Take Control of Scrivener 2 (1.2)

Kirk McElhearn

This book is for sale at http://leanpub.com/tco-scrivener-2

This version was published on 2016-08-23

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© 2016 Eyes of the World Limited

ISBN for EPUB version: 9781615421343

ISBN for MOBI version: 9781615421343

Read Me First

Welcome to Take Control of Scrivener 2, version 1.2, published in August 2016 by TidBITS Publishing Inc. This book was written by Kirk McElhearn and edited by Michael E. Cohen, with help from Tonya Engst.

Literature & Latte’s Scrivener is an innovative program for writing fiction, non-fiction, screenplays, and other long-form texts. This book helps you start writing your masterpiece with Scrivener, presenting the program’s basic concepts and features, and showing you how to get the most out of the program.

Copyright © 2016, Eyes of the World Limited. All rights reserved.

Thanks to Keith Blount at Literature & Latte for making this such an enjoyable project.

Updates and More

You can access extras related to this ebook on the Web (use the link in Ebook Extras, near the end; it’s available only to purchasers). On the ebook’s Take Control Extras page, you can:

Download any available new version of the ebook for free, or buy any subsequent edition at a discount.

Download various formats, including PDF, EPUB, and Mobipocket. (Learn about reading on mobile devices on our Device Advice page.)

Read the ebook’s blog. You may find new tips or information, as well as a link to an author interview.

If you bought this ebook from the Take Control Web site, it has been added to your account, where you can download it in other formats and access any future updates. However, if you bought this ebook elsewhere, you can add it to your account manually; see Ebook Extras.

Basics

To review background information that might help you understand this book better, such as finding System Preferences and working with files in the Finder, read Tonya Engst’s free ebook Read Me First: A Take Control Crash Course, available for free on the Web or as a standalone ebook in PDF, EPUB, and the Kindle’s Mobipocket format.

What’s New in Version 1.2

Version 1.2 of this book was published in August 2016 shortly after the release of Scrivener 2.8 and the release of Scrivener for iOS. It has major additions and minor changes:

Scrivener for iOS is now available. (Finally.) You can now write in Scrivener on an iPhone or iPad and sync projects between the desktop and iOS versions of the app. I cover Scrivener for iOS in Meet Scrivener for iOS.

The Scrivener interface has been updated for OS X 10.11 El Capitan, and I’ve replaced all the screenshots to match.

Scrivener for Windows is now at version 1.9.5. A number of Mac features that were not available in the previous Windows version have been added. My Windows Note sidebars reflect the current features for this version.

I’ve made a handful of additional small changes to update the book for 2016, plus it was published using a newer template, making it match other current Take Control titles and giving it an improved layout in the EPUB and Mobipocket versions.

What Was New in Version 1.1

Version 1.1 of this book was revised for Scrivener 2.4, which Literature & Latte released in February 2013. Version 1.1 also added details about the Windows version of Scrivener, and Windows users should pay attention to the “Windows Note” sidebars that describe key differences.

The most important changes were these:

Scrivener can import text files with extensions other than .txt, such as Markdown files with .md or .markdown extensions. A setting in the program’s preferences allows you to tell the program which extensions to accept. (See Import Text Files.)

You can view Web pages in Scrivener’s editor by dragging them onto the Header Bar above the Editor pane. This is a good way to view Web pages in Scrivener without importing them into your project. (See View Web Pages without Importing Them.)

Mac users can add two new types of files to the Binder: photos, taken with a built-in camera on a Mac, and audio notes, recorded by speaking into a microphone attached to your Mac. (See Create New Files and Folders in the Binder.)

I described a new method of displaying a QuickReference window for any item in your Binder in Use Quick Reference to Peek at Files.

Scrivener supports the Mac’s Notifications feature for project targets. You can also have Scrivener tweet your daily session goal. (See Set Targets.)

On a Mac, Scrivener can automatically take snapshots of your project when you manually save it by pressing Command-S. (See Take Snapshots.)

Note: To see a full, detailed list of all the changes to Scrivener, go to the Change List page for Scrivener for Mac.

Introduction

Writers have a nearly endless choice of tools. The number of word processors, text editors, and other text applications available today is staggering. But most of them are designed for linear writing, where you start at the beginning and write until you get to the end.

Scrivener is designed with the assumption that most writers of long-form works—novels, non-fiction books, theses, screenplays, and so on—don’t write that way. Scrivener provides a unique environment that frees you from the constraints of beginning, middle, and end. If you like, you can start at the end of your work, then write the beginning, and then fill out the middle. As you write, you can easily move scenes, sections, and chapters, until your work is exactly as you want.

In addition, Scrivener provides an easy way to store items such as research material, character sketches, and setting information in the same project file as your writing, giving you instant access to all this material.

You may find that Scrivener can replace the current app you use for writing and provide powerful features that your app doesn’t offer. Welcome to the text app that may become your essential writing tool!

In this book, I look at Scrivener from the point of view of a writer about to embark on a project. This project could be fiction or non-fiction; it could be a screenplay or a collection of short stories. I show you how to easily start working with Scrivener, leverage its powerful organizational and text management features, move ahead as you write, and then forget that you’re using the program. For, after all, when writing, what counts most is the words. Your tool is important, because it is the scaffolding around which you create, but you need to focus on your text and let your tools get out of the way.

In order to present a realistic project in the examples used in this book, I have chosen Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, the classic novel of obsession and the quest for redemption.

Scrivener Versions for Mac and Windows

This book discusses Scrivener 2.8 on the Mac, along with a chapter about Scrivener for iOS.

Scrivener was initially a Mac-only program, and it remained so for many years. But Windows users, jealous that they had no similar tool, convinced Scrivener’s developer to work on a Windows version. The first Windows version saw the light of day in 2011, and the current version, as of this writing, is 1.9.5.

Windows Users: Look for “Windows Note” Sidebars!

The Windows version of Scrivener will be behind the Mac version for a while, so if you are using the Windows version, you may find that some features mentioned in this book are not available. (The Windows version will eventually have all the same features.) A handful of sidebars in this book note features that aren’t available in Windows. Bear in mind, however, that the vast majority of Scrivener’s features are the same in both the Mac and Windows versions.

All the screenshots in this book come from the Mac version, but the Windows version looks essentially the same.

One thing to note is that I present Mac keyboard shortcuts in this book. For the most part, these shortcuts use the Command key. In Windows, you’d use the Control key instead. So, to save a project in Scrivener, you’d press Command-S on a Mac, but Control-S in Windows.

Also, when I mention accessing Scrivener’s preferences to change the way the program works for you, in Windows, you need to choose Tools > Options, not Scrivener > Preferences.

For more information about the Windows version, check the Scrivener for Windows page on the Literature & Latte Web site.

Note: You can view the Scrivener manual from within the program by choosing Help > Scrivener Manual. Since the Scrivener manual is in flux, and chapter and section numbers may change, all references to the manual in this book include chapter names. Check the manual’s table of contents for the specific items I refer to.

Scrivener Quick Start

Scan the Quick Start below for an overview of what you can learn in this ebook. It tells you how to use Scrivener for all types of writing: fiction, non-fiction, screenplays, short stories, and more.

If you are new to Scrivener, I suggest that you read about learning the program’s environment, brainstorming and organizing, and how to start writing in one session. After that, read the rest based on your interests and needs.

If you’ve been using Scrivener for a while, the early chapters offer you an overview of the program’s essential features for preparing to write, and help you feel more comfortable with the program’s interface. Even if you’ve been using Scrivener for a while, you might find these chapters useful. Have a look through them, and then pick from the remaining topics to hone your knowledge.

For all readers, before you get too far into your masterpiece I especially recommend that you read Take Snapshots of Your Texts, since it could help you sail around leviathan-sized problems.

Learn the environment:

Become acquainted with Scrivener’s writing environment in Call Me Scrivener, where you can Understand the Scrivener Philosophy and explore the program visually in Discover the Scrivener Window.

Use the right structure:

Scrivener includes a number of templates for writing different types of texts: novels, short stories, academic documents, screenplays, poetry, and more. See Create a New Project.

Brainstorm and organize:

The left-hand Binder sidebar offers opportunities to brainstorm and organize (see Understand the Binder and Collections), and the powerful and flexible Corkboard and Outliner give you even more brainstorming and organizing capabilities:

With the unique Corkboard you can brainstorm and organize ideas, then switch either to writing or outlining. Read Use the Corkboard.

The Outliner integrates perfectly with your writing; you can switch back and forth between the outline and the full text. See Use the Outliner.

Start writing:

With the Scrivenings feature, you can write your document in small sections, yet view it as though it were a single document, so writing and editing can flow more smoothly. View and Edit Multiple Files: Scrivenings View explains this feature.

You can move and reorganize documents (chapters, scenes, etc.) by drag and drop, rearranging large chunks of your project in seconds. Learn how to do this in Reorganize the Binder.

Avoid distractions:

Many of Scrivener’s interface elements can be hidden, to give you more screen space for writing or to reduce distractions. Read Show and Hide Interface Elements.

Composition Mode is a full-screen view that blocks out everything other than your words. You can write without distractions from menus, buttons, windows, icons, or other programs that may lurk behind your text. See Work in Composition Mode.

Try a do-over:

Snapshots allow you to make periodic backups of different versions of your text. You can go back and see what previous versions contained, and restore those sections that didn’t sound so good at first, but read better now. Take Snapshots of Your Texts tells you how to use this feature.

Go further with Scrivener:

Scrivener has many more powerful features that help you write. Some of these help you to Work with Revisions, Use Collections to Organize the Binder, Use Notes and Comments, and more.

Share and Synchronize Your Project by, for example, emailing it to a colleague or using Dropbox to sync it between computers.

Use Scrivener in iOS:

The Scrivener for iOS app reproduces most of the features of the desktop app on an iPhone or iPad, and it syncs your projects so you can work anywhere. See Meet Scrivener for iOS and Sync with Scrivener for iOS.

Print and export:

When you’ve finished writing, you’ll want to get your project out of Scrivener in order to either print out a draft or to save in a different format that you can share with others. Compile Your Work for Print and Export covers this essential process.

Call Me Scrivener

Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no knowledge of writing Mac applications, and wanting a word processor that would be more appropriate for his creative writing and a PhD thesis, Keith Blount thought he would delve into programming and see whether he could learn how to write the program he wanted.

After much hard work, Scrivener was born.

Note: I discuss Scrivener for iOS later in this book. Even if you only plan to use the iOS version, you should read through all the information in this book. Scrivener works in a very similar way on all platforms where it is available, so it is important to understand its basic principles as they are deployed on the desktop.

Understand the Scrivener Philosophy

Neither a word processor nor a text editor, Scrivener presents an environment designed to help writers approach long-form works in a non-linear manner. Instead of starting at the beginning and writing until the end, a writer working with Scrivener can start writing anywhere, then move texts around easily until they are where they belong. She can plan, then write, and then plan some more, then write more. She can store research notes and documents, do some more writing, then tweak her outline.

The writer can then move sections around, change the order of chapters, and exercise a constant give and take between the visible part of the writing process—getting those words down on virtual paper—and all the work that goes on in the background. This can be done with the different elements—texts and research—in the same window, providing access to all the parts that combine to make up a work without switching back and forth between programs.

Scrivener’s philosophy can be summed up in a few basic points (summarized from the first chapter of the program’s manual, Philosophy):

Permit the author to work with formatted text: The writer should be able to use many formatting features—different fonts, character styles, paragraph styles, and so on.

Separate formatting from content: The user should be able to completely reformat the text on export or for printing, if so desired, without affecting the original, working with one font and size while writing, and exporting a document with different formatting.

Break out of the rigid “file” mentality of most word processing programs: It should be possible to create and view a project as individual “files” that combine to make up a text, and to combine files of varying lengths. Thus, for instance, a chapter could be viewed as a whole, or each scene could be viewed individually.

Provide a useful outline feature: It should be easy to view the project as an outline and use drag and drop to restructure the it. Moving between the outline and the text itself should be fluid.

Bridge the gap between the big picture of an outline and the actual text with a synopsis element: There should be a synopsis linked with each part of a project, which can be viewed with other synopses to get an overview of the project as a whole.

Give easy access to background and research material: The software should be capable of storing and displaying common research documents, because writers do not just use text, they also refer to images, Web pages, recorded interviews, and other media.

Offer flexible viewing options: The user should be able to view more than one document at the same time—for instance, the end of one chapter alongside the beginning of the next, a character sketch alongside a scene in which that character appears, or a research document alongside the writing it is being used to support.

Note: You can view the Scrivener manual from within the program by choosing Help > Scrivener Manual.

Note: You can read the history of Scrivener on the Literature & Latte blog.

Writers Talk: Jeff Abbott

Scrivener is a brilliant tool for serious writers. Scrivener lets you write your scenes in the order you please, then easily move and shift them around. I’ve written all the scenes for a particular character’s point of view, all in a row, and then Scrivener lets me painlessly reorder them in the manuscript to create heightened drama and suspense. It also simplifies working across a large manuscript when you are rewriting: you can easily find and access every chapter that is from a particular point of view, or contains a keyword or tag.

Scrivener is terrific for keeping all your research in one centralized place: images, Web links, articles, videos, and more. It was clearly designed by a writer, for writers.

Jeff Abbott writes breathtaking thrillers. His latest book (January, 2016) is The First Order.

Create a New Project

Scrivener doesn’t require you to follow any particular workflow, so it’s up to you whether you start writing immediately and structure your work later, or whether you plan your work in detail before you start putting down words. No matter which route you choose, though, the first thing you need to do is create a new project with Scrivener. In Scrivener, choose File > New Project to see the Project Templates dialog (Figure 1).

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Figure 1: Use the Project Templates dialog to either choose a pre-formatted template or start with an empty project.

Scrivener offers six types of templates in the left column of the Project Templates dialog:

Getting Started: This offers three items: an Interactive Tutorial, quick access to the Scrivener User Manual (you can also access both of these from the Help menu), and a link to YouTube, where you can view a number of video tutorials.

If this is your first time working with Scrivener, you might want to try out the interactive tutorial, which creates a new project file full of useful information, and which provides a detailed overview of Scrivener’s different interface elements. You can go through the various text files in order and follow the instructions to learn the basics of working with Scrivener; however, I suggest you read through the rest of this chapter first, at least, before you undertake the tutorial.

Blank: This is an empty project, with no pages, folders, or other presets. Use Blank to start from scratch, but the other templates may give you a better idea of how to work with the program if you’re new to Scrivener.

Fiction: There are templates for novels and short stories in this category.

Non-Fiction: The templates in this category are designed for academic writing and general non-fiction.

Scriptwriting: This category contains templates specially formatted for movie screenplays, stage scripts, comics, and more. If you choose a Scriptwriting template, be sure to read Use Script Mode, later in this chapter.

Poetry & Lyrics: If you wish to write poetry that flows trippingly on the tongue, use the single template here that is designed for writing in verse.

Miscellaneous: This category contains templates for lectures and recipe collections.

Select a template, and click Choose. In the standard Save dialog, enter a name for your project, choose a location for it, and then click Create.

Your project appears in a new window. I explain the parts of the window in Discover the Scrivener Window.

Note: The Templates section of the Project Management chapter of the Scrivener manual has more information about templates.

What’s Inside a Scrivener Project?

Within a Scrivener project, you see a number of items, as I explain in Understand the Binder and Collections. In the Mac’s Finder, however, a Scrivener project appears as a single icon; a Scrivener project is a special type of folder called a package on a Mac. You don’t see it as a folder, but if you Control-click (right-click) it in the Finder and choose Show Package Contents, you can see what it contains (Figure 2).

Windows Note: In Windows, a Scrivener project is in a folder with a .scriv extension, and you can see any files it contains by opening that folder and navigating its sub-folders.

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Figure 2: Here are the contents of my Moby-Dick project after I had worked on it for a while.

You don’t need to know about these files, but may find it reassuring to know that, for example, the Docs folder contains RTF files for the different elements in the Binder, as well as your character sketches, settings, and more. Should the project become corrupted, there is no single, monolithic file that could be lost, but rather a group of files that you can recover. Given the way that Scrivener manages projects, it is unlikely that such corruption will occur.

Scrivener and Auto-Save

If you’re like me, you may have a reflex to often press Command-S as you work to make sure that you never lose any important thoughts in case of a crash. This is a habit I developed back in the day before programs saved files automatically. Given the stability of some software, I still do it often. (There, I just did it again…)

With Scrivener, once you’ve saved your new project, you can pretty much forget about manually saving your work. By default, Scrivener saves your project after 2 seconds of inactivity. (You can adjust this time in the program’s General preferences.) This means you can write and not worry about losing your work.

Scrivener can also automatically create backups of your work in a dedicated folder—see Back Up Your Projects Automatically.

Use Script Mode

Scriptwriting is a special type of writing, not only because of the way a script is written, but also because of special formatting requirements for screenplays and scripts. Scrivener is, indeed, fully adapted to the needs of this type of writing, with a number of features and formatting tools to help those who write scripts and screenplays.

If you use a template in the Scriptwriting category, you’ll find that not only is the appropriate formatting applied, but Scrivener switches to Script Mode. Script Mode turns on a number of special features that make scriptwriting easier. (You don’t have to choose a scriptwriting template to use Script Mode; you can turn this mode on at any time by choosing Format > Scriptwriting > Script Mode - Screenplay. When you turn on Script Mode, it affects only the document you’re currently using.)

Scrivener’s Script Mode reproduces many features found in programs that are designed specifically for scriptwriting. For example:

Scrivener has specific formatting settings for each element in a script, such as Scene Heading, Action, Character, Dialog, and Shot. (You can change these settings in the Format > Scriptwriting > Script Settings dialog.)

When you press Enter and type, the text format changes to that required for what is generally the next element in a script.

You can use the menu in the Footer Bar to switch among script elements. Open the menu by either clicking it or pressing Command-Shift-Y. Once it is open, choose a format either with the pointer or by pressing the corresponding letter shown in the menu. For example, once the menu is open, pressing T picks the Technical Directions element. So, pressing Command-Shift-Y, T would switch the text at the insertion point to Technical Directions.

