managing project-wide notes. Note: Be sure to read the section on Quick Reference Panels before reading this section! First, we’re going to create a folder in the binder that we’ll use to store project notes: 1. In the binder, select the “Research” folder. 2. Click the “new folder” button... Splitting and Merging Documents Splitting Documents Suppose you start out creating a single document for each chapter. Then, after your first draft, you realise that you want to break your chapters up into smaller sections, so that you can restructure more easily. No problem. To split the text of a document into smaller pieces: 1. Click into the text at the point you wish to split it apart. 2. In the main menu, go to Documents > Split > at Selection. The document will be split in two at the cursor point. Documents > Split > ... Corkboard and Outliner Tricks View Multiple Groups You aren’t limited to displaying the contents of only one group in the corkboard or outliner—you can show the subdocuments of several groups by “stacking” them. This is really easy to do: 1. Split the editor horizontally or vertically. 2. Click into the other editor to give it the focus. 3. Select “The Basics” in the binder. 4. Switch to corkboard mode if necessary. 5. Hold down the Command key and click on “Going Further” in the binder. 6. With the Command key still held down, click on “T... Control the Other Editor The outliner and corkboard are not only great organisational tools: they can also be used to navigate, just like the binder, using the “Selection Affects Other Editor” tool: 1. Split the editor if necessary. 2. In the other editor, load any folder and switch to either corkboard or outliner mode. Note the button containing an arrow pointing out of a box in the footer bar: # That’s the “Selection Affects Other Editor” button. Click on it now. You will notice that it changes colour, to indicate t... Freeform Corkboard Mode Scrivener’s corkboard is not like a real corkboard: on a real corkboard, you can pin cards anywhere; in Scrivener, the corkboard is a linear list of of a group’s subdocuments laid out in rows. However, there is a freeform mode, which allows you to place cards anywhere and experiment. You switch between freeform and regular modes using the button on the right of the corkboard’s footer bar: # (You can also enter freeform mode by going to View > Corkboard Options > Freeform.) Try this now: 1. Spl... Tracking Threads with Labels In “The Basics”, we covered how coloured labels can be assigned to documents, and how they can be used for anything. There’s a cool way of viewing labels that we didn’t cover when looking at the basics, though: labels can be displayed in threads on the corkboard view. The easiest way to understand how this works is to see it in action: 1. Split the editor if necessary. 2. In the other editor, load the “Writing and Editing” folder under “Going Further”. 3. Switch to corkboard mode. You should ... Getting Work In and Out Import, export and sync. Importing Files Importing Files To bring in writing and research from other apps: 1. In Scrivener’s binder, select the folder into which you wish to import the new files. Or, select the file under which you wish the files to be imported. (If you select a folder, the imported files will be placed inside it as the last items; if you select a file, imported files will be placed directly beneath it.) 2. Go to File > Import > Files… in the main menu. 3. In the file browser window that appears, select the files th... Exporting Files There are three ways of getting work out in Scrivener: 1. Compile the Draft folder into a single document for printing or exporting. 2. Print the contents of the current editor using File > Print Current Document… 3. Export individual documents from the binder—this is what we will look at here. Exporting allows you to get anything you have brought into Scrivener out again, or to export individual text files to popular word processor formats. To export: 1. In the binder, select all of the fil... Syncing with iOS Scrivener is also available for iOS so that you can write and structure while on your iPhone or iPad. The iOS version is available as a separate purchase from the App Store. Below we cover how to sync between platforms for those who also own the iOS version. If you don’t have Scrivener for iPhone or iPad, you can ignore this section. Setting Up Dropbox on Your Mac You need to store any projects you wish to sync on Dropbox. You can get a free Dropbox account from http://www.getdropbox.com. You’ll... Customising Projects How to create your own project and document templates. Custom Icons You can assign any file or folder a custom icon via Documents > Change Icon. Some of the documents in this project have custom icons assigned, such as the folders using yellow book icons and the “START HERE” document, among others. To see this feature in action, let’s try setting up another root folder in which we will store information about characters: 1. Lock the editor so that this document stays on screen (Ctrl-click in the header bar and select “Lock In Place”). 2. Select the “Research” ... Document Templates Note: Make sure you go through the Custom Icons section before reading this section, so that you have a “Characters” folder set up. One of the philosophies behind Scrivener is that it doesn’t force you into a particular workflow. You can write any sort of long-form text in Scrivener, setting up your project to fit the task at hand. Therefore, Scrivener doesn’t assume that everyone writing a novel (for example) uses character sheets to keep track of character information, or prompt sheets for inf... Project Templates Scrivener comes with a range of project templates that can be used as the basis for new projects. To create a new project from a template: 1. From the main menu, choose File > New Project… 2. In the templates chooser panel that appears, select a category in the sidebar. 