Another way to switch among script elements is to choose from Format > Scriptwriting > Change Element To. The Change Element To submenu also lists keyboard shortcuts for the various elements, such as Command-Option-2 for Technical Directions.

You can import from and export to programs such as Final Draft, which is the industry standard for writing scripts and screenplays.

In general, the majority of Scrivener’s features apply to scriptwriting as well as to other texts, but features related to the special formatting required for scripts and screenplays become available when you are in Script Mode.

Note: If you write scripts and screenplays, you should certainly read the Scriptwriting chapter of the Scrivener manual, which discusses these features in detail.

Discover the Scrivener Window

Now that you’ve created a project, the best way to get to know Scrivener is to take a quick look at the program’s main window. As you view the different sections of the window, you’ll get a better idea of what the program offers. Figure 3 shows the elements of the Scrivener window with a project underway.

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Figure 3: The main Scrivener window has five elements: (1) the Toolbar, (2) the Format Bar, (3) the Binder, (4) the Editor, and (5) the Inspector. Each element is detailed in the text just ahead.

Note: Skip ahead to Show and Hide Interface Elements to learn how to toggle Scrivener interface elements on and off.

Let’s look at a few key aspects of each Scrivener window element.

Toolbar

The Toolbar holds buttons and controls that let you create new items, change views, and perform other tasks. You can customize which items—buttons and controls—are visible in the Toolbar by choosing View > Customize Toolbar. There are more than 50 items you can add to the Toolbar, either in addition to the default items or in their place. You can also show only icons, only text, or both.

Format Bar

The Format Bar, which appears below the Toolbar, provides buttons and menus that you use to format the text you see in the Editor.

Binder

The Binder is where you organize the files that make up your project: your texts, research notes, character sketches, place settings, and more. I discuss the Binder in Understand the Binder and Collections.

Editor

The Editor is where you do your real work: your writing. To access the Editor, select an item in the Binder sidebar at the left and then click the leftmost segment of the View Mode switcher on the Toolbar.

Inspector

The Inspector stores notes and metadata, and displays some information you add to a project, such as synopses and keywords. The Inspector itself has several views, which you access by clicking the small buttons in its header. I look at the Inspector in Use the Inspector.

Dive Right In!

You’ve got a general idea of what Scrivener looks like, and, if you wish, you can Write Your Masterpiece now, discovering the program’s features as you work. The next chapter, though, describes how Scrivener can help you plan your project and organize ideas and research, so you may want to skim the next chapter quickly to get an idea of what’s available, and come back to it later once the first blush of inspiration has passed.

Heading Out to Sea

Before going on, here’s a brief excerpt from the first chapter of Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby-Dick to whet your appetite for writing.

But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd’s head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies—what is the one charm wanting?—Water—there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

Plan Your Project

Scrivener is designed so you can jump back and forth between planning and writing, but many writers like to do basic preparation before they write. In this chapter I discuss several important aspects of planning your Scrivener project:

In order to do outlining, visual brainstorming, and otherwise organize your thoughts, you’ll want to use Scrivener tools such as the Binder (and its Collections), the Corkboard, and the Outliner. In Know the Key Organization Tools, immediately following, I explain each of these options. Also, in Record Project Notes, I tell you how to take notes at the project level.

To import content into your new project, you have many options, which I detail in Add Files and Other Content. You can even take a file you’ve started writing in another program and work with it in Scrivener.

Note: If you want to skip ahead to Start Writing Your Manuscript, you can come back to this chapter later. Scrivener is ideal for those who want to write without setting things up, as well as for those who want do detailed planning before they start putting down words.

Know the Key Organization Tools

Scrivener’s power comes from providing three ways for you to take a high-level look at your work: the Binder, the Corkboard, and the Outliner. As I explain in this section, you can work in one mode, switch to another, add more information and ideas, then switch to another mode. Some people may never want to use the Corkboard, and others may swear by it; some may use only the Binder, while others may make detailed outlines. Whichever way your pleasure tends, you’ll find an efficient way to plan your work with Scrivener’s powerful tools.

As you read about these three tools, you may find it useful to start thinking about which one will work best for you. The Binder is always there for you in the left sidebar of the Scrivener window, giving you immediate access to your work and enabling certain types of organizational activities. Collections—which appear in the Binder sidebar—give you new ways to consider and experiment with your project. However, you may also want to spend time in the Corkboard and Outliner, with their respectively visual and hierarchical approaches to the same information.

Depending on whether you prefer to outline or to just dive into writing, Scrivener lets you work the way you want. And if you decide to change your approach as you advance in your project, you can do that too.

Understand the Binder and Collections

Most of the organizational work you perform in Scrivener involves the Binder, the sidebar at the left of the app’s window. Organizing, planning, restructuring, and exporting your project all depend on the arrangement of files in the Binder. The contents of the Binder vary depending on the template you choose when you create a project.

Two examples of the Binder can be seen in Figure 4; this is what Scrivener displays when you choose the Blank template or the Novel template.

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Figure 4: This is the Binder when you choose the Blank template (left). Other templates, such as Novel (right) have more containers.

The Binder holds three main containers (called “folders” although they don’t always look like folders): Draft, Research, and Trash. These folders help you organize your project files as follows:

Draft: The Draft folder is for your actual writing. With the Blank template, this folder is named Draft, but other templates may have other names: in the examples in this book, which use the Novel template, this folder is named Manuscript (Figure 4, above). You can, of course, change the name if you wish—see Naming Items in the Binder, a page or so ahead.

After the project is created from the template, the Draft folder contains an Untitled file; if you start writing in the Editor right after creating a project, your text is stored in that file. You can add more files to the Draft folder whenever you need—one file per chapter is an easy way for Scrivener neophytes to think about it, but to fully embrace the Scrivener philosophy and gain from its powerful features, you may want a more granular breakdown that starts with ideas and later grows into a logical structure (don’t worry, I explain all this later). You can also add sub-folders, and you can reorganize these files and folders in the Binder.

The Draft folder is important because its contents are used to Compile Your Work for Print and Export. Although you can create other folders and store text files in them, you must eventually move those files to the Draft folder (no matter what name you’ve given it) before compiling to include them in your final document.

Note: The Draft folder can contain only text files (and other folders); you cannot store media files inside it. The text files you store in the Draft folder can, however, contain embedded images.

Research: The Research folder stores your research documents. You can add text files, PDFs, graphics, Web archives, audio files, video files, and more. As with the Draft folder, you can create sub-folders and move files from folder to folder.

Trash: The Trash acts like the Trash in the Mac Finder or the Windows Recycle Bin. To move an item to the Trash, click a file or folder to select it and then do one of the following: click the Trash button in the Toolbar; drag the item to the Trash folder; or press Command-Delete. Items remain in the Trash until you Control-click (right-click) the Trash folder and choose Empty Trash (or choose Project > Empty Trash).

Naming Items in the Binder

You can change the names of any of the items in the Binder, whether they are files or folders you have added, or whether they are items that are part of a template. To rename an item, double-click it to select its current name, type a new name, and press Return.

Once you’ve named an item, the name will stick around in the future.

When you use the Novel template, the Binder not only contains more default folders and files than the Blank template, but it also has several folders and files with special icons (this is a reason to use a template) (Figure 4, above). For example, the Novel template names the Draft folder Manuscript and it adds folders named Characters and Places, which are designed to store notes about characters and settings. The Front Matter folder contains folders for three different kinds of output from a novel project: manuscript, ebook, and printed paperback. These folders, in turn, contain documents you can use for the novel’s title page, copyright page, and dedication. The Template Sheets folder contains specially formatted files you can use to store information about the novel’s characters and settings. Finally, the first file in the Binder, Novel Format, is an introductory text that describes the template; you can delete it once you’ve read it.

So, depending on your project, you’ll have different items in the Binder, and while they may have different icons and names, they are all just folders and files.

Add Items to the Binder

You may already want to add a number of files to the Binder, if you’ve started planning your work, for example, and have chapter titles or ideas already set down. To add a new file to the Binder, select the folder where you want to store the file, click and hold the Add button in the Toolbar, and choose New Text.

Tip: If the Add button isn’t your cup of tea, you can choose File > New Text, or press Command-N, or click the plus button at the lower left of the Scrivener window. Or, select an existing item in the Binder and press Return.

As you work, you may want to add folders and sub-folders to your Binder to better organize your writing and your research. For example, you may want to separate items in your Research folder for different characters, locations, historical events, and so on. To add a new folder, choose New Folder from the Add button’s menu in the Toolbar.

Tip: Here are more ways to create a new folder: choose Project > New Folder; press Command-Option-N; click the New Folder button in the Footer Bar below the Binder.

Note: I’ve covered the basics of the Binder here, but for more details, flip ahead to Reorganize the Binder, several chapters ahead.

Use Collections to Organize the Binder

Another way of organizing and accessing files in the Binder is to use Collections. Collections allow you to view items stored in various places in your Binder without your having to re-arrange your Binder to see them together.

Collections appear on a special type of tab that displays at the top of the Binder sidebar. Collections can be shown or hidden. To view them, choose View > Collections > Show Collections or click the Collections button in the Toolbar. You’ll see something like Figure 5, without the New Collection collection.

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Figure 5: Collections appear at the top of the Binder sidebar.

Scrivener has two kinds of collections: Search and Standard.

Search Collection

Search collections store the results of a search, as their name suggests. Type something in the Search field at the right of the Toolbar, and the results of that search appear in the Binder. You can click a file in the search results to view it; your search terms are highlighted in each file. When you click the Binder tab, you go back to the Binder, but you can click the Search Results collection at any time to return to the most recent search results, as long as you haven’t cleared the Search field.

To save a search so you can re-use it later and not have it replaced by the most recent search settings, click the magnifying glass in the Toolbar’s Search field and choose Save Search as Collection. This creates a new collection that acts exactly the same as the Search Results collection; when you click it, you see the current results for the saved search terms. You can use a saved search to repeatedly search for, say, specific terms or keywords, or find where a character or location appear in your manuscript.

To change the name of a search collection, double-click its current name, enter a new name, and press Return.

You can convert Search collections to standard collections (described next): click a Search collection, then choose View > Collections > Convert to Standard Collection. You can then rename the new collection to help you recall what it contains, and you can refer to it at any time.

Standard Collection

Standard collections can store anything you want. You can move items to them from the Binder, and they stay together, but the originals remain in their original locations in the Binder. If you modify an item in a collection, the changes also appear in the Binder. You can even put the same Binder item into more than one collection. (If you are familiar with aliases on the Mac, or shortcuts in Windows, think of Standard collections as storing aliases or shortcuts of files and folders in the Binder.)

For example, you might want to add several chapters or scenes to a collection to remind yourself to go back and revise them later. You can also use a Standard collection to rearrange files—chapters or scenes, for example—to read through them in a different order to decide if you want to change the flow of your text.

Here’s how to create a standard collection and add content to it:

Click the plus button in the Collections bar at the top of the Binder.

Click the Binder tab so you can see your Binder contents.

Drag any files from the Binder onto the New Collection tab.

You can also select multiple Binder items first and then click the plus button to create a collection containing the selected items.

To view your new collection, click its tab. To change the collection’s name, double-click its name, type a new name, and press Return.

Managing a Search or Standard Collection

To delete a file from a collection, within the collection’s tab, select the file, click the minus button in the bar above that collection, and then click OK. The file is removed from the collection, but not the Binder.

To delete an entire Search collection or Standard collection, click its tab and then click the minus button in the Collections bar at the top of the Binder sidebar.

Note: Collections offer a number of other interesting uses. See the Using Collections section of the Setting Up the Binder chapter of the Scrivener manual for more tips on using collections.

Organize Your Ideas with the Corkboard and Outliner

Not only can you organize chapters, scenes, sections, and other items in the Binder, as I discuss above, but two tools—the Outliner and the Corkboard—give you additional ways to brainstorm, outline, and rearrange your ideas.

Changing Views

You can switch to Outliner or Corkboard view by clicking a button in the View Mode switcher on the Toolbar. The View Mode switcher (Figure 6) switches between Standard view, Corkboard view and Outline view.

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Figure 6: Scrivener’s View Mode switcher in the Toolbar. (If you’ve selected multiple items in the Binder, the switcher is labeled Group Mode and the icons are slightly different.)

To change views, you can also use keyboard shortcuts, pressing Command-1, Command-2, or Command-3, respectively, or you can choose these views from the View menu. (I discuss these views in View and Edit Multiple Files: Scrivenings View, Use the Corkboard, and Use the Outliner.)

Use the Corkboard

Many writers use index cards to record notes and ideas, and they may pin them on a corkboard to organize them. Scrivener’s Corkboard is a virtual version of this age-old technique.

Don’t think of a Scrivener index card as a file that appears in the Binder. Instead, think of it as a virtual index card clipped to a file in the Binder, like paper-clipping a real index card to a sheet of paper. Although you can use index cards in a variety of creative ways, the core purpose of a card is to store a brief summary of a file, or what you want a file to contain. That way, you can work with the card as a stand-in for the entire file. The card has a title at the top and a file synopsis in its body.

The Corkboard is ideal for brainstorming. Create some index cards, jot down some ideas, flesh them out, then rearrange them. As your project progresses, you can move any of these cards—and the files that they represent in the Binder—to reflect changes in your narrative.

Adding New Index Cards

Let’s walk through adding a new card to the Corkboard:

If the Inspector is not visible at the right of the Scrivener window, toggle it on by clicking the Inspector button at the right of the Toolbar.

Click a folder to select it, and then click the middle segment of the Group Mode control on the Toolbar (see Changing Views, earlier) to show the Corkboard.

Add a new index card: click the plus button below the Corkboard.

Enter a title, character name, location, or other information in the highlighted title section of the new card. While the card may look small, you can type as much as you want on that title line. However, given its limited visual space, it’s best to keep the text concise. (You can change display options to view more text on each card or to show more cards. See Tweaking the Corkboard Display.)

Press Tab, or click the body of the index card (double-click if the card isn’t selected), and then enter more information. For example, if the title line bears the name of a scene, you can describe what will transpire in the scene here.

Notice that the text that you’ve typed appears in the Synopsis section of the Inspector, at the right.

If you like, you can apply a label to a card and set its status:

Apply a label: You can use a label as a reminder for a type of scene, to indicate main or secondary characters, or for other information. A label appears as a color block on the upper-right of a card, as you can see on three of the cards in Figure 7 just ahead. To add a label, Control-click (right-click) the card and choose Label from the contextual menu, or choose Edit from the Label submenu to add your own label. Alternatively, with the card selected, you can choose a label from the Label pop-up menu in the Inspector.

Assign status: You assign a status either from the contextual menu or the Inspector mentioned in the previous bullet point. You can choose an existing status, or create your own by choosing Edit.

Now that you’ve added a card, you can add another card either by clicking the plus button in the Footer View beneath the Corkboard or by pressing Command-N. You can add as many ideas as you want by creating and filling out cards.

Figure 7 shows index cards for my Moby-Dick project. Each card has a title, and then a sentence or two describing the chapter.

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Figure 7: The Corkboard here contains index cards for five chapters.

Figure 7 shows two basic, but key, effects of using the Corkboard:

In addition to creating index cards on the Corkboard, Scrivener has created corresponding files in the Manuscript folder in the Binder.

In the Inspector at the right, in the Synopsis section, Scrivener shows the full synopsis text for the currently selected card—that card has a blue outline in the figure.

Note: Corkboard synopses don’t appear in the main text of your files; they appear only on the index cards or in the Synopsis section of the Inspector.

These basic points highlight a key feature of Scrivener: while the program provides different ways of entering and manipulating text, they are all related, and different views often show the same content in different ways.

Working with the Corkboard

Figure 7, slightly earlier, shows index cards that are part of a manuscript. You can also view the Corkboard when other folders in the Binder are selected. For example, click Characters, then start writing character sketches on index cards. Click Places, and start writing about locations or settings. All index cards are equal, so you can drag any of them to any of your folders, just as you can drag files from folder to folder. (However, you cannot place media index cards—those that display images, videos, and other non-text items—in the Draft folder.)

Here are some important tips for working with the Corkboard:

To move the insertion point among cards, press Tab to advance from a card’s title to bottom section, to the next card’s title, and so on. Press Shift-Tab to move backwards. To edit any title or bottom section immediately, double-click that area.

When the Corkboard is displayed and you click a file in the Binder, Scrivener presents you with an Editor view so you can start working on that file. When you do this, and you also have the Inspector visible, you can still see the synopsis you wrote on the index card for that file.

If you have a multi-level outline (see Use the Outliner, ahead a page or so), the Corkboard displays only the topmost level of the item selected in the Binder; the Outliner, however, can display as many levels as you want.

Keeping Track of Tasks with the Corkboard

You can use the Corkboard as a kind of to-do list for tasks you need to accomplish for your project, but that are not directly related to the writing.

Create a new folder in the Binder (click and hold the Add button in the Toolbar, and then choose New Folder), click the Corkboard view button, and add index cards for any tasks you need to do.

You can move the cards around as you need, set statuses and labels to indicate priorities, and delete the cards when you have completed the tasks they represent.

Linear vs. Freeform Corkboard

Figure 7 (earlier) shows the Linear Corkboard, where the index cards snap to a grid. You can also use a Freeform Corkboard, which allows you to move cards around as you please. To switch between the two modes, use the Corkboard Mode switcher beneath the Corkboard. Click the button on its left for Linear Mode, and the button on its right for Freeform Mode.

In Freeform Mode, Scrivener doesn’t update the Binder and Outliner each time you make a change, since the program assumes that the positions of the cards are not final. To tell Scrivener to update your project, click the Commit Order button to the left of the Corkboard Mode switcher in the Footer View.

In Linear Mode, the Corkboard and Binder are always in sync. When you move a card, the order of the files in the Binder changes. The Binder shows files in an order corresponding to a left-to-right, top-to-bottom order in the Corkboard. In other words, the first file in the Binder is the top-left index card; this is followed by the other index cards on the same row. The leftmost index card on the next row then follows, and so on.

Windows Note: The Freeform Corkboard isn’t available in the Windows version of Scrivener.

Tweaking the Corkboard Display

You can set a number of options for how the Corkboard displays cards. To do this, click the Corkboard Options button, located beneath the Corkboard; an options pane appears (Figure 8).

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Figure 8: Tweak the Corkboard display options to fit the way you use this feature, and to the amount of screen space you have.

Note: Many Corkboard display options are self-explanatory, but consult the Corkboard Options section of the Project Planning chapter of the Scrivener manual if you want extended details.

Use the Outliner

You probably saw this coming. Since the Binder and Corkboard are in sync, it stands to reason that the Outliner should be just another way of viewing and organizing the same content. Click a folder to select it in the Binder, then click the rightmost button in the Group Mode switcher on the Toolbar (see Changing Views); Scrivener displays the Outliner view for the contents of that folder (Figure 9).

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Figure 9: Outliner view. Compare this with Corkboard view in Figure 7 to see how these different views are related.

Figure 9 shows the same project in the same state as in Figure 7; comparing the two figures shows you how the Corkboard and Outliner are related. The Outliner shows the same information as your index cards (in the Title and Synopsis column), and, in addition, shows Label and Status information in two other columns. If you have a long outline and only want to view the titles of your index cards—which, here, become the headers of your outline—click the Hide Synopses button in the Footer Bar.

Here are some other ways to manage and use the Outliner:

Add a new outline item: Click the plus button to add a text file to the outline, as well as to the Binder, in the currently selected folder, or click the Add Folder button in the Footer Bar to add a folder to the outline and the Binder.

Move outline items: As you might expect, you can drag items in the Outliner to change their order, and, as you do so, the changes are reflected in the Binder and Corkboard.

Arrange outline levels: When you drag an outliner item onto another item, it gets demoted to a child beneath the top item, and an expansion triangle appears so you can show or hide sub-heads.

Show and hide outline columns: Click the View Options button at the far right of the Outliner’s header. In the pop-up menu that appears, you see a number of columns you can add or remove. These include such columns as Modified Date, Created Date, Word Count, Keywords, Target, and more.

By creating outliner items and dragging them around, you can make an outline with many different levels, from main concepts or chapter heads, to sub-sections, scenes, or other types of breakdowns that fit the way you write.

Import Outlines from Other Programs

There are many programs you can use to make outlines, including Literature & Latte’s mind-mapping visual outliner, Scapple, and The Omni Group’s OmniOutliner Pro, a flexible program with a number of features that are great for complex outlines.

Scapple and OmniOutliner Pro, like many other outliners, can export files as OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) files. You can import a file in OPML format in Scrivener by choosing File > Import > Files. Scrivener dissects the file and creates a full hierarchy of folders and files based on your headers, sub-headers, and notes; it does this in the Binder, as well as in its Outliner and Corkboard.

If you don’t want the imported outline to be the main structure of your project, make a new folder outside the Draft folder (Project > New Folder), name it something like “Outline,” select that folder, then import the file. The imported structure is stored in that folder, and your main manuscript is not affected, but you can consult your outline at any time from the Binder.

Scapple is a visual outliner that creates mind maps, outlines that display connected graphics containing text. If you use Scapple, you can export its files in OPML format, and import them in Scrivener to create new projects.

Writers Talk: Michael Marshall Smith

Creatively, Scrivener is where I live. I now start every project—whether a novel or screenplay or blog or set of generic notes or quotations—in a Scrivener file. At first I just create files as and when required, and jot things down in them. As a need for order emerges (or a structure suggests itself), I’ll start to move things around, putting them into folders or sub-files. You can develop your own workflow, and switch the files and information around as the whim or need strikes you.

Personally I try to keep my hierarchies no more than two levels deep, as I get lost with anything more—but sometimes I break that rule and nest the information as richly as it needs to be: hyperlinking between the files until it comes close to being a cloud of ideas. The ability to work on a folder of files as if they’re one big document—while keeping them as separate entities in reality—is killer.

There’s so much power in the software, and yet it doesn’t force you down any particular road. You can set the interface to be so complicated it looks like you could run the space shuttle out of it, or so sparsely that it presents like nothing more than a word-processing document. It’s worth taking the time to explore all the Binder options, too. The ability to set up collections of otherwise unrelated documents can be great for breaking out of the structure of your notes, and for finding new links between them. I also really like being able to hoist the binder, allowing you to focus in on an particular area of the project before bouncing back out for an overview.

Writing is a psychological battle between the page, the information you need to put there, and yourself. For me, there are two key things that make a piece of software a boon rather than a barrier to the process. The first is the ability to create order out of chaos. The second is being able to return to that chaos when you need it—by shifting your relationship to the notes and files and snippets, keeping them fresh and in flux. Scrivener performs both tasks, brilliantly.

Michael Marshall Smith is the author of many popular fantasy and horror novels, short stories, and screenplays.

Record Project Notes

In addition to using the Research folder to store different types of files, Scrivener offers you a way to record notes that are saved not in the Binder but in a separate note pad. This note pad is especially useful because you can have it visible at all times, whether you are viewing an item from the Binder, the Outliner, or the Corkboard.

You might use Project Notes to store notes that are unrelated to specific scenes, characters, or settings. You can also use Project Notes to save snippets of text—names, phrases, or paragraphs—that you plan to refer to throughout your project.

You have two options for viewing Project Notes:

In a separate window: To display project notes in a separate Project Notes window, choose Project > Project Notes (Command-Option-P). Figure 10 shows what this window looks like.

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Figure 10: The Project Notes window can be visible regardless of what item you are viewing in the main Scrivener interface.

In the Inspector: Above the Inspector, ensure that the Notes pane is enabled by clicking the Notes button. Then, choose Project Notes from the Document Notes pop-up menu within the Inspector.

Note: To take notes for Scrivener overall or to take notes when you are working in another application, you can Use the Scratch Pad. I explain how later in this chapter.

Add Files and Other Content

While you may do much or all of your writing in Scrivener, you may also use other programs for specific types of preparatory work. In this section, I describe several methods of moving content into Scrivener:

Import Text Files into your manuscript: By “text” I mean files that are textual in nature—you can import plain text files as well as files from several popular word processors and more.

Import Research Files: You can also import files that you’ll use for reference while writing, and your choices go far beyond just text files to graphics, movies, and more.

Use the Scratch Pad: Unlike the Project Notes function described earlier in this chapter, the Scratch Pad is for notes that apply to all your Scrivener projects. You can import a Scratch Pad note into an individual Scrivener project.

Use Services to Add Text to Scrivener: The Mac version of Scrivener includes several services, making it easy to move text from any services-savvy application to Scrivener.

Import Text Files

Scrivener can import text files in a number of formats that you can then edit and integrate into your project. The program supports the following text file formats:

RTFD: Files created with, say, TextEdit or other Mac text programs. These are Rich Text Files that also can include images.

RTF: Rich Text Files can be created by any of a number of apps.

DOC and DOCX: Document files in Microsoft Word format. TextEdit and Pages on the Mac, for example, can create these kinds of files as well.

TXT: These are plain text files. The Mac version of Scrivener allows you to choose which types of text files you can import, by adding their extensions to the Plain Text Import Types tab of the Import/Export preferences. For example, if you work with Markdown files, you can add their .md or .markdown extension to be able to import them into your project.

FDX: These are files created by Final Draft, a screenplay writing program.

OPML: Files that use the Outline Processor Markup Language, such as those created by Omni Outliner.

To import a text file do the following:

Click a folder in the Binder to select it.

Choose File > Import > Files.

Select the file in the dialog that appears, and then click Import.

Scrivener converts the file to RTF format and adds it to your project; you can work with it just like the files you directly create in your project.

Note: If you import a text file using .fountain markup (a syntax used to format screenplays in plain text files), Scrivener recognizes it and imports it as a script document. To learn more about Fountain, read this TidBITS article: Formatting Screenplays with Fountain.

Import Research Files

Scrivener is designed to store not only your writing, but also the files that you use for research. You’ll certainly have noticed in the various screenshots presented so far that Scrivener’s Binder contains a folder named Research. This folder is intended to be a receptacle for any text files, graphics, PDFs, videos, music files, HTML files, or Web archives that you want to consult as you work.

To import files to your Research folder, do this:

Click the Research folder in the Binder

Choose File > Import > Files.

Select the file in the dialog that appears, then click Import.

Imported text files are converted to RTF format, but other files are added in their original format. Once files are imported into your Research folder, you can access them by selecting them.

You view text files, PDFs, and Web archives in Scrivener’s Editor: click one to select it in the Binder, and it displays in the Editor (Figure 11). If you select an audio or video file, a playback bar will appear at the bottom of the Editor.

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Figure 11: The Research folder here contains an audio file, a photo, a PDF, a video, and a Web archive. Scrivener displays Web archives as Web pages, and can display many other types of files in their native formats or play back their content.

Note: One of Scrivener’s most valuable features for working with research documents is the capability to split the Editor pane and view both a text file and a research file at the same time. I discuss this in View Your Work Differently.

View Web Pages without Importing Them

The Mac version of Scrivener lets you view Web pages without importing them into your project. Just drag a URL from a Web page or a text file onto the Header Bar above the editor. (If this isn’t visible, choose View > Layout > Show Header View.) When you’ve finished viewing the Web page, either click the back arrow in the Header Bar, or click a file in the Binder.

Import and Split Files

Not only can Scrivener import many kinds of text files, but it also has a unique Import and Split feature that helps you import longer files that you have written in other programs.

Say you have a manuscript with chapter headers that you wrote in Microsoft Word and you want to create a Scrivener project from this file. Here’s what you do:

Go through the Word file and add a special character (such as #) before each chapter header. (If the file already has double lines or page breaks between chapters, but nowhere else, then this step isn’t necessary.)

In Scrivener, choose File > Import > Import and Split.

Tell Scrivener which character you have used to separate sections. (If your document uses, say, double return characters to split sections, you can press Return twice in this field.)

Choose the file and click Import.

Scrivener imports the file and splits it at the section markers you have made, creating a new file in the Binder for each section, using the order in which they appear in the original file.

Use the Scratch Pad

The Scratch Pad (Figure 12) stores notes in a floating panel that appears above all other Scrivener windows, independent of the project you are working on.

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Figure 12: The Scratch Pad is available regardless of which project you have open.

You can access the Scratch Pad any time Scrivener is running, even when another application is in the foreground. To open the Scratch Pad initially, choose Window > Show Scratch Pad. You can store multiple notes, and you can send their contents to a project by choosing it from the Send to Project pop-up menu.

Note: See the Scratch Pad Panel section of the Gathering Material chapter of the Scrivener manual for more on using the Scratch Pad.

Note: To store notes within Scrivener on a per-project basis, you can Record Project Notes (described earlier in this chapter).

Use Services to Add Text to Scrivener

The final tool set you use to organize your ideas and plan your projects is a set of services that Scrivener provides. These services allow you to add text to a Scrivener project when you’re working in another application. Say you’re copying a quote from a PDF file, or a few paragraphs of research material from a Web page. Using a Scrivener service, you can add the text you need without having to copy, switch to Scrivener, then paste the text.

Windows Note: Services are a Mac-only feature; they are part of the Mac operating system itself.

Services are a feature whereby applications can add features that display both in a Services submenu of each application menu (for example, Finder > Services), and in a contextual menu when you Control-click (right-click) an item (Figure 13).

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Figure 13: Scrivener’s services in a contextual menu.

Note: If you don’t see the Scrivener services in the menu, go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts and select Services, then turn them on in the Text section of the Services panel.

To use a service, select some text or a graphic, Control-click (right-click) your selection (or choose application menu > Services) and then choose the service you want to use.

With Scrivener, you have access to two versions for each of three services:

Make New Clipping: This makes a new text file in the active project using the selected text. If your project does not have a Clippings folder, one is created. When you choose this service, a dialog asks you to enter a name for the clipping. You can later move the clipping files into, say, Research folders or other locations in your Binder.

Append to Current Text: This pastes the selected text at the end of the Editor window of the currently selected file. If the file is not editable (if it’s, say, a PDF, Web archive, or a graphic), Scrivener will ask if you want to create a new clipping.

Append to Current Notes: This appends the selected text to the active file’s Document Notes field. The Document Notes field appears in the Inspector.

In addition to these three services are three others, bearing the same names, but with the word Unformatted at the end. These services paste the text but strip all formatting (font, size, etc.), so the pasted text takes on the formatting of the item to which it is pasted.

Service Limitations

Services do not work from within all applications, and, when they do work, not all applications support them in the contextual menu. For example, Microsoft Office applications do not support services; Bare Bone’s text editor BBEdit supports them from the BBEdit > Services menu, but not from the contextual menu. Apple’s Safari Web browser supports them, but, as of this writing, Mozilla’s Firefox supports them only from the Firefox > Services menu. So if you plan to use services, check out which applications you use where they will be available.

To better understand services and how they work, see this useful TidBITS article: OS X Hidden Treasures: Services.

Write Your Masterpiece

If you’ve been following along in this book, you know your way around the basic Scrivener interface (see Discover the Scrivener Window), you know how to Create a New Project and you’ve learned how to Plan Your Project. Now it’s time to start writing. With Scrivener, you can shift between planning and writing at any time, moving from ideas to sentences and paragraphs, and then back again.

This chapter helps you get comfortable with Scrivener’s writing environment so you can use the program efficiently. You can read through the topics in this chapter to learn about the most important ways to prepare to write in Scrivener. I show you how to use Scrivener’s powerful Editor, how to adjust the program’s environment to suit your preferences, how to use different views, and much more.

Show and Hide Interface Elements

In Figure 14, you can see that the Scrivener window contains several elements. (Refer to Discover the Scrivener Window, earlier, if you need basic help with understanding this window.)

When you get down to serious writing, you can hide many of these elements, reducing the window to a minimal display, as in Figure 15. This flexibility allows you to choose what you see when you work. For example, if you need to work with your outline, the files in the Binder, or metadata, you can display those elements as needed. If you don’t need them, and want to focus only on text, you can do that as well. You can alter the window’s display whenever like.

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Figure 14: The main Scrivener window has several elements that can be hidden if they get in your way while writing: (1) the Toolbar, (2) the Format Bar, (3) the Binder, (4) the Inspector, (5) the Header View, (6) the Footer View. The Editor is the section containing text in the middle of the window.

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Figure 15: The Scrivener window in its barest form.

Here’s how to show and hide each of these elements:

Toolbar: If you find the Toolbar distracting, you can hide it by choosing View > Hide Toolbar. You may prefer to hide it while you are writing, and show it again (View > Show Toolbar) when you are manipulating items, formatting text, or preparing to print or compile your project. If you work on a small screen, you may find it especially useful to gain more space by hiding the Toolbar.

To see the Toolbar but use as little space as possible, choose View > Customize Toolbar, then choose Text Only from the Show menu at the bottom of the window. This displays the names of buttons rather than their icons.

Format Bar: You can hide and show the Format Bar by choosing Format > Hide Format Bar (Command-Shift-R), and Format > Show Format Bar.

Binder: You can hide or show the Binder by choosing View > Layout > Hide Binder (Command-Option-B), or View > Layout > Show Binder, or by clicking the Binder button at the left of the Toolbar.

Inspector: You can hide or show the Inspector by choosing View > Layout > Hide Inspector (Command-Option-I), or View > Layout > Show Inspector, or by clicking the Inspector button at the right of the Toolbar.

Header or Footer View: You can even hide the Editor’s Header or Footer View (View > Layout > Hide Header View, and View > Layout > Hide Footer View), and gain even more space.

Tip: If you like to change Scrivener’s display, and find that certain display settings are useful at certain times, you can even save these settings. Scrivener calls these “layouts,” and you can save and apply different layouts by choosing View > Layout > Show Layouts. See the Layouts Panel section of the Navigating and Organising chapter of the Scrivener manual for details.

Work in Composition Mode

You have seen above that you can alter Scrivener’s display to suit your needs, showing and hiding different elements of the program’s window. But one of Scrivener’s most useful interface elements, Composition Mode, removes everything from your screen, other than your text and a background. It also hides any other windows that are open on your monitor, preventing you from being distracted so you can focus entirely on your text. Figure 16 shows Composition Mode on a 12-inch MacBook.

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Figure 16: Scrivener in Composition Mode.

To enter Composition Mode, click the blue Compose button on the Toolbar or choose View > Enter Composition Mode (Command-Option-F). The easiest ways to exit Composition Mode are to press Escape (or press Command-Option-F again) or to click the Exit Composition Mode button at the far right of the control bar.

Windows Note: Composition Mode is called Full Screen Editing Mode in the Windows version of Scrivener. Choose View > Enter Full Screen to activate this mode.

In Figure 16 (above), the pointer is at the bottom of the screen; moving the pointer there displays a Control Strip that offers a number of options for Composition Mode display, such as Text Scale, Paper Position (left, center, or right), Paper Width, and more. This bar also displays word and character count statistics. The Control Strip gets out of the way when you’ve finished working with it.

Tip: When you are in Composition Mode on a Mac, you can still access all of Scrivener’s menus. To do this, move your pointer to the top of the screen to display the program’s menu bar. You can then choose any menu items as you would in normal view mode.

You can change the Composition Mode background in the Mac version of Scrivener: choose View > Composition Backdrop > Choose, and select a photo, if you’d like, say, a natural scene behind your work. If you want a different color for the Composition Mode background, you can do this from Scrivener’s Compose preferences in the Customizable Colors section (click Background, and then choose a color).

To change the color of the text, go to Scrivener’s Compose preferences, and select “Override natural text color with custom color,” in the Text Color entry of the Customizable Colors section. Next, click the color swatch and then choose a color from the Colors palette.

Note: The Composition Mode chapter of the Scrivener manual discusses Composition Mode, and the Compose section of the Preferences appendix talks about the many preferences available for Composition Mode.

Using the Mac’s Full Screen Mode

Scrivener also supports the Mac’s built-in Full Screen Mode. In this mode, you click the green button in an application window’s toolbar, and that window expands to fill your entire display, hiding the Dock (if you have it set to display all the time) and the menu bar. You can still access the menu bar; move your pointer to the top of your display and the menu bar slides down. To exit Full-screen mode, choose View > Exit Full Screen or press Command-Control-F.

See the Full Screen Mode section of the Navigating and Organising chapter of the Scrivener manual for more on Full Screen Mode.