3. Select one of the templates in the category. 4. Click “Choose…” Note that the “Blank” project type is not technically a template. “Blank” creates an empty project that is not based on a template. I created all of the proje... Scrivener's File Format Scrivener projects are saved on disk as files with the extension “.scriv” and are actually package files. A “package file” is a file that is really a folder, but which looks like, and is treated like, a file by the macOS file system. To see what I mean, try the following: 1. Ctrl-click on a .scriv file in the Finder. 2. Select “Show Package Contents” from the contextual menu that appears. The Finder now shows the innards of your .scriv package. Take a look inside the “Files/Data” folder, for i... Tips Some short tips that you can look at whenever you want. Default Formatting Changing the Default Formatting for New Documents You can change the default formatting used for new documents like this: 1. In the editor, set up some text with the formatting you want to use for all new documents, and ensure the cursor is inside it. 2. From the main menu, select Scrivener > Preferences… 3. Select “Editing” in the toolbar. 4. Select the “Formatting” tab. 5. Click the “Use Formatting in Current Editor” button. From now on, whenever you create a new blank document and start ... Inserting Images To insert an image into your manuscript: 1. Click into the editor and place the cursor where you would like the image to be inserted. 2. Go to Insert > Image From File… in the main menu. 3. Select the image file you would like to insert. Alternatively, drag an image from the Finder (or an image file from the binder) into the editor. Note that you do not use File > Import > Files… or drag images into the binder from the Finder to import images. Importing images into the binder creates an image... Chapter Numbering and Placeholders Sometimes you will want numbers to appear in the text whose value may change depending on the arrangement of the text. For instance, you might want to title a document “Chapter 1”, but if you move it later, it might become “Chapter 2”. For this, you can use “placeholders”. To insert an auto-number placeholder, go to Insert > Auto-Number in the main menu and pick a number type. A tag will be inserted into the text. For example, if you select “1, 2, 3, 4, 5…”, the following tag will be inserted: <... Editor Text Width By default, Scrivener’s editor uses a “fixed width”, so that when the editor is expanded beyond a certain width, the text will appear as a column in its centre. If you would prefer the text to take up the full width of the editor, you can turn this behaviour off via the Preferences: 1. Go to Scrivener > Preferences… in the main window. 2. Select the “Appearance” tab at the top. 3. Select “Main Editor” from the sidebar. 4. Deselect “Use fixed width editor”. Dark Mode If you’re running on macOS 10.14 Mojave or above, you will notice that Scrivener fully supports macOS’s dark mode. Scrivener’s interface will automatically switch to a dark appearance whenever you choose “Dark” for the “Appearance” in System Preferences. You can also determine Scrivener’s appearance independently of the System Preferences as follows: • From the Scrivener > Appearance menu, choose “Dark” to force Scrivener to use a dark appearance at all times, even when the system is using a li... Locking the Editor Sometimes you will want to navigate through the binder while keeping the document in the editor pinned in place. “Lock in Place” allows this: 1. Ctrl-click on the header view to bring up the header bar menu. 2. Select “Lock in Place”. The header bar will turn a different shade of grey, indicating that the editor is now “locked”. When an editor is locked, clicks in the binder have no effect on it. If you have split the editor so that two editors are visible on screen, clicks in the binder will ... Transcription Transcribing audio and media files in Scrivener is easy with the split view. Try the following: 1. Split the editor vertically or horizontally. 2. Click into one of the editors. 3. In the binder, select “ThisIsBuzzAldrin” inside the “Research” folder so that it loads in the editor. “ThisIsBuzzAldrin” is an audio file, so you won’t see much other than the play controls when you mouse over the editor. (Actually, that audio file is the beginning of the coolest phone message I ever picked up; sad... Focus on Dialogue Scrivener features a “Linguistic Focus” feature that allows you to fade out other text in the editor except for certain speech types. For instance, you can fade out everything except your adverbs, to check for overuse. You can bring up the Linguistic Focus panel by going to Edit > Writing Tools > Linguistic Focus… in the main menu. Then simply select a part of speech to focus on. This feature uses linguistic analysis tools that are built into macOS, but it also adds something else: dialogue focu... Name Generator Having problems coming up with character names? Scrivener comes with a name generator, available from Edit > Writing Tools > Name Generator… Printing You can print individual documents, the contents of the outliner, and index cards from the corkboard, by using File > Print Current Document… in the main menu. You can change various options pertaining to printing as follows: 1. In the main menu, go to File > Page Setup… 2. From the pop-up menu that says “Page Attributes” at the top, select “Scrivener”. Viewing Snapshots in the Editor In “The Basics”, we looked at creating snapshots and viewing them in the inspector. If you ever want more space to read through a snapshot, you can drag a snapshot from the list in the inspector onto the header view of the editor to load it there. Try this now: 1. Split the editor. 2. Take a snapshot of this document (Cmd-5). 3. Write some text below: ⁃ Type here: 4. Open the inspector and switch to the snapshots pane if necessary. 