Typewriter Scrolling

When you type in most word processors, the new text is added below existing text, and the window contents don’t move until your text reaches the bottom of the window. Eventually, when you get tired of staring at that part of the screen, you scroll to move the text up, and you may have to do this all day long if you type a lot.

Scrivener offers a Typewriter Scrolling option, whereby the window contents move when you reach the end of a line, so your new text is always in the middle of the window. This keeps you from always having to look at the bottom of the window to see what you’re typing.

To use this feature, choose Format > Options > Typewriter Scrolling.

Customize Your Writing Environment

You can jump in and get to work now, but most people feel more comfortable using familiar fonts and a type size that makes it as easy to read text on their display. For this reason, I recommend that you look at Scrivener’s preferences for fonts and font sizes for the diverse elements that make up the Scrivener environment.

Let’s look at the most important settings to consider changing. To begin, choose Scrivener > Preferences (or Tools > Options, in Windows) to see the Scrivener Preferences window. The window has ten preference icons, from General to Backup, and clicking each one leads to a pane showing a number of options.

Tip: Unlike many programs where preferences are applied only after closing a Preferences window or clicking a Save button, Scrivener applies preferences in real time. I recommend that you open the Preferences window, move it to one side of your screen, and try some of the settings.

Set Appearance Preferences

The Appearance preferences let you choose how to view Scrivener’s display (Figure 17).

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Figure 17: Scrivener’s Appearance preferences.

You can set fonts and sizes for the Header View, Binder, and Outliner. (Fonts in the Editor are set in the Formatting preferences, as noted in Set Formatting Preferences, next.)

Other options in these preferences include whether you want lines on index cards and notes, the opacity of label colors, and whether or not to use grid lines in the Outliner. You can choose to “embolden” folders—in other words, have folders display in bold—something I find very practical. In the “Customizable Colors” section you can apply colors to a plethora of different elements.

Set Formatting Preferences

Click the Formatting icon in the Scrivener Preferences window to see options for setting up fonts and styles for Scrivener elements where you create text—in the Editor, in notes, in Inspector comments and footnotes, and in Scrivenings Mode (Figure 18).

Windows Note: If you’re using Windows, choose Tools > Options, and then click the Editor icon to access these settings.

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Figure 18: Scrivener’s Formatting preferences.

Changes you make in this window are not applied to existing files, so as not to make unanticipated changes to files that you may have manually formatted. As the window says, these are “Options that take effect for new documents.” (However, you can apply these changes by selecting the files in the Binder whose formatting you want to change and choosing Documents > Convert > Convert Formatting to Default Text Style. Scrivener will change the formatting for each selected file to match what you’ve set in the preferences.)

So how can you find the fonts and size that are best for you? You could do this in the Formatting preference pane, but I find it easier to try formatting in the Editor first and then apply that formatting in the Appearance pane. Here’s how:

Go to the section of the Scrivener window where you want to make formatting changes.

On a Mac, select all the text (press Command-A) and then press Command-T to display the Fonts pane. In Windows, press Control-A to select all the text and press F4 to open the Select Font window.

Adjust the font, size, and typeface to see these changes applied immediately to your texts.

Use the Format Bar to adjust characteristics such as alignment, text color, line spacing, and so on.

When you find your ideal selections, return to the Formatting preferences pane and apply the same settings.

If you have made changes in the Editor, you can click Use Formatting in Current Editor in the upper right of the Formatting preferences to apply those settings for future documents.

To change the format settings for other text elements, such as for comments and footnotes, click the current font listed for each item to open the Fonts window and make your changes.

Note: To find out more about Scrivener’s preferences, consult the Preferences portion of the Appendix section of the Scrivener manual.

Reuse Your Favorite Format Settings with Presets

If you’re familiar with the concept of styles in a word processor, you’ll quickly understand the usefulness of Scrivener’s presets. A preset stores a number of text attributes, such as font, size, and line spacing. A preset can be applied with a single click to any text. While you may be happy with a single font setting for your entire manuscript, some people may want specific formatting for lists, quoted text, headers, or chapter titles.

Scrivener comes with a few basic presets; you can access them from the Presets pop-up menu at the left of the Format Bar. You can apply paragraph presets—their names are prefaced with the ¶ character—simply by clicking anywhere in a paragraph (you don’t need to select all of its text) and then choosing the preset from the menu. For character presets—indicated by an a character—you must select some text, be it a word, sentence or more, then choose the preset from the menu.

Paragraph vs. Character Presets

Scrivener has several types of presets. Each one stores different types of settings:

Paragraph: The type of preset stores ruler settings, such as tabs and margins, as well as fonts, sizes, line spacing, alignment, and more. You use these to define styles that you want to use for complete paragraphs, rather than for portions of a paragraph, such as a few words or a sentence.

Character: This type of preset saves fonts, text styles (such as bold or italic), colors, and more. Generally, you use a character preset to format a word or sentence within a paragraph.

Combo: This type of preset applies both paragraph and character settings once. These presets are prefaced by ¶a.

The settings that you can apply to paragraph presets are in the Format > Text submenu. Settings that you can apply to character presets are available in the Format > Font submenu.

Warning! Presets are not retroactive! It’s important to understand that, unlike styles in many word processors, changing a preset in Scrivener doesn’t change the display of existing text that has already had the preset applied to it, but changes only how the preset’s formatting will be applied in the future.

To make a preset from a paragraph that you’ve formatted in a specific way, select that paragraph’s text and choose Format > Formatting > New Preset from Selection. The same is the case for character presets; just select a word that you’ve formatted, and choose the same menu item. Once you’ve created the new preset, you can choose it from the Presets pop-up menu in the Format Bar.

Note: For more on working with presets, see the Formatting Tools section of the Writing and Editing chapter of the Scrivener manual.

Start Writing Your Manuscript

You can start writing without adding research documents, creating index cards, or fiddling with an outline. But the first part of this book shows you the features in Scrivener that help you organize your work, should you wish to begin that way. You’ve also seen the many interface elements and how they can help you work more efficiently. Even if you do just dive into writing now, you’ll want to refer back to the earlier portions of this book later, when you start restructuring your text.

Create a new project (see Create a New Project) and add any research files you need (see Import Research Files), then create a new chapter file (see Add Items to the Binder) and start writing.

I can’t help you with the creative process; that’s up to you and your muse. Scrivener can help you organize and manage your writing, but it won’t make you a better writer. It presents a blank page, and it’s your task to put words, sentences, and paragraphs on that page.

As you write, you’ll want to manage different parts of your manuscript, such as chapters, folders, and more. That’s what I look at next. So stop procrastinating, and get to work!

Writers Talk: Jason Snell

As a technology writer, I get to test-drive a lot of different Mac apps. Generally I use them just long enough to form my opinion of them, and then move on to the next thing. The funny thing about Scrivener is, amid a swarm of new writing apps for the Mac, it was the only one that I simply couldn’t abandon. Before I knew it, I had abandoned the bare-bones text editor I had been using for years and was writing my long-form projects exclusively in Scrivener.

What was it about Scrivener that made it different? It’s hard to define, but I have a theory. The program doesn’t get in your way, so I was able to start writing without having to learn the app first. Then, as I wrote, I began to notice the features that helped me be more productive. Meanwhile, the features that didn’t fit the way I work never got in my way. Before I knew it, I had written most of three novels in Scrivener. I used the app’s word-target features to inspire me to complete seven straight years of National Novel Writing Month.

Perhaps the best part of Scrivener is that, while it has a lot of non-writing features such as customizable style sheets and ebook exporting, its most valuable features are ones that contribute to the writing experience itself. It’s easy to waste a lot of time setting up your margins, choosing your fonts, dreaming about your book-cover art—in other words, doing everything but the actual work of writing. Scrivener has always struck me as being much more about aiding a writer in performing the act of writing, rather than doing nifty stuff that helps writers procrastinate. And that’s a huge feature in itself.

Jason Snell writes at sixcolors.com, was editor of Macworld for more than a decade, and is the board of directors chair at National Novel Writing Month.

Take the Helm of Your Project

By now, you should be familiar with the Scrivener interface, and you should have added and organized any research material you need for your project, and determined what display settings and preferences you want to use. And, you may have started writing.

Now it’s time to learn how to work with your manuscript and with the different elements that make up a project. You’ll see the various ways you can view your project, how you can manage files and folders in the Binder, how to add annotations and comments to your texts, how to use the Inspector, and more. This chapter covers the many things you’ll want to do after your inspiration is flowing and you’ve started following the big white whale of your work.

View Your Work Differently

As you write, you may want to change the way you view your manuscript. By default, the Editor shows the file you are working on, but you can change the way this file is presented, and you can view multiple files at the same time.

One way to change your view is to split the Editor, and view two different parts of the same file simultaneously, or view two different files at the same time. This is good if you’re writing a chapter and want to confirm how you previously described a character or location, or see some dialog in an earlier scene, or want to work on one section while referring back to another.

The first way to split the Editor is horizontally. Click the Editor Split button in the Header View at the top of the Editor to split the Editor, as in Figure 19. The Header View for the active part of the Editor (the one that contains the cursor or currently selected text) is blue.

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Figure 19: Splitting the Editor pane lets you see two parts of your text at once. You can also view two different files in the split editor.

Now that you’ve split the Editor, if you want to view one file in one Editor section and another file in the other section, click in the section you want to change, then click another file in the Binder. Or, use the Next and Previous Document buttons in the Header View to scroll through all the content in the Binder.

As you might expect, you can use the View Mode switcher in the Toolbar to change the view of any item in either section of the split Editor (see Changing Views, earlier, for more on switching views).

You can also split the Editor vertically, displaying one section at the left and another at the right. To do this, choose View > Layout > Split Vertically or press Option when you click the Editor Split button.

Tip: When you’ve already split the Editor pane, you can change from a horizontal to a vertical split by holding down the Option key and clicking the Editor Split button.

Windows Note: Scrivener for Windows has two buttons to split the editor: a vertical Split button and a horizontal Split button.

Note: Scrivener’s split Editor has some nifty tricks up its sleeve, such as allowing you to scroll a non-active section, or swap items from one section to the other. See the Scrivener manual’s Splitting the Editor section in the Writing and Editing chapter for more details.

Reorganize the Binder

You may find yourself wanting to rearrange portions of a manuscript. For example, for a novel where the chapters shift points of view, you may decide to switch two chapters around so protagonist A presents his story before protagonist B. If you were using a standard word processor, you would have to cut and paste blocks of text, but in Scrivener, this is as easy as dragging icons in the Binder.

Reorganize Your Work

Files in the Binder can be chapters, sections, scenes, beats, or whatever you want. This is one of the important aspects of Scrivener, one which helps free you from the fetters of linear composition.

Your files can be as large or as small as you want; they could be separate paragraphs, if your work dictates such an approach, or entire chapters, or anything in between. If you break a chapter into scenes, it can be much easier to move scenes around if you wish to restructure the chapter later. In addition, you don’t need to commit to any specific approach when you start writing: you can split and merge files as needed. If you wish to split a file, put the text cursor at the location where you would like to make the split, then choose Documents > Split > at Selection (Command-K). To merge two or more files, select the files in the Binder, then choose Documents > Merge (Command-Shift-M).

The Binder gives you the power to reorganize your work in myriad ways. No matter how much you have written, you can move files around in the Binder to change your narrative, splitting or merging them when it is useful, or arranging your files in a different order to see how that changes the way your work flows.

In Figure 20, I show two ways you can drag files in the Binder to rearrange them:

In the first example, I drag a file to a new location, and the Binder interface shows a line with a circle on the left to indicate the new position before I let go of the file.

In the middle, however, I drag a file on top of another file, so it becomes a child of the latter file. This can be useful when you work with shorter sections and want to group them logically, yet still retain the individual sections. (This is as opposed to simply copying the content of a section and pasting it at the end of another one.)

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Figure 20: Two ways of moving files. On the left, moving a file to a new location; in the middle, moving a file to become a child of another file. Finally, on the right, the child file in place.

The Binder may seem to be a repository for files and folders, but it is much more than that. In fact, as you saw in Organize Your Ideas with the Corkboard and Outliner, the Binder, Corkboard, and Outliner are all linked, and changes in one are reflected in the others. For example, if you switch to the Outliner after making the change reflected in the middle screenshot in Figure 20 (above), you’ll see that The Sprouter-Inn now shows as a child under The Carpet Bag, just as it does in the Binder. If you switch to the Corkboard, you’ll see that The Carpet Bag now shows as a stack of pages, and you can see the child text by double-clicking the stack icon on the The Carpet Bag index card.

While you can use the Binder as a simple repository for chapters—if each of your files is a chapter—you’ll find it much more powerful if you treat it as an outliner. You see less information in the Binder than in the Outliner; Figure 9 (in Use the Outliner) shows this. But as your manuscript progresses, you will undoubtedly make changes to the structure of your text, and using the Binder at this point is a simple way to move different segments of text from one location to another.

Create New Files and Folders in the Binder

You can start a new chapter, section, or scene in the Binder. Click the Add button in the Toolbar to add a new file below the currently selected item in the Binder. If you have selected your top-level Draft or Manuscript folder, the new file gets added below all current files. If you have a file selected, the new file gets added below the selection. The title of the new file is highlighted in either case, so you can rename it.

You can also click and hold the Add button to choose other items to add to the Binder. In Figure 21, you can see these choices.

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Figure 21: Adding new items to the Binder from the Add button. Projects created from different templates may show different items in this pop-up menu.

No matter which menu item you choose, the new Binder item is added either at the bottom of the selected container (in Figure 21, above, this is Manuscript), or if another Binder item is selected, just below that item. So if you choose Character Sketch or Setting Sketch from the pop-up menu, a file gets added to the Characters or Places folder only if one of those folders is selected. You don’t need to store a character sketch or setting sketch in its folder, of course—you can create one in any location you want. You may, for example, want to store a character sketch next to a chapter file where that character appears. (Though if you do this, make sure that, when you compile your manuscript, you don’t include the character sketch in the selection of files to be compiled; see Compile Your Work for Print and Export.)

In the Mac version of Scrivener, you can add two types of media files to your Binder. Click a folder to select it, and then choose Project > New Media File to see a submenu with two choices: New Picture from Camera and New Audio Note. Use the former to take a picture using your Mac’s camera and the latter to record an Audio Note using your Mac’s microphone. You can add these files to any folder other than your Draft folder. This is a good way to record notes to yourself about things you want to change in your project.

In both the Mac and Windows versions of Scrivener, you can also add new folders to any part of the Binder. To do this, select a folder, then choose Project > New Folder.

You’ve seen several folders in the Binder, including Manuscript (or Draft), Characters, Places, and Research. These default folders help you organize your work. You can create your own folders as you want. You could create, say, Good Guys and Bad Guys folders for characters; Murder Locations and Planets folders for settings; or any number of folders for research. Folders can hold files and other folders, and folders can hold sub-folders; if you want, it can be sub-folders all the way down, just like in the Finder or the Windows Explorer.

When you organize your Binder this way, you can use the triangle next to any folder—or file—that contains other items to get its children out of the way. This lets you use the Binder as a “big-picture” view, yet allows you to expand individual items when you need a more detailed look at their constituent parts. For example, after you’ve finished your first five chapters, you no longer need to see the full hierarchy of the items that make them up: you can collapse each chapter’s triangle to save space and focus more on the chapter you’re currently writing.

Changing Folder Icons

When you add a new folder, it gets a default blue icon. To differentiate among folders at a glance, you can change a folder’s icon: Control-click (right-click) the folder, choose Change Icon, and then select one of the many available icons. You can even use your own icon.

For more on adding icons, see the Custom Icons section of the Setting Up the Binder chapter in the Scrivener manual.

Delete Items in the Binder

It may seem obvious, but you can remove any selected item from the Binder by clicking the Trash button on the Toolbar. (Or press Command-Delete on the Mac, or Shift-Delete in Windows.) This doesn’t delete the item from your project, however; Scrivener puts these items in its Trash. You can then recover any item from the Trash if you need to. To empty the Trash and actually remove its contents from the project, choose Project > Empty Trash.

Note: For more information about working with files and folders in the Binder, see How the Binder is Organised in the Setting Up the Binder chapter of the Scrivener manual.

View and Edit Multiple Files: Scrivenings View

One of the most powerful ways of viewing and editing your work is Scrivenings view. It’s important to fully understand what this unique view offers. Let me quote from the Editing Multiple Documents section of the Writing and Editing chapter of the Scrivener manual:

The “Scrivenings” view mode allows you to edit multiple text documents as though they were one long document. This way, you can write in small chunks and then combine them in any way you like to see how they work together. For instance, you might write lots of small scenes for a chapter, and then edit them all together in a Scrivenings session to see how the chapter works as a whole.

To reiterate, with Scrivenings view you can view any group of files as though they were a single file. Rather than clicking one file, editing it, then clicking another file and making changes to that one, you can scroll through a group of files as though they were one.

Let me demonstrate with an example. The Moby-Dick project I’ve used for my examples in this book has been fleshed out from an outline of the first chapters so that it contains the full texts of those chapters. Figure 22 shows an example of Scrivenings view.

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Figure 22: Viewing two chapters simultaneously in Scrivenings view.

As you can see above, I have selected two files—in this case, chapters—in the Binder. The Header View at the top of the Editor shows this by saying “Multiple Selection,” and the label for the View Mode switcher on the Toolbar changes to say Group Mode. Also, in the Editor itself, at the junction of the two files, you can see a horizontal rule. In this example, I selected contiguous files, but you can select non-contiguous files as well.

Select Multiple Files in the Binder

To select multiple contiguous files in the Binder—files that are next to each other—click one file, hold down the Shift key, then click the last one in the series that you want to select.

To select non-contiguous files—files that aren’t next to each other—on a Mac, click one file, hold down the Command key, then click the other files you want to select. In Windows, press Control and Alt.

Perhaps you’ve broken up your manuscript by scenes, and, in one chapter, consecutive scenes alternate between different point-of-view characters. You may nevertheless want to read through all of the scenes of one character to see how they flow. You can use Scrivenings view for this; just select the files that contain those scenes, and start reading (and editing).

When you select a container—a folder, such as the Manuscript folder in Figure 22 (earlier)—the Editor displays all the items in that folder in a Scrivenings view. So if you want to view your entire manuscript as if it were a single file, just click the Manuscript folder. If you store chapters in folders, with individual files for each scene, you can view an entire chapter by clicking the folder that contains that chapter’s files.

Working in Page View

The default view in Scrivener’s Editor is an endless, scrolling page, but sometimes you may want to use a view that shows page breaks. Some writers find this more appealing, as it gives them small milestones.

To do this, choose View > Page View > Show Page View (Command-Option-Shift-P). Scrivener lays out your work in pages, displaying white space at the top and bottom of each page. By default, the page size used is the one defined in the File > Page Setup (Command-Shift-P) dialog. (Sorry Windows users, Page View is Mac-only.)

There are a number of options available to help you choose the way pages are displayed in Page View. Open Scrivener’s preferences and click the Editor icon; the Wrap to Page Mode settings, at the bottom of the window, let you apply settings for this view.

Use QuickReference to Peek at Files

I’m sure it happens to you often; I experience this all the time. You’re writing one chapter or section, and you need to check another section to see what you wrote: perhaps you want to see how you described a character, or review a particular bit of dialog. When you switch to the other file and find what you were looking for, then try to return to where you were, you discover that you have lost your place.

Windows Note: QuickReference isn’t available in the Windows version of Scrivener.

Scrivener’s QuickReference feature makes these backward (and forward) glances easy to manage, and keeps you from skipping about from one file to another.

Say you’re looking at Chapter 27 of a manuscript and you need to confirm an event in Chapter 12. Choose View > QuickReference, and then choose the file you want to view. (This works even in Composition Mode.) A small window displays the contents of the chosen item, as in Figure 23.

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Figure 23: A QuickReference window showing a text file.

You can also display a QuickReference window showing any item in the Binder by dragging that item onto the QuickRef button in the Scrivener toolbar, if you have the toolbar set up to display that button. Or, if you Control-click (right-click) an item in the Binder, you can choose Open > As QuickReference.

You can resize QuickReference windows, scroll through them to find text you want, then close them. Or you can leave them open if you need to refer back to them. You can have multiple QuickReference windows open at a time, and you can edit the text in QuickReference windows.

QuickReference windows can display more than a file’s text. Notice the pop-up menu with None chosen from it at the bottom of Figure 23, slightly earlier. You can choose from this menu to display, in addition to the text, either a Synopsis, Picture, Notes, Keywords, References, Custom Metadata, or Comments/Footnotes. The chosen item appears in a pane at the bottom of the QuickReference window.

Use Notes and Comments

In addition to your text itself, you may want to provide supplementary information. I look at adding notes for yourself next, and I explain how to Add Footnotes and Endnotes a few pages ahead.

Add Annotations and Comments

As you write, you may want to make notes at certain points. You might want to indicate that you need to develop a scene, change a character’s name, introduce a new event, call out passages you think are well-written, or flag something for further editing. You might make these notes for yourself, as reminders for when you have finished your draft, or make them for a collaborator or editor who will work with your project later.

Scrivener has tools that allow you to attach notes to text, similar to the commenting tools available in many word processors. Not only are these annotation and commenting tools useful when you’re writing, but they are invaluable during the editing and revision phases of your work. (I look more closely at these stages in Revise and Edit Your Work.)

Scrivener offers two ways to add notes to texts: Inline Annotations and Comments. Either way lets you add notes to specific areas of a text, but each type of note serves a different purpose:

Inline annotations: These notes appear within your text, and are merely text formatted in a special manner to stand out; this special formatting allows you to strip annotations easily when you compile your final text (see Compile Your Work for Print and Export).

Comments: A comment does not appear inline with your text; instead, it appears in the Inspector where it is less obtrusive and less likely to get in the way than an Inline Annotation. Like annotations, comments are not meant to appear in a final text.

Depending on how you use these features, you will find that one or the other—or perhaps both—can help you with your writing.

To add an inline annotation, move your cursor to the location where you want to type a note and choose Format > Inline Annotation (Command-Shift-A). Type as much as you want. As you can see in Figure 24, annotations appear in red with a border, making them stand out clearly from the surrounding text.

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Figure 24: Inline annotations are in red, comments are highlighted in yellow, and comment texts display in the Comments & Footnotes panel of the Inspector.

Changing Annotation Colors

By default, inline annotations are red. You can change this color, if you’re using the Mac version of Scrivener, so you can have different types of annotations with different colors: position the text cursor in an annotation, choose Format > Font > Show Colors, and then pick a new color. Because Inline Annotations are just text, you can, if you wish, select all the text in an annotation and apply bold, italic, or underline formatting to it.

Since inline annotations appear in your text, you can copy them, cut them, and paste them to other locations; select their contents and drag them to other locations; or split them, as you would any other text.

To add a comment, select some text and then click the Comment button on the Toolbar, or choose Format > Comment (Command-Shift-*). A new Comment box appears in the Comments & Footnotes panel in the Inspector, even if you have previously hidden the Inspector. You can type your comment text in the Comment box.

Comments are linked to the highlighted text: you can change the highlighted text, and you can move the comment attached to it if you wish.

To attach an existing comment to a different bit of text, do the following:

In the Editor, select the text to which you want the comment attached.

Control-click (right-click) the comment in the Inspector.

Choose Move to Selection.

Tip: To jump to the text linked to a comment, click the comment in the Inspector.

Note: To learn more about using annotations and comments, read the Annotations and Footnotes chapter of the Scrivener manual.

Add Footnotes and Endnotes

Annotations and comments, as described just above, are for your eyes only and are not meant to be seen in your final document. Footnotes and endnotes, however, are meant to be visible in your final project. While notes (I’ll use that short word to mean footnotes and/or endnotes in this topic) may appear inline in your texts as you edit, when you compile your project (see Compile Your Work for Print and Export), the notes get converted to either bottom-of-page footnotes or end-of-document endnotes.

To add a note, place your cursor where you want the note to appear, then choose Format > Footnote (Command-Control-B) to add a footnote that displays in the Inspector; choose Format > Inline Footnote (Command-Shift-F), to add a footnote that displays in your text. You type the text of inline footnotes just as you do for an inline annotation (described a page or so earlier), but inline footnotes aren’t colored and have a gray background. I discuss note export options in Formatting Options.

Note: From Scrivener’s point of view, footnotes and endnotes are similar to the comments and annotations that I described a page or so earlier, except that footnotes and endnotes are meant to appear in a final document. As such, there are many similarities in these different “note” features. You should peruse the Annotations and Footnotes chapter of the Scrivener manual to learn about many tweakable settings and tricks for these features.

Get Statistics and Set Targets

Many writers have assignments that specify a certain number of words, characters, or pages. While journalists may need this, and some types of serial novels or short stories may have such limits, other writers may simply want to set goals for a number of words to write each session. Scrivener helps you manage these targets, and it provides statistics for different elements, as well as your overall project.

Get Statistics

You can see the statistics for the current document in the Editor’s Footer View. Scrivener tells you the number of words and characters in the file, and if you select some text, Scrivener will show the statistics for that selection only. (If you’ve hidden the Footer View, you can display it again by choosing View > Layout > Show Footer View.)

You can get more statistics for a text file by choosing Project > Text Statistics (Command-Option-Control-S). A dialog appears, containing more detailed word counts and a Word Frequency section at the bottom showing the most- and least-common words in the text. You can use this Word Frequency tool on your entire manuscript, or on selected files if you are viewing multiple files in Scrivenings Mode (described earlier in this chapter, in View and Edit Multiple Files: Scrivenings View).

If you want statistics for your entire project (all the text in your text files), choose Project > Project Statistics (Command-Option-Shift-S) to bring up the Project Statistics dialog (Figure 25).

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Figure 25: The Project Statistics dialog shows you the sum of the words and characters in the text files in your project’s Draft or Manuscript folder.

Click Options in the Project Statistics dialog to choose what is counted: you can count all files, or only those that are marked for inclusion; you can choose to include footnotes and annotations in the statistics; and you can specify how many words constitute a typical paperback page.

Note: The Goals and Statistics Tracking Tools section of the Writing Tools chapter of the Scrivener manual details these options.

Set Targets

While it’s easy to follow your word count by glancing at the Editor’s Footer View from time to time, you may have hidden the Footer View (View > Layout > Hide Footer View), or you may be in such a state of inspiration that you might not notice that you have already exceeded the 1,500 words that you have been assigned for an article. Or you may have a set a personal goal that you want to write at least 2,000 words every day, no matter what happens. To help you achieve your goals, Scrivener lets you set page, word, and character count targets, and it can notify you when you have reached those targets.

You can set a target for the Editor or for your entire project.

To set a target for the Editor:

Click the Target button in the Footer Bar, below the Editor at the far right.

From the pop-up menu on the right, choose Words or Characters.

Enter a target number in the field.

Click OK.

When you have set a target for a document, a small, colored progress bar appears in the Footer Bar beside the target icon, and its color changes from red to yellow to green as you approach your target.

To turn a document target off, and to hide the progress bar, reset the target to zero.

To set a target for your entire project:

Choose Project > Show Project Targets (Command-Shift-T).

A small, floating window (Figure 26) appears containing two progress bars: the first is a Manuscript (or Draft folder) Target, for the entire project, and the second is a Session Target, for the number of words you want to reach during a session or day.

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Figure 26: The Project Targets window tracks your manuscript- and session-based goals.

Click the goal number below either progress bar, and enter a value to change the target. The default count is for words, but if you click the pop-up menu below either bar, you can change the units to characters or pages.

Click Options to set a deadline, turn on target notifications, and configure other options, and then click OK.

Click Apply.

The Project Targets window stays visible all the time, floating above the Scrivener window. You can move it to the side, or if you have the Scrivener window filling your screen, you can move it to a position where it stays out of the way, but is still visible.

Click Options in the Project Targets window to see a number of options as to how targets are calculated. One notable option is to choose when targets are reset: either at midnight each day, when you close a project, on the next day you open a project, or never.

Tip: If you set targets and work with the Outliner, you might want to display the Target column in the Outliner in order to see a visual reminder of how much work you need to do on each section. Read Use the Outliner for more on changing Outliner view settings.

Use the Inspector

I mentioned the Inspector earlier, in Discover the Scrivener Window. The Inspector helps you better manage your work by displaying useful information about your project, by allowing you to add tags for different files, and much more. The Inspector can automatically appear when you create certain types of content, such as comments.

To show or hide the Inspector, either click the Inspector button in the Toolbar or choose View > Layout > Show Inspector (Command-Option-I).

The Inspector is contextual: what appears in the Inspector depends on what you are viewing elsewhere in Scrivener. Also, the buttons in the Inspector’s header allow you to choose what types of information the Inspector shows, and which buttons appear depends on what is selected in the Binder. These buttons are, from left to right, Notes , References , Keywords , Snapshots , Custom Meta-data , and Comments & Footnotes .

The following brief sections provide examples of what the Inspector displays when you select different items in the Binder.

Manuscript (or Draft) folder, text file, Research folder, Trash folder, or multiple items:

When you select one or more of these items in the Binder, you see all six top buttons for changing the Inspector’s view.

If you’ve created a synopsis on an index card in the Corkboard or the Outliner, it appears in the Inspector’s Synopsis section in most views. (Figure 27). You can also enter or edit a synopsis here. For some items, such as images, character sketches, and others, the Synopsis section shows a visual preview of the item.

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Figure 27: Here is the Inspector’s References view when a text file is selected in the Binder.

Tip: You can collapse the Synopsis and General Meta-Data sections by clicking the triangles next to their names.

The General section, also visible in several of the views, displays metadata such as the file’s label, status, modified date, and more.

The Notes view displays a Project Notes section (see Record Project Notes) or a Document Notes section (click either of these texts above the bottom pane of the Inspector to switch between them) at the bottom of the view you choose. This section’s header is a pop-up menu: click it to choose which kind of notes are displayed. You can also choose Manage Project Notes from the pop-up menu to display Project Notes in their own window.

Click the Custom Meta-Data button at the top of the Inspector to define your own tags in the bottom section of the Inspector.

The Snapshots button displays information about Snapshots; I discuss these in Take Snapshots of Your Texts. Finally, the Comments & Footnotes button displays these items. (I discuss comments and footnotes in Use Notes and Comments.)

A character or setting sketch:

When you select one of these in the Binder, the display in the Inspector is similar to what you see when you select a text file. That’s because these sketches are just special types of text files:

Character sketches allow you to add images to the Synopsis section, in case your writing is based on real people and you want to add their photos, or you have actual sketches of them. (Just drag an image file from the Finder to the placeholder silhouette image.)

Setting sketches allow you to add photos of places if you wish. (Drag a file in the same way as for character sketches.)

Research items:

When you select a photo, video, audio file, or Web page in the Research folder (or in any other folder you may use), the Inspector shows only the first four buttons in its header.

Note: The Inspector has many additional features. For more details on these features, notably on using references and keywords, see the Inspector chapter of the Scrivener manual.

Share and Synchronize Your Project

As your Scrivener projects develops, you may also want to provide your project to a collaborator or editor. I give some ideas for simply sharing your project file, such as via email, in this chapter, though I also discuss how to export your project into an editable word processing document later, in Compile Your Draft.

Most of this chapter focuses on syncing. Writers who work in only one location—their home or office—will generally work with their Scrivener projects on one computer in that location. Some writers, however, will want to work on the road or carry out research in different locations. With Scrivener’s syncing features you can make your project available via different cloud services—I talk about Dropbox and Simplenote in this chapter—so you can work with it from different locations and on different computers. In addition, Scrivener for iOS is now available so you can work on your iPhone or iPad, and sync your projects between computers and mobile devices.

Move Projects to Another Computer

If you work on two different computers—say a desktop and a laptop—there may be times when you want to move your current project from one computer to another. In general, this is easy, but there are some points to consider.

You might want to compress a Scrivener project no matter how you transfer it; this allows the project to be sent more quickly. Compressing a project also reduces the likelihood of problems that can occur if a single file within a project bundle gets corrupted during transfer.

Another thing to consider is the size of your project. While there is technically no size limit to a Scrivener project, if you store a lot of research in a project—especially videos, or lots of PDFs—the project may be too big to send by email. Some mail servers limit the size of attachments to 20 MB; some to only 10 MB. So bear this in mind if you try to transfer projects by email.

There are many ways to transfer files from one Mac to another. I won’t go into them here, but you can refer to an article I wrote for Macworld, Nine ways to share files between Macs.

As I pointed out in What’s Inside a Scrivener Project?, a Scrivener “document” on the Mac is really a package; a special kind of folder containing a number of files and sub-folders, that the Mac presents as a single file. While you can get along just fine without knowing this, packages can present a problem in some situations.

Some email clients might not accept a Scrivener project attachment as-is. Apple’s Mail works fine with Scrivener projects, and Microsoft Outlook and its predecessor Entourage (part of Office 2004 and 2008) will compress them automatically, so those programs should handle a Scrivener attachment with no problem. If you use Web-based email, such as Google’s Gmail, then you need to compress your Scrivener project so it is seen as a single file.

To compress a project on Mac, Control-click (right-click) your project in the Finder and choose Compress project name. You can then send the resulting zip file via any email service.

Windows Note: In Windows, a Scrivener project is a folder, with a .scriv extension, which contains the files and folders you see in the Binder. To compress a folder in Windows, right-click the folder, then choose Send To > Compressed (zipped) Folder.

Sync Projects between Computers with Dropbox

A popular way of synchronizing files is Dropbox. This service—free for 2 GB storage, with additional storage available for a fee—offers transparent syncing to a remote server, and it automatically updates your Dropbox folder on other computers linked to the account. For example, the Dropbox folder on my desktop Mac contains files for a number of projects. When I make changes, they are saved to Dropbox’s servers. When I open my laptop, the Dropbox service updates the laptop’s Dropbox folder so the files are the same on both computers. As I make changes to files on my laptop, the changes sync back to the server, and so on.

Dropbox is a great way to sync Scrivener projects across computers, even between a Mac and a Windows PC, and it’s how Scrivener for iOS syncs to desktop versions of the app (see Sync Projects to Dropbox). Just drag your project into your Dropbox folder and wait until it’s updated on Dropbox’s server, then you can turn off your computer if you want. Open your other computer, wait until the project is downloaded, and start working.

Now, you can, if you desire, work on a project while it’s in the Dropbox folder. As you make changes, the individual items in the project bundle will sync. In rare cases, the items in the bundle may not sync correctly, leading to a corrupted project. If you experience this, you may want to copy your projects from the Dropbox folder to another location to work on them, then copy them back when you’re finished. See this thread in the Scrivener forum for some essential rules: Using Scrivener with Dropbox.

Generally, when Dropbox syncs on a Mac or in Windows, the sync takes place automatically; individual apps don’t trigger syncing, but Dropbox detects the presence of new or changed files. Scrivener for Mac and Windows both work this way—so long as your project is in a folder that Dropbox syncs, your project will sync without manual intervention on your part.

Note that in Scrivener for iOS, you must manually tap a button to initiate a Dropbox sync (or toggle on a switch to initiate a sync every time you close a project). Also, Scrivener for iOS can sync to only one folder in your Dropbox folder. I explain the details in Sync Projects to Dropbox, later.

Note: For more about all that you can accomplish with Dropbox, read Take Control of Dropbox, by Joe Kissell.

Syncing to a Folder

Another Scrivener feature allows you to sync a project to a specific folder on your Mac. This can be useful if you want others to have access to your work or if you want to sync a project from its current folder to a folder you use with a cloud service, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, or others.

You can access this feature by choosing File > Sync > with External Folder. This saves the files of a project as text files in a folder. You should not, however, use this to try to keep two copies of a project in sync; if you do so, you may corrupt your project. Once you’ve set up folder syncing, you can re-sync a folder by choosing File > Sync > with External Folder Now.

Please see the Synchronized Folders section of the Cloud Integration and Sharing chapter of the Scrivener manual for more information on this type of syncing, and visit the Scrivener Tutorial Videos page to find screencasts about using this feature and others.

Sync Scrivener Projects to iOS Apps

You can sync your projects to Scrivener for iOS so you can work on them on your iPad or iPhone, using either iTunes or Dropbox. I cover this sync process in detail in Sync with Scrivener for iOS.