5. Drag the snapshot you just took from the list in the i... Writing History Scrivener keeps track of how many words and characters you write every day. To see a breakdown of how many words you’ve written each day and month for a particular project, go to Project > Writing History… Dragging in the Binder & Outliner By default, when you drag items around in the binder or outliner, you can drop them on other items as well as between them. Dropping “on” an item places the dropped document inside the document it was dropped on, as a subdocument. Holding the Option key down while dragging restricts this behaviour so that you can only drop between documents—this can be useful when you want a little more accuracy. Drag Text to and from Binder Drag Text to the Binder You can create new documents from sections of text in the editor as follows: 1. Select some text in the editor. 2. Click on the text and hold to begin a drag. 3. Drag the text into the binder. A new document will be created containing the dragged text. Drag Text from the Binder You can insert the text of a binder document into another binder document like this: 1. In the editor, open the document into which you want to insert the text. 2. In the binder, locate the do... Adding Project Bookmarks A quick way of adding documents to the project bookmarks list is by dragging them from the binder and dropping them onto the red “Bookmarks” toolbar icon. Opening Bookmarks and Links By default, clicking on a document link opens it in the other editor; double-clicking the icon of a bookmark from the inspector list opens it in a Quick Reference panel. You can change this behaviour and determine how you would like links and bookmarks to be opened as follows: 1. In the main menu, go to Scrivener > Preferences… 2. Click on “Behaviors” in the toolbar. 3. Select “Document Links” in the sidebar. You will be presented with a number of options that allow you to customise how docum... Keywords When assigning keywords to documents from the keywords panel, you can simultaneously assign the groups to which they belong by holding down the Option key while dragging. Try this: 1. Open the inspector and select the Metadata tab, ensuring the Keywords pane is visible. 2. Open the keywords panel (Project > Show Project Keywords). 3. Click on the triangle next to “Characters” in the panel to reveal the names of some characters. 4. If you were to drag one of these character keywords to the in... Index Card Images The index card in the inspector can be used to show an image instead of a synopsis. If an image is used instead of a synopsis, then the image will also be used on the corkboard. This could be useful if you have a document about a character and want a photo to represent the character on the corkboard, for instance. To use an image in the index card for a document: 1. Open the Inspector. 2. Select the notes pane so that the synopsis and notes are displayed. 3. In the synopsis header bar, click ... Multiple Books in One Project Generally, Scrivener is set up to assume that each project contains a single book (or writing project): when you compile, you compile the entire Draft folder into a single manuscript. However, you don’t have to work this way. Perhaps you are working on a series of books that rely on the same research, for instance—in that case, you might want to set up a project to contain multiple books. Here’s how: 1. Inside the Draft folder, setup a subfolder for each book. 2. Treat each subfolder inside th... Name & Address in Templates Some project templates can populate title pages with your name and address. You can set your name, address and other author information in the Preferences: go to Scrivener > Preferences and enter your details in the “Author Information” section of the “General” pane. Saving UI Settings with Layouts If you find yourself opening and closing the binder and inspector frequently, or spending a lot of time setting up the corkboard or outliner view to appear in the right place for a particular task, check out the Layouts feature: From the main menu, select Window > Layouts > Manage Layouts… This allows you to save the state of the interface and quickly return to it at a later time, either via the layouts panel or the Window > Layouts menu. Layouts can also be accessed through the View button whic... Scratch Pad and Clippings If you have to gather a lot of research in other applications and find yourself doing a lot of copying and pasting into Scrivener, the Scratch Pad and clippings features may come in handy. Scratch Pad The scratch pad is a panel that can be called up from any other application using a keyboard shortcut that you set in the “General” pane of the Preferences (the default shortcut is Shift-Cmd-Return). You can paste or type notes into it and send them to one of your open projects either straight away... Backing Up Although Scrivener is designed to be as stable as possible, and its auto-save should ensure your work is constantly saved, with important writing projects it’s always a good idea to make regular backups, saved to either cloud services or external hard drives, so that your work is always safe no matter what happens. Automatic Backups By default, Scrivener will back up a project every time it is closed, and up to a maximum of five backups of each project will be kept around (with newer backups rep... Resetting the Tutorial If at any time you decide you want to wipe all of your edits and restore the tutorial to its original state, follow these steps: 1. Ctrl-click or right-click on the project title right at the very top of the tutorial project window. A menu will appear showing the path to the project. 2. Click on the second item in the menu, which will be the folder in which the tutorial project is stored. This will open a Finder window. 3. Close the tutorial project in Scrivener. 4. In the Finder window that... |