Scrivener can also sync to a handful of other iOS apps. But if you’re serious about Scrivener and you use an iOS device, you should just get Scrivener for iOS. If you want to learn more about other options, see the Cloud Integration and Sharing chapter of the Scrivener manual.

Sync to Simplenote

Simplenote is a Web-based service that allows you to sync “notes, lists, ideas and more.” Scrivener has a dedicated sync feature that works with Simplenote; when you sync a project with Simplenote, you can work on it with the Simplenote Web interface or the Simplenote app running on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. In addition, a number of other Mac and Windows applications can interface with Simplenote.

Windows Note: Syncing between Scrivener and Simplenote isn’t available in the Windows version of Scrivener.

Note: Simplenote is very different from Dropbox (described earlier in this chapter). With Dropbox, you sync your actual project file, and can use it in Scrivener on another computer. With Simplenote, you sync some of your project’s content and can view or edit it, but you need to import the changes to your project later.

To sync to Simplenote, you first need to set up a Simplenote account. Next, from within the project you wish to sync, choose File > Sync > with Simplenote. Scrivener asks you to sign in to your Simplenote account, and then presents a dialog as in Figure 28.

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Figure 28: Choose which files you want to sync with Simplenote.

In the dialog, you select the files you want to sync. You can sync only text files, so you may not be able to sync many of the files in your Research folder, such as PDFs, images, and so on. In the next dialog, you are asked which folder you want to sync files from Simplenote to. The Research folder is selected by default, but you can choose any folder from a pop-up menu.

Note: If you plan to use Simplenote, please make sure to read the Simplenote section of the Cloud Integration and Sharing chapter of the Scrivener manual. It discusses limitations to syncing using this service.

Revise and Edit Your Work

When the writing’s done, and your draft is finished, you can take a break for a while. But then it’s time to work on revising, rewriting, and editing your work. As you go from first draft to second, and then to your final draft, you may make a lot of changes, and you may want to record them in case your original turns of phrase were better.

This chapter looks at the revision and editing process, talking about marking revisions, taking snapshots, and managing this step in the production of your manuscript.

Find and Replace Text

When revising and editing your work, you may want to find certain texts—character names, locations, or phrases—to see how you have used them. You may also want to replace texts: for example, you decide that a character named Cain should finally be called Ishmael. You may want to find the former name and replace it with the latter.

Scrivener has some useful capabilities in its find/replace toolkit:

Find and replace text: Choose Edit > Find > Find (Command-F) to bring up the Find window. Enter the text you’re searching for, and click Next to find it. You can search the entire document or just the currently selected text, such as a block of text or a chapter.

Find by Formatting: Choose Edit > Find > Find by Formatting (Command-Option-Control-F) to search for specific types of text. Find by Formatting not only lets you search for, say, bold or italic text, but also highlighted text, footnotes, revision marks, links, and more. You can search all documents or only selected documents.

Project Search: Type in the Search field in the Toolbar to search for text anywhere in your project. Click the magnifying glass in this field to see a pop-up menu you can use to narrow your search (Figure 29).

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Figure 29: The Search field options give you great flexibility in searching in an entire project.

The search scans all items in your project, not just the texts in your manuscript. This is especially useful when your projects contain a lot of disparately organized research materials.

Tip: If you have hidden the Toolbar, you can perform project searches by choosing Edit > Find > Project Search (Option-Control-F); the window that appears offers the same options as the Search field and pop-up menu in Figure 29 (above).

Note: Scrivener’s find and replace features offer many options. For more information on using them, read the Searching and Replacing section of the Writing Tools chapter in the Scrivener manual.

Take Snapshots of Your Texts

For many writers, writing is a fluid process. You’ll write a chapter, put it aside, go on to the next chapter, and then come back to the first to make changes influenced by what transpires later. Others may write a complete first draft without looking back, then start the revision process from the beginning. No matter which way you work, you may want to keep records of your texts before you change them.

Scrivener lets you take snapshots, which save the state of a file before you edit it. Later, you can use a snapshot to return to a previous version after you make revisions, or you can compare your changes with an older version.

Warning! Snapshots are not backups! A backup of a project makes a copy of the entire project bundle; a snapshot makes a copy of one or more text files in the Binder and stores them in the project itself. I cover backups a few pages ahead, in Back Up Your Projects Automatically.

Take Snapshots

There are several ways to take snapshots. Select one or more text files in the Binder, then do one of the following:

For a quick snapshot, choose Documents > Snapshots > Take Snapshot (Command-5).

For a snapshot with a custom name, choose Documents > Snapshots > Take Snapshot with Title (Command-Shift-%). A dialog asks you to name the snapshot. You can enter anything that will help you remember the current state of the file. Don’t bother to enter a date, because Scrivener does that for you; you’ll see it when you view snapshots.

To automatically take snapshots on a Mac, go to Scrivener’s General preferences and check “Take snapshots of changed text documents on manual save.” Every time you press Command-S to save your file, Scrivener will take a snapshot of those files that have changed since the last time you took a snapshot. (Automatic snapshots are not available in the Windows version of Scrivener.)

Open the Snapshots pane of the Inspector (Figure 30), and click the plus button in the title bar at the top of the pane. To add a title, double-click the text Untitled Snapshot and enter a name.

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Figure 30: The Snapshots pane of the Inspector. At left, you can see a snapshot, and at right you can see the result of clicking the Compare button at the top of the pane. Notice that the Compare button changes to read Original.

No matter which method you use, it’s a good idea to take snapshots of your texts before you start editing them, or, if you are an on-the-fly writer/reviser, from time to time as you work.

Use Snapshots

You can view snapshots for specific text files by choosing Documents > Snapshots > Show Snapshots, and then clicking the files in the Binder. Or, if the Inspector is visible, click the Snapshots button above the Inspector (Figure 30, just previously). The currently selected snapshot shows its content in the bottom section of the Inspector. If you have multiple snapshots, click the one you want to view.

To compare the currently selected text file with the selected snapshot, click the Compare button at the top of the Inspector to see the changes indicated with different colored text, in underline and strikethrough format, as in the right-hand screenshot in Figure 30, above. You can step through the changes by clicking the arrow buttons next to the Original button at the top of the Snapshots pane. Click the Original button to revert the display to the text of the snapshot.

You can also compare two snapshots. Select them in the Snapshots list, and then click the Compare button.

Windows Note: You can’t compare two snapshots in the Windows version of Scrivener.

Scrivener offers different levels of comparison granularity, allowing you to tell the program how to display changes. Click the pop-up menu next to the Compare button to see the choices; by default, all three are checked, which means that Scrivener goes through each level of granularity until changes are found (or not):

By Paragraph: Changes in any paragraph will result in the entire paragraph being marked as a change.

By Clause: Changes within any clause or sentence will mark the entire clause or sentence as changed.

By Word: Every change at the word level is marked as such. If a word is different, or even if a letter in a word has been changed, the full word will be marked as changed.

In the right-hand screenshot of Figure 30 (slightly earlier), the default setting is active. You can see that each change displays at the word level. In most cases, you’ll find this to be the best way to display changes. When changes are marked at higher levels, you’ll have to look carefully to spot them. However, if you simply want to glance at a text and see changes, or if you have made very large changes, displaying changes by clause or paragraph may be appropriate. Try the different settings to see what works best for you and your style of revising.

Tip: If the Snapshots pane is too small for you to closely compare your texts, you can split the Editor and drag a snapshot from the list to the Header View of one of the sections. This loads the snapshot into the section in read-only mode. Press the Option key when you drag a snapshot to the Header View to load the snapshot and display the differences with the current version using the current granularity settings.

Unlike word processors that offer change tracking, you can’t accept or reject individual changes in a snapshot. However, you can “roll back” a text to a snapshot. To do this, select the snapshot you want to use, then click the Roll Back button at the top of the Snapshots pane.

Warning! You cannot undo a roll back, so if you’re not sure about your changes, make sure to take a snapshot of the latest version of your text before rolling back to a previous version. Scrivener displays a dialog asking if you want to do this.

Back Up Your Projects Automatically

I mentioned that snapshots are different from backups. A snapshot is a copy of a single text file, whereas a backup is a copy of your entire project.

Scrivener has a built-in automatic backup feature that saves copies of your projects in a pre-determined location:

Mac: Scrivener saves backups to ~/Library/Application Support/Scrivener/Backups by default, where ~ is your home folder. To find these backups, choose Scrivener > Reveal Support Folder in Finder. This folder contains the Backup folder. If you’ve chosen another location for the Backup folder, you can find it from Scrivener’s preferences: click the Backup icon, and then click Open Backup Folder. You can change this folder location in the preferences, and if possible, you should change it to a location on another disk. You can choose when backups are made—when you open a project, when you close it, or each time you save by pressing Command-S or choosing File > Save—or any combination of these three options.

Windows: Backups are stored in your AppData folder, which isn’t easy to get to. The best way to go there is to choose Tools > Options, click the Backup icon, and then click Open Backup Folder.

Backups are compressed by default to save space, but you can change this. You can also have dates added to the names of backups, and you can choose how many backups of each project Scrivener saves. The default value is 5, but you can choose other values, from 3 to 25.

For more on backups, see the Backing Up Your Work section of the Project Management chapter of the Scrivener manual.

(If you’re running Scrivener on a Mac, see Backing Up Your Mac: A Joe On Tech Guide to help you choose the best backup strategy.)

Work with Revisions

When you are revising and editing your work you may want to keep track of the changes you’ve made. You’ve seen in Take Snapshots of Your Texts that you can save snapshots at different times and compare them to the current version of a text file. But you can also use Scrivener’s Revision Mode feature to mark texts as you edit them, and even have different color markings for subsequent edit passes so you can see the different layers of changes.

Windows Note: Revision Mode isn’t available in the Windows version of Scrivener.

If you’re used to working with change tracking in programs like Microsoft Word or Apple’s Pages, you need to know that that Scrivener’s revision tracking is different. In Word and Pages, you can track changes, and then, later, accept or reject any or all of the changes you’ve made. Word and Pages also track all changes, whereas Scrivener only tracks additions to your texts, not deletions. If you need more detailed change tracking, it’s best to use snapshots and compare them to different versions.

Scrivener’s revision feature is a simple tool that applies different colors to your texts. To turn it on, choose Format > Revision Mode, then choose a revision level: First Revision, Second Revision, and so on. From this point on, all the new text you type in the current document will be in the color of that revision level.

Changing Revision Level Colors

Scrivener offers five revision levels, and you can set a different color for each one: choose Scrivener > Preferences > Appearance and then look in the Customizable Colors section. Scroll down in the list on the left until you see Revision Colors. Click it, click a revision level, and then click the color well and choose a new color.

You may want to mark certain a bit of text with a specific revision color, even if it is not new. To do this, choose Format > Revision Mode > Mark Revised. You may also want to remove revision marks for certain parts of a text: choose Format > Revision Mode > Remove Current Revision Color.

Revision Mode is active for a text file until you either turn it off (Format > Revision Mode > None) or you select another item in the Binder.

Working with External Edits

When you’ve finished your manuscript and sent it to your agent or editor (you’ll see how to compile and export your project in Compile Your Work for Print and Export), you’re likely to get back a document with changes and comments. In many cases, it is easiest to work with this document in the program in which the changes and comments were recorded, such as Microsoft Word or Final Draft.

However, in some cases, you can import these files and work with changes in Scrivener. The ability to do this depends on the quantity and type of changes and comments. For example, Scrivener can import comments from Word documents, provided you convert these files to RTF first from within Word.

Scrivener can also import Script Notes from Final Draft files, as long as they are in .fdx format.

If you really want to work with external changes in Scrivener, the best you can do is make a copy of, for example, the Word document. In this copy, accept all the changes. In Scrivener, make snapshots of each of your text files, and copy the equivalent texts from the Word document and paste them into Scrivener for each text file. You can then use your latest snapshot and compare this to the text returned by your editor or agent.

Nevertheless, this is a bit of a kludge, and I recommend that if you need to work on a lot of changes in a different file format, you should use the appropriate program if possible. When you submit your manuscript or screenplay, you have to accept that the publishing and movie industries generally use Word and Final Draft. As they say, sell in the language of your customers; if you want to sell a book or screenplay, do everything you can to be compatible with your agent, editor, or producer.

Writers Talk: James Fallows

I’ve used “word processing” programs since the dawn of the computer age, starting in the late 1970s with one called The Electric Pencil. The line has extended with various twists and turns since then—through WordStar and WordPerfect and XyWrite and AmiPro and DeScribe and of course the inescapable Word. (For which I actually worked on a design team, at Microsoft, for a short while in the late 1990s.)

Most of them managed to seem magical in some way in their time. Split-screen display! Customizable key shortcuts! Macros! Footnotes! Track-changes! Where would the wonders end?

But it was not until I started using Scrivener several years ago that I sensed that I had found a program designed for writing, not “processing words.” That is because every part of the program’s approach and layout reflects an understanding of the varied elements and stages involved in creating books, magazine articles, dissertations or theses, and other extended written works. It helps in the research stages, by making it easy to collect and retrieve information. It helps in the organization stages, especially through its inspired system for dividing work into small chunks that can easily be moved and redeployed. And it helps in the dreaded “actual writing” stage, through a variety of touches that make it easier to concentrate on what you’re trying to say and filter out everything else. These range from the amazingly handy “QuickRef” windows to the Zen-inducing Full Screen [Composition] view. And meanwhile it provides all the routine functions we require from advanced word-processing programs, from footnoting and annotation to automatic backups.

Many of Scrivener’s features are so obvious—once you’ve seen them demonstrated—that you naturally wonder why mainstream programs have left them out. And, from experience seeing how the very most mainstream program was put together, I realize that the answer is: they’re not created with real writers in mind. Scrivener is, and my only complaint is that I didn’t have it decades ago.

James Fallows is a national correspondent for the Atlantic.

Compile Your Work for Print and Export

You’ve finished your novel, screenplay, non-fiction book, thesis, short story, or article. It’s time to liberate your work from Scrivener and send it to your agent, editor, or producer. You’ll now need to export your work to a standard file format as used in the publishing and movie industries.

But you may also want to save your work in special formats so your manuscript can be read on ebook readers. And, in some cases, you’ll want to print out work for submission, or even for your own use as you work on rewrites.

In this chapter, I cover printing and exporting Scrivener projects, and notably show you how to save your work in the formats that you need in order to send to others so they can read your words.

Print Your Work on Paper

Depending on what you are planning to do with your current manuscript, you may want to print it out. While some writers work in a purely digital format—in journalism, this is the norm—others still have to submit manuscripts in printed form. If you’re a student writing a thesis, it’s likely that you’ll need to provide a hard copy of your final work. And even if you don’t need to send anyone a printout of your work, you may want to print it for your own re-reading. I prefer printing out and revising texts on paper; I find that I see them differently, and that I spot different mistakes and stamp out infelicitous words. And, given that I work on a computer when writing, reading on paper is like a change of scenery.

Scrivener can print anything in your project: not just the texts you’ve written, but also research materials you’ve imported, your outline, the index cards on your Corkboard, character and setting sketches, and more. When you choose File > Print Current Document (Command-P), Scrivener presents a Print dialog offering to print whatever you’ve selected in the Binder. If you’ve selected a single text file, that is printed; if you’ve selected multiple items, they are printed; if you’ve selected your entire Manuscript folder, or a sub-folder containing multiple text files, all the files in the selected folder are printed.

Scrivener prints what it displays in the Editor, though it places footnotes at the end of your text and it prints the other elements that you specify, as shown in Figure 31. So, if you’ve selected, say, three text files, and the Editor shows these files with horizontal rules delineating each one, they will be printed as such; there will be no page breaks between the contents of each selected file. If you do want page breaks, you must print files separately.

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Figure 31: The Print Options dialog, available from the Page Setup dialog, has many options that affect how a file or project prints.

Scrivener offers several options for printing. To see them, choose File > Page Setup (Command-Shift-P) and then choose Scrivener from the pop-up menu at the top of the dialog. In this dialog, you can set page margins, but if you click the Options button, a Print Options dialog, offering several other settings (Figure 31, above), as follows:

For text documents: You can select whether to print page numbers, file names and dates, and annotations and comments, and you can specify a font for printing that is different from your onscreen display. You can also select which elements you want to print: just your text, titles, metadata and more.

Tip: You may find it useful to print your work in a different font from what you see on screen. It lets you view the work differently, and, perhaps, spot mistakes that you didn’t see on the screen: select Print Using Font and then change the font and size settings to your liking.

For index cards on the Corkboard: You can choose whether to print titles, keywords, numbers, and more; print cutting guides, so you can cut your texts and paste them on real index cards; and choose a font and size for printing. If printed in Portrait mode on letter-sized paper, index cards fit perfectly on standard Avery index card stock that you can use in your printer. Only the Mac version of Scrivener lets you print the Corkboard.

For outlines: Many settings let you choose how much content from your outlines to include. You can indent the printout for different outline levels, include word counts and targets, print labels and status, and much more. You can print the Outline only with the Mac version of Scrivener.

Other print settings: these are for printing Web pages and images. For the former, you can choose to print backgrounds; for the latter, you can print at actual size or scale to fit to the page.

After you’ve set these options, and clicked OK to save them, Scrivener will remember them for any printing you do in the current project. If you wish to change settings when you print again, make sure you remember to go back to these options.

Print a Full Draft

When you want to print a full draft of your project, the process is slightly different than that described just above. To print a full draft, choose File > Compile (Command-Option-E), and, in the Compile For menu, choose Print. But before you do that, read the section below, Compile Your Draft, as there are many important compilation options to consider before printing a compiled first draft.

Save as PDF

To save selected documents as a PDF in the Mac version of Scrivener, choose File > Print Current Document and then choose an option from the PDF pop-up menu in the dialog.

In Windows 10, you can use the built in Microsoft Print to PDF driver, but in earlier versions of Windows you need to have a PDF writer plug-in installed. Lacking that, you can use the Compile for PDF feature; see the information about how to compile your draft, next.

In either case, to save your full draft as a PDF file, follow the procedure described above in Print a Full Draft, but make sure to read about how to compile your draft, next.

Compile Your Draft

This should be a time of celebration. You have battled against blank pages, procrastination, distractions, and deadlines, and have reached the end of the road; well, the end of this leg of the journey. Because if this is your first draft, you know you probably have several other drafts to go before your work is ready for publication. Compiling your draft combines all your many files into one, and either outputs them in the format you want or prints your manuscript.

But by now you should be ready to export your project in a format that you can send to an agent, editor, or producer, or that you can print out before you start that long, slow process of rewriting.

The compilation process can be extremely simple, if one of Scrivener’s presets suits you, or extremely detailed, if you wish to tweak the many settings available for this action. I discuss both possibilities, and while I don’t cover all the settings in the Compile window, I do cover the main options.

Prepare to Compile

To prepare to compile your work, all your files should be in their final locations (folders or sub-folders in the Binder), and your work should be either complete or ready for rewriting (for example, if you want to compile and save your work in a file to edit and revise).

All your text files should be in your Draft or Manuscript folder before compiling, or in a collection containing files from this folder. Your files should also be in the order in which you want them to appear in the final document.

You should know what type of file you want to create: PDF, .doc, .docx or .rtf for Microsoft Word, .fdx file for Final Draft, and so on.

Windows Note: To save a file in .docx format in Windows, you must have a copy of Word 2007 or later installed on your computer, and you must enable the “Use Microsoft Word or Open Office for doc and docx conversions” option in Tools > Options > Import/Export.

When you have prepared as described above, choose File > Compile to display the Compile dialog.

Compile Your Project

In most cases, compiling your document using one of Scrivener’s presets is the best way to go. You don’t have to worry about complex options, and if you wish to tweak the file after compilation you can do so: you may want to add a header or footer, or you may want to change the font, size, or other settings.

To compile using a preset:

If you haven’t already done so, choose File > Compile and then click Summary at the top of the Compile dialog (Figure 32).

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Figure 32: Use the summary mode Compile dialog to choose a preset, an output format, and some basic settings.

From the bottom pop-up menu, Compile For, choose the format in which you want Scrivener to save your document. Options include Rich Text (.rtf), Plain Text (.txt), Microsoft Word (.doc and .docx), OpenOffice (.odt), Final Draft (.fdx and .fcf), and more, including ePub, Kindle, and iBooks Author ebook formats.

Choose a preset from the upper pop-up menu, Format As:

Original: This preset retains the formatting that you’ve applied in the Editor. It’s a helpful setting if you’ve worked hard already to apply specific fonts and formatting in the Editor. It stitches together your text files as they are, adding no page breaks, titles, or any other formatting changes. It will, however, add page breaks between folders. In the Summary view of the Compile dialog, the few compilation options offered are turned off by default, with the exception of the Footnotes/Comments setting, which inserts a separator (a rule) between your text and footnotes.

Tip: To access the complete set of Compilation Options, click All Options at the top of the Compile dialog. I explain these settings more fully a few pages ahead.

Enumerated Outline: This preset exports your work as an outline. This format works well if you’ve created an outline using Scrivener’s Corkboard, Outliner, and/or Binder, and want to print it, either for your own use, or as a file to send to an agent, editor, or producer. The outline has titles for each text file in the Binder, with hierarchical numbering, and indentation to indicate hierarchy. To include synopses, click All Options and then check an option in the Formatting pane of the expanded Compilation Options dialog. You can add synopses only for specific levels of hierarchy if you want (see Use Compilation Options, just ahead).

Standard Manuscript Format: As much as we may like using proportional fonts, custom sizes, and line spacing when we work, the publishing industry, for the most part, still seems to think that writers work with typewriters. For this reason, the standard manuscript format for both novels and screenplays is a fixed-width Courier font at 12 points, with double-spaced lines, no justification, and very specific margins. This preset is designed to meet these requirements. It compiles your manuscript so that folders and top-level files are chapters, and everything else is sections within chapters. You can change this in the Formatting pane of the full Compilation Options dialog if you wish (see Use Compilation Options, ahead), but unless your work has complex formatting, this preset may be the most appropriate choice to send your work to those who decide if it is worth publishing.

Proof Copy: If you want to compile your manuscript for proofing, or for revising on paper, this format may be just what you need. It retains your formatting, but adds double spacing between lines, so you can easily add notes. You can also send the resulting file out to others, and ensure that they know it is not final, as it will have a footer saying, “PROOF COPY - Not for distribution.”

Script or Screenplay: This preset uses formatting that is compatible with Final Draft 8 or later, and creates an .fdx file.

Click the Compile button.

Now:

If you’ve opted to save the compilation as a file, you see an Export dialog asking you to name the file and to choose a location for it. Specify these and click Export.

If you have chosen Print in the Compile For pop-up menu, you see a standard Print dialog. Set your print options and click Print.

Congratulations! You’ve completed the process of compiling your Scrivener project, and you can send it to whoever needs to read it next.

Use Compilation Options

The basic compilation options described just above will be appropriate for most writers in most situations. But you may need to go further, to tweak certain settings, choose which text files to include, adjust formatting, and more. Scrivener’s advanced compilation options give you dozens of settings you can change.

After you choose File > Compile, click All Options near the top of the Compile dialog to see the full Compilation Options settings. (In Windows, click the arrow to the right of the Format As menu.)

In the full dialog, you can select any option in the Compilation Options list at the left to access a corresponding settings pane at the right. For example, in Figure 33, Contents is selected at the left. The Compilations Options list is contextual; the options available depend on the format you’ve selected in the Compile For pop-up menu. If, for example, you choose Rich Text (.rtf) in the Compile For menu, you will see more options than those shown in Figure 33. Or, if you choose an ebook format, you will see a Meta-Data entry in the list.

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Figure 33: The expanded Compile dialog gives you a plethora of settings to tweak your work before it is compiled into a single file.

I discuss several of the Compilation Options items in the following sections.

Contents Options

The first section in the Compilation Options is Contents. In most cases, you’ll want to compile all of your text files, but if you want to only compile parts of your project (say for proofing, or to send to an editor), you can do so here.

Here’s how to set your Contents options, working from top to bottom of the Contents pane:

Choose an item from the top-pop-up menu (the Manuscript pop-up menu in Figure 33, above), to limit which files can be selected as part of your compilation:

To use all or part of your Manuscript or Draft folder, leave the top pop-up menu as it is.

If you selected specific files in your Binder before choosing the Compile command, choose Current Selection.

To work with the Search Results collection or any other Collection, choose it from the menu. (For more on this feature, see the Compiling the Draft chapter of the Scrivener manual.)

In the Include column, select or deselect the boxes to specify the files that you want to include. (Hold down the Option key and click any box to select or deselect all of them.)

In the Pg Break Before column, select or deselect the boxes to tell Scrivener which files to add a page break before in the compilation. You can use this option to have each chapter start on a new page, but if your files are not full chapters, select the box only for those files that start chapters.

In the As-Is column, select or deselect the boxes to have the compilation ignore any settings you may make in the Formatting options, which I discuss just below. Also, when an As-Is box is selected, titles and synopses are omitted from the compiled document.

Formatting Options

Click the Formatting options to display the Formatting pane in the Compile dialog, as in Figure 34.

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Figure 34: The Formatting options in the Compile dialog allow you to alter text formatting.

You use this pane for two tasks:

To include or exclude certain specific types of content.

To optionally override the formatting used in Scrivener with formatting more appropriate to the compilation.

The main reason for making formatting changes here is so your compiled document has fonts and styles that are different from those you have used in the Editor while writing. If you have done a lot of work formatting your text in the Editor, you most likely don’t want to change anything here. However, say you like working with 20-point fonts in the Editor; if you were to compile and/or print your document at that size, the text would be too large. Or an agent, publisher, or writing competition may have specific requirements you must follow.

Follow these steps to work in the Formatting pane:

In the top section, which the Scrivener Manual calls the Structure and Content Table, check or uncheck the boxes for the elements you want to include in your compiled document. For example, you can tell Scrivener that all Level 1 or lower elements will generate Titles, Meta-Data, Synopses, Notes, and/or Text. These items are included in the compilation in the order shown, and as you select the boxes, you see an example in dummy text in the Formatting Editor below.

Note: Levels are sub-folders and their contents in the Binder; Notes are annotation and footnotes.

To format elements whose checkboxes you’ve marked, first select a row in the Structure and Content table containing a group of elements. Then, if you want to format notes or text, select the Override Text and Notes Formatting checkbox. Finally, in the Formatting Editor below, click in the text and use the Formatting Bar to make changes.

Repeat Step 2 as needed for each row in the Structure and Content table.

Note: Depending on your manuscript, you can add other levels, and you can do more with the Structure and Content table. Also, Scrivener offers a huge number of formatting options you can set when you compile your document. See the Compiling the Draft chapter of the Scrivener manual to explore the many possibilities.

More Options

I don’t go into detail about the other Compilation Options; again, the Scrivener manual gives you plenty of information about these, and many of them are self-explanatory. Here are the highlights:

Separators: Use the Separators options to add page breaks, lines, or custom characters between files. You may have files that are smaller than chapters, but that you wish to separate in your final document.

Transformations: With the Text Options, you can change smart quotes to straight quotes, convert em-dashes to double hyphens, convert italics to underlines and more.

Replacements: Use Replacements to choose any words and replace them—throughout your final document—with other words. For example, you may want to change MyHero to “Ishmael,” or MySetting to “the Pequod.”

Statistics: You can determine what text is counted if you include statistics. The Statistics option is available only in the Mac version of Scrivener.

Footnotes & Comments: Specify how footnotes and comments are displayed, how footnotes are numbered, and more.

Meta-Data: These options appear in the Compilation Options pane if you have chosen the ePub or Kindle ebook format from the Compile For menu. They include some settings that are useful for an ebook: you can include authors’ names, a title, description, publisher, and more in the ebook’s metadata.

Cover: A Cover option also appears when you choose an ebook format. Use it to select a graphic that you’ve imported into your project for your ebook’s cover.

Note: Other Compilation Options panes may appear, depending on which format you’ve chosen in the Compile For menu. For more information on these options and on compiling generally, read the (extensive and comprehensive) chapter in the Scrivener manual, Compiling the Draft.

Compile for Ebook Formats

Scrivener offers options that let you compile a manuscript for two ebook formats: ePub eBook (.epub) and Kindle eBook (.mobi). In this topic, I offer tips to help you get the most out of this type of compilation. These tips are especially important as editing the compiled files is not an easy task.

Note: Although Scrivener includes iBooks Author Chapters (.docx) as an ebook format, this compilation format actually creates a Word file designed for importing into Apple’s iBooks Author ebook creation app. The Compilation Options don’t include the ebook options used for Kindle and EPUB exports.

Before compiling an ebook you should be familiar with the compile settings, to ensure that your book gets formatted as you expect. A good way to do this is to set up compile formatting for PDF and check how it looks in a PDF-reading app, such as Apple’s Preview or Adobe Reader. Once the formatting looks as you want, it’s fairly easy to switch to ebook format and generate an .epub or .mobi file. Creating an ebook is easy to do if you’ve used the Novel template, and the following instructions should be sufficient.

The instructions below assume that you’ve read the earlier parts of this chapter and are familiar with the basic compilation process.

To compile an ebook:

Import an image for your book’s cover into the Research folder or any other folder.

Choose File > Compile.

In the Compile dialog, choose ePub eBook (.epub) or Kindle eBook (.mobi) from the Compile For pop-up menu.

Note: Scrivener uses the spelling “ePub,” following Apple’s practice, but the format is officially spelled “EPUB” by the International Digital Publishing Forum, which controls the format standard.

Consider whether the checkbox for the title page should be selected in the Contents pane, especially if you are using the Novel template or a similar template: many ebooks don’t have title pages, but you can include one if your book design calls for one.

In either the Separators or the Contents pane, ensure that chapters will have page breaks between them (if you chose an ebook option, Page Break is called Section Break in the Separators options). For the Novel template, this should already be set up so you shouldn’t need to do anything (in the Separators pane, Section Break should already be chosen in the Text and Folder separator pop-up menu, meaning that a section break will be inserted every time a new folder is encountered following a text file; and in the Novel template, that means every time there’s a new chapter folder).

In the Formatting pane, go through the Section Types list and, for those that have Titles checked, click the title in the text area and select a heading level from the pop-up menu to the right of the Section Layout button. For example, if you have titles and subheads as in the Novel format, you might choose a different heading level for each. This setting ensures that titles appear larger than body text, because the ebook formats ignore font size based only on heading levels.

In the Cover pane, select the cover image you imported from the “Cover image” pop-up menu.

In the Layout pane, you may want to select “Generate HTML table of contents” for Kindle and EPUB compiles: Some ebook reading apps, like Apple’s iBooks app, don’t need an HTML table of contents because they have a separate table of contents feature. However, not all ebook apps have such a feature, so you should generate an HTML table of contents if you want to be sure your readers have access to the table of contents. You can leave the default settings for the other options for most ebooks, though you should select “Center body text of HTML table of contents” if you want the table of contents to be centered.

In the Meta-Data pane, enter your title and author information. You may need to enter other information; if you are self-publishing, you should check with the site on which you are publishing your work to find out what metadata they expect to be in your book.

Click the Compile button.

Scrivener saves your ebook. Now you can load it into your favorite ebook-reading application and see how it reads!

Compile with Scrivener for iOS

If you have a long, complex project, you may want to compile it on a Mac or Windows PC, where there are lots of options, as you’ve just seen. But if you want to share a quick PDF or Microsoft Word file of your project from your iPhone or iPad, you can do so:

With the Binder visible, tap the Compile button to see a compile screen (Figure 35).

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Figure 35: To format the compiled document, tap Appearance (left) and pick a preset from the Appearance screen (right).

Under Output, tap to choose a file format (PDF, Word, RTF, Plain Text) and tap to choose an Appearance. The Appearance options govern the way a compiled document is formatted. If you stick with the default, Scrivener uses the formatting you have applied in the Editor, adding a page break between each folder.

Note: To learn how to create an Appearance preset, see Customising Compile Settings on iOS on the Literature & Latte Web site.

As desired, adjust the Remove Comments switch.

Under Page Options, set up your paper size, header, and footer.

After you are happy with your settings, tap Compile.

Scrivener compiles your project and displays the compilation.

To work with the document, either tap the Share button or tap the Application button. With the Share button, you can send it by email, save it to another app, or save it to Dropbox. With the Application button, you can open it in a different app; the options depend on which apps are available and the format of the compiled document, but may include apps such as Pages, a text editor, or a cloud service like Dropbox or Google Drive.

Meet Scrivener for iOS

In July 2016 when Literature & Latte released the $20 Scrivener for iOS, writers around the world give a collective sigh and said “finally.” While there were ways to work with Scrivener projects in iOS before, they weren’t ideal. Now, with Scrivener for iOS, you can work on your projects on your Mac or Windows PC, and continue working on your iPad or iPhone. Add a keyboard to an iPad Pro, and you may want to do much of your writing that way. (My tech editor Michael Cohen enjoys working like this.)

The main concepts of working with Scrivener are no different in iOS than they are on the desktop. In fact, if you know how to work with Scrivener for Mac or Windows, then you already know most of what you need to use the iOS version. In this chapter, I start by helping you navigate around the basic screens and interface elements, make sure you are aware of the handy and customizable extended keyboard row, and talk about how to access special keyboard shortcuts when you Use an External Keyboard.

I finish the chapter by talking about how to use iTunes or Dropbox to move your projects between a desktop computer and Scrivener for iOS, in Sync with Scrivener for iOS.

Note: I described how to Compile with Scrivener for iOS at the end of the previous chapter.

Get Started in iOS

When you first open Scrivener for iOS, the app walks you through a few welcome screens that contain essential tips, like pinching and spreading your fingers to zoom text. Once you’ve swiped through those screens, you see the Project view, with its link to a tutorial and an empty list of available projects.

To transfer an existing project to your iOS device, see Sync with Scrivener for iOS, ahead.

To start a new project, tap Create Project or tap the plus button at the top of the screen. Name your project and tap Create. If Scrivener asks whether you want to store the project on your device or in Dropbox, choose which you prefer. (If you choose Dropbox, the project won’t automatically sync to Dropbox; see Sync While You Work, later.)

Note: While Scrivener on the desktop offers a number of project templates, Scrivener for iOS offers just one template, the Blank project. If you want to use a more complex project, it’s best to create it on the desktop and then sync it so you can use it in iOS.

Most of the main elements of the desktop app are reproduced on the iPhone and iPad. Figure 36 shows the app with a project open on an iPad. Tap an item in the sidebar to view it.

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Figure 36: My Moby-Dick project on an iPad. Notice the various interface elements placed along the edges, including the toolbar across the top of the main pane and the Project Settings button at the lower left.

Note: If you’re entirely new to Scrivener, you might want to read the Tutorial, which is available from the Project view under Help.

Accessing the Inspector

Unlike on the desktop, where the Inspector is visible at the right of the Scrivener window, iOS, with more limited screen space, does not display the Inspector at all times. To view the Inspector, tap the Inspector button in the toolbar or press and hold on a text’s name in the Binder.

Accessing the Corkboard

The Corkboard is available only on the iPad, since there’s not enough room on an iPhone to use it efficiently. To access the Corkboard, view a project and then in the Binder, tap the Corkboard button next to any folder.

Using the Formatting Palette

When you work on the desktop, you use the Format Bar to style text, set justification, and more, but to conserve screen space, Scrivener for iOS provides a Formatting Palette (Figure 37).

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Figure 37: In iOS, the Formatting Palette offers similar options to the Format Bar found in the desktop app.

To format your project, tap the Format button on the toolbar (on the iPhone, this button is on the extended keyboard row, in the third set of buttons—see Use the Extended Keyboard Row, ahead). You can add bold or italic to your text, apply paragraph styles, change justification, spacing, and much more.

Checking the Settings

As you start working in Scrivener for iOS, be sure to look through its settings to make sure they’re configured optimally for you. Open the iOS Settings app, scroll down to Scrivener, and look through the options for Editor, Spelling & Substitutions, Corkboard Navigation (iPad-only), Background Colors, and Syncing & Sharing.

Working with the Sidebar

The sidebar appears at the left of the main view when a project is open on the iPad, or as its own screen on the iPhone.

Rearranging Files in the Binder

You probably want to rearrange files in the Binder at some point. Scrivener has a neat way of allowing you to move items where you want.

In the sidebar, tap the Edit button. Now you can drag any Binder item up and down by sliding the item’s drag handle. (You can see this handle at the right of the items in the Binder in Figure 38.) To move an item into another item, or indent it or outdent it, tap the Movement Mode button at the bottom of the sidebar, tap an item to select it, and then tap one of the arrow buttons at the bottom of the sidebar to move it (Figure 38). When you’re finished moving items in the Binder, tap Done.

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Figure 38: I’ve indented Script in the Binder by selecting it and tapping first the Movement Mode button at the bottom left and then the Right arrow → button (both buttons are circled above).

Managing Files with Move and More

You may want to carry out other operations on items in the Binder, such as duplicating a file, copying a file to another folder, or converting a file to a folder. To do this, left-swipe an item to display two buttons:

Move: Tap the Move button to see a menu offering a number of options, including moving a file to the top level of the Binder, moving it into a new folder, or putting it in the Trash.

More: The More button lets you duplicate a file, convert a file to a folder, move it to the Trash, and more.

Tapping More to Turn On Quick Reference

On the iPad only, one useful feature available from the More button, (described just above) is Quick Reference. This is similar to the QuickReference feature in Scrivener on the desktop, but since iOS cannot display a floating window, Scrivener instead displays the contents of the file in the sidebar. This is a good way to view two items at once: your main document displays at the right, and the document you view in Quick Reference Mode shows up in the smaller column at the left.

When you use Quick Reference, you may prefer to view the Scrivener interface in Expanded Mode so that the columns are of equal width. To do so, tap the Project Settings button at the lower left and then, under Sidebar, tap Expanded.

Viewing the Sidebar in Compact or Expanded Mode

If you’re using Scrivener on an iPad, you can switch the sidebar from the default Compact Mode to the wider Expanded Mode.

In Expanded Mode, it’s easier to read long filenames and you may prefer it when viewing items side-by-side using Quick Reference (described in the sidebar just above). Expanded Mode also displays a full synopses for a file if you’ve entered a synopsis for it—and if the display of synopses is toggled on, in the Project Settings popover, in the Binder settings.

To change this mode, tap the Project Settings button at the lower left and then, under Sidebar, tap Expanded or Compact.

Working in Full Screen

One advantage of working on an iOS device is the lack of distractions. Since, for the most part, you can see only one screen from one app at a time, you aren’t bothered by other windows or apps. But by default, Scrivener on the iPad displays your texts while still showing the Binder. If you want to hide the sidebar and just view your text, tap the Full Screen button on the toolbar; Scrivener hides the sidebar. To return to the sidebar, tap Manuscript at the top left of the screen.

Scriptwriting

Just as Scrivener is a great tool for scriptwriting on the desktop, Scrivener for iOS offers scriptwriting features. To access these features, in Project view, tap the Project Settings button, tap Editor, and then toggle on Scriptwriting and tap Done.

Note: If you import a project with script documents from the Mac or Windows version of Scrivener, the iOS app will toggle on Scriptwriting automatically.

With Scriptwriting on, you can:

Turn on Scriptwriting for a document in the Binder: With any text file in the Binder open, tap the Inspector button, tap Editor, and then toggle on Scriptwriting.

This switches the document to Scriptwriting Mode, which has several effects. The document’s icon in the Binder becomes yellow, and the document adopts scriptwriting formatting. If you start typing in a new script element, the text is formatted with Courier Prime 12 point, a monospaced font.

Add a new scriptwriting document: Tap the plus button below the Binder to add a new document to your project, and in the New Document screen, make sure the Scriptwriting switch is on (Figure 39). In a new scriptwriting document, the Scene Heading element is selected, and you can start typing right away.

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Figure 39: Once you’ve turned on Scriptwriting for a document (Scriptwriting is being turned on for a new document at left here), you can tap the menu at the top of the document to choose a script element (right).

As with Scrivener on the desktop, the app provides several script elements—Scene Heading, Action, Character, Parenthetical, Dialogue, Transition, and Shot. These are available from a menu at the top of the document (Figure 39, above), and the app switches to what is generally the next appropriate element when you press Return. If you use an external keyboard, pressing the Tab key changes to the next element.

Use the Extended Keyboard Row

Typing on an iOS device can be problematic, since you need to switch keyboard views often in order to type most punctuation or to move around in your text. Scrivener for iOS makes typing much easier by adding an eight-button extended keyboard row above the shortcut bar (Figure 40). Three button sets are available for this row; to access the other two, just swipe the drag handle at the center of the row.

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Figure 40: The first extended keyboard row has a red outline here; swipe on the drag handle in the middle of the row to see the others.

By default, the first extended keyboard row contains common punctuation marks, the second row has buttons for navigating text, and the third has buttons to add links and footnotes, change justification, highlight text, modify text color, and more.

But it gets even better: you can fully customize any of these buttons. Press and hold one to bring up the customization dialog and choose from dozens of options for characters (such as punctuation), formatting, and navigation. Put the buttons you use the most often on the first row, and set up other buttons on the other rows.

To hide the extended keyboard row on an iPad, tap the button at the right of the shortcut bar. Tap the button again to show the row once more. Another way to hide or show the extended keyboard row is to open the iOS Settings app, tap Scrivener > Editor, and then toggle the Keyboard Row switch.

Use an External Keyboard

You may want to use an external Bluetooth keyboard with Scrivener for iOS, especially if you’re working with an iPad. You may even have Apple’s Smart Keyboard for the iPad Pro, which turns your thin, light iPad into a powerful writing machine.

With the exception of Apple’s Smart Keyboard, which pairs automatically when connected to the iPad, you need to pair your Bluetooth keyboard with your device: make sure the keyboard is powered on, open the Settings app, and tap Bluetooth. If you need more help, check your keyboard’s documentation.

When your external keyboard is connected, you can use keyboard shortcuts, and Scrivener offers plenty of them. Press and hold the Command key (or Alt key if there’s no Command key) on the keyboard to bring up an overlay that lists the available shortcuts (Figure 41).

[picture]

Figure 41: Scrivener offers lots of useful shortcuts for external keyboards. If you see dots (circled here), you can swipe horizontally to see more shortcuts.

Make sure to swipe when you see little dots at the bottom of the shortcut list to reveal more shortcuts.

These shortcuts are contextual; they depend on what you’ve selected. If you haven’t tapped an item in the Binder, you’ll see shortcuts to create a new document or move among documents, but if you’ve selected a file in the Binder, the shortcuts will be for formatting, adding footnotes, compiling, and more.

Note: To see all the shortcuts in one place, refer to the Literature & Latte knowledge base article Keyboard Shortcuts & Gestures.

Sync with Scrivener for iOS

Scrivener for iOS offers two ways of syncing projects to other devices: the iTunes File Sharing feature and the cloud-based Dropbox file sharing service. The former requires that you connect your device with iTunes on a Mac or Windows PC in order to copy a project, while Dropbox requires that you have a Dropbox account and that all your devices have an Internet connection in order to sync.

With iTunes File Sharing, you must keep track of which version of your project is the latest, and be careful to rename or discard older versions. With Dropbox syncing, Dropbox maintains just one current copy of your project on all your devices. So long as you pay attention and make sure that Dropbox has finished syncing your project, you can continue working on different devices without generating different versions of your project.

Copy Projects with iTunes

Although many Scrivener users prefer to use Dropbox to sync their projects between their iOS devices and computers, if Dropbox isn’t to your liking, you can copy your projects from or to a Mac or Windows PC through iTunes. If you make changes on your Mac or PC, you must then transfer the project back to the iOS device and replace that copy.

To copy a project to an iOS device from a Mac or Windows PC running iTunes, do the following:

If you don’t use the iTunes Wi-Fi sync feature for your iOS device, connect your iOS device to the computer with a cable.

In iTunes, use the icon to the right of the Media Picker menu to select the iOS device (Figure 42). iTunes displays the Summary pane, showing information about your iOS device.

[picture]

Figure 42: If more than one iOS device is connected, choose the one that you want to copy your Scrivener project to.

Click Apps in the iTunes sidebar.

Scroll down to the File Sharing section at the bottom of this pane, and then click Scrivener in the Apps list. You see any projects that are on your iOS device, as well as the Tutorial folder.

Click the Add button near the lower right, and navigate to find the project; select it and click Add. (Or drag the icon for the project into the iTunes window and drop it in the Scrivener Documents list.)

Click Sync.

iTunes copies the project to your iOS device, and you can access it by tapping it on main screen. If you modify this copy in Scrivener for iOS, the copy on your computer will not change. You may want to rename the iOS copy so that it’s more obvious which version of the file is which; press and hold the filename to edit its name.

To copy a project from an iOS device to a computer, follow the first four steps above. Then select the project in the Scrivener Documents list and drag it to your Mac or Windows desktop. Or, click the Save To button and choose a location to save the project.

Warning! Make sure that the latest version of your project is the one on your iOS device. If not, you’ll have two versions of a project that are out of sync.

Sync Projects to Dropbox

For most people, syncing to Dropbox is a lot more practical than using iTunes File Sharing. It ensures that your projects sync even when you’re not able to connect your iOS device to a computer and allows you to access the projects from any device or computer that can access your Dropbox folder.

As I mentioned earlier, in Sync Projects between Computers with Dropbox, you can get a free Dropbox account with 2 GB storage from the Dropbox Web site.

Warning! If you’re accustomed to working with Dropbox syncing, you may assume that Dropbox will automatically sync your Scrivener projects. In the case of Scrivener for iOS, however, you must periodically tap the Sync button or set the app up to sync automatically when you close a project (or both). I explain the details below.

To sync from Scrivener for iOS to Dropbox, you first need to set a few things up. I’ll tell you how to do that, then I’ll explain how to sync a project as you’re working on it.

Note: In order to sync a project with Scrivener for iOS you must be using Scrivener for Mac 2.8 or later, or Scrivener for Windows 1.9.5 or later.

Set Dropbox Up for Scrivener

If you haven’t already done so, install Dropbox’s free iOS app on your iPhone and/or iPad.

Because syncing with Dropbox can consume a lot of data over a cellular connection, if you plan to sync a bunch of projects from your computer to iOS right away, I recommend carrying out the next set of steps while your iOS device has a Wi-Fi connection.

To connect Scrivener for iOS to Dropbox:

In Scrivener for iOS, tap the Sync button and tap Link Dropbox.

A dialog tells you that Scrivener wants to open Dropbox. Tap Open.

The Dropbox app opens (you may need to enter a passcode or use Touch ID if you’ve set it to require authentication), and it asks you to allow Scrivener to access files and folders in your Dropbox. Tap Allow.

Select a folder inside your Dropbox folder—either the default Apps/Scrivener folder or another folder—and tap Done. I recommend the default Apps/Scrivener folder unless you already store your Scrivener projects in a different Dropbox folder. Note that you can sync from Scrivener for iOS to only one Dropbox folder.

Dropbox sets up the sync and switches back to Scrivener.

The Scrivener Projects view now shows any projects previously on your device in an On My iPad/iPhone list, and it shows a new Dropbox list, containing any projects in the folder that you selected in the steps above.

You can move project files on your computer into the selected folder. Once you’ve moved them, tap the Sync button to pull them into Scrivener for iOS and see them in the Dropbox list.

Note: Scrivener for iOS syncs to Dropbox only those projects that are under Dropbox in the Projects view. If you have projects under On My iPad/iPhone, you need to first move them to Dropbox to sync them. To do this, tap Edit at the top of the Projects view, then drag a project from On My iPad/iPhone to Dropbox, and Scrivener will move it. However, it will not sync it to Dropbox until you manually tap the Sync button.

Tip: In Scrivener’s settings (go to the iOS Settings app, then tap Scrivener), use the Syncing & Sharing settings to get a warning if you’re not on Wi-Fi and there is a lot of data to be synced.

Sync While You Work

In order to sync projects with Dropbox as you work in iOS, you need to understand that sync is not automatic. Since Scrivener projects contain many files, there would be too much a risk of sync conflicts if it were constantly updating as you worked. Therefore, you need to manually sync your projects.

To sync all your projects:

If you’re working on a project, switch back to the Projects screen. This closes the project, so no more changes can be made.

Tap the Sync button. This tells Scrivener to sync all your projects. Scrivener displays a Dropbox dialog as it syncs. (On an external keyboard, you can press Command-Shift-S instead of tapping the Sync button.)

To sync just the project you are working on:

Tap the Project Settings button that displays below the Binder.

Tap Sync Now.

You may want to do this regularly; every half hour, every hour, or every time you take a break.

You can also have Scrivener automatically sync projects when you close them. In the iOS Settings app, go to Scrivener > Syncing & Sharing > Sync Projects on Close. You can choose Never, Wi-Fi Only, or Always. If you tap Always, you won’t need to manually sync your projects as often: every time you return to the Projects screen, Scrivener syncs your work. You get the same result if you select Wi-Fi Only, except that your projects won’t sync if your iOS device doesn’t have a Wi-Fi connection.

Note: For more on syncing Scrivener projects, see Literature & Latte’s Dropbox Syncing with iOS knowledge base article.

Learn More

Throughout this book, you’ve seen how you can leverage the powerful tool that is Scrivener to create and manage projects, and write texts from short stories to novels, from screenplays to theses.

Now that you know the basics of using Scrivener, I suggest that you check the program’s manual for more details about the features you use most. To do this, choose Help > Scrivener Manual. The manual is updated regularly, so each time there is a new program update, there will be new content in the manual. If you save the manual to view it separately (when viewing it, choose File > Save As to save a copy of the manual where you want), make sure to replace that copy each time the program is updated.

Also, in Scrivener for iOS, look on the Projects screen for the helpful tutorial, which points out important concepts and tips for working effectively on a mobile device.

To learn more about Scrivener, visit the Scrivener Web site, where you can get support for the program, read and post in its forums, and follow its blog. The forums are particularly useful if you have questions about using the program, or have feature requests you’d like to share with the developer. And the Knowledge Base offers a number of frequently asked questions, and links to articles and videos about using Scrivener.

The Scrivener Web site has a number of screencasts presenting introductions to the program and walkthroughs of many of its features. These resources can help you understand some of the more complex features, as well as the basics.

I’ve included testimonials from a number of authors in this book, but you can read dozens of other comments on the Literature & Latte Web site’s Testimonials page. You’ll see the broad range of writers who work with Scrivener.

About This Book

Thank you for purchasing this Take Control book. We hope you find it both useful and enjoyable to read. We welcome your comments.

Ebook Extras

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About the Author

Kirk McElhearn writes about Macs, iOS devices, iTunes, books, music, and more. He is a Senior Contributor to Macworld, where he is The iTunes Guy, and he contributes to TidBITS and other publications. Kirk has written and co-written more than two dozen books about using the Mac, including Take Control of iTunes 12: The FAQ, Take Control of Audio Hijack, and Take Control of LaunchBar.

Kirk’s Web site, Kirkville, presents articles on Macs, iOS devices, books, music, and much more. A lapsed New Yorker, Kirk has lived in Europe for more than 30 years; he currently lives in a farmhouse near Stratford-upon-Avon, in the United Kingdom. You can email Kirk at kirk@mcelhearn.com or follow him on Twitter: @mcelhearn.

Author’s Acknowledgments

It has been a pleasure to write this book, and create a new version, especially in such good (virtual) company.

Working with Keith Blount, the creator and developer of Scrivener, has been interesting and rewarding. Keith has built a unique tool, one that I’ve used for many years, and I’m proud to be able to write about it. Keith has been a big help every step of the way, providing comments and advice, and the most detailed change lists of any software I’ve seen, making the update process simple.

It was a great pleasure to once again work with editor Michael Cohen, author extraordinaire and Moby-Dick fan. His enthusiasm for Scrivener is motivating, and the many puns he inserted as comments into the manuscript during the editing process gave me chuckles. Thanks Michael.

Thanks, as always, to the woman behind the curtain, Tonya Engst, for her guidance and advice in making this book just exactly right.

Thanks to my son Perceval for help with some of the screenshots in this book.

The latest edition of this book was written in Nisus Writer Pro on a 5K iMac, with the help of a 12-inch MacBook, an iPad Pro, and an iPhone SE, under the influence of some wonderful Chinese green teas and wulongs, and some first flush Darjeelings. Titus the Cat helped keep me alert as I worked, asking for food, and occasionally bringing toys to my office when he wanted to play.

To relax and keep my mind nimble, I like to see performances of Shakespeare plays; I live a few miles from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s two theaters in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. If you’re a Shakespeare buff like me, check out my articles about Shakespeare and his plays.

The soundtrack for this update included music by the Grateful Dead, John Coltrane, The Clash, Bill Nelson, The Cure, John Dowland, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Glenn Gould, Toru Takemitsu, Sviatoslav Richter, the Emerson String Quartet, and more.

About the Publisher

TidBITS Publishing Inc., publisher of the Take Control ebook series, was incorporated in 2007 by co-founders Adam and Tonya Engst. Adam and Tonya have been creating Apple-related content since they started the online newsletter TidBITS in 1990. In TidBITS, you can find the latest Apple news, plus read reviews, opinions, and more.

Credits

Publisher: Adam Engst

Editor in Chief: Tonya Engst

Editor: Michael E. Cohen

Production Assistant: Lauri Reinhardt

Cover design: Sam Schick of Neversink

Logo design: Geoff Allen of FUN is OK

Thanks to Literature & Latte for making this ebook possible! Also, thanks to the authors who added flavor to this ebook by contributing personal testimonials: James Fallows, Jason Snell, Jeff Abbot, and Michael Marshall Smith.

More Take Control Books

This is but one of many Take Control titles! Most of our books focus on the Mac, but we also publish titles that cover iOS, along with general technology topics. You can buy Take Control books from the Take Control online catalog as well as from venues such as Amazon and the iBooks Store.

Copyright and Fine Print

Take Control of Scrivener 2
ISBN: 978-1-61542-134-3
Copyright © 2016, Eyes of the World Limited. All rights reserved.

TidBITS Publishing Inc. 50 Hickory Road, Ithaca NY 14850, USA

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