Tutorial

Just a quick note before we begin: this tutorial assumes that you are using
the default preferences. If necessary, you can reset them to the defaults by
clicking on the “Defaults” button in the Preferences pane, available under
Scrivener > Preferences… If you haven’t made any changes to the preferences,
you don’t need to worry about this. Right, on with the tutorial.

When you first open a Scrivener project, by default you are presented
with two panes:

1. THE BINDER
Quick Start Note: If you’re viewing the “Quick Start” collection, that
collection appears in place of the binder, so you need to switch back to
viewing the full binder for this part to see what you are reading about. Do
so by clicking on the “X” in the bottom-right of the binder area. (Ignore this
if you did not choose only to view the “Quick Start” collection when you
started this tutorial.)

On the left, you can see a list of files: the “binder”. This is an outline view
that contains three default folders: “Draft”, “Research”, and “Trash”. You can
rename these folders to whatever you like by double-clicking on them (in
some of the templates, for instance, the Draft folder has been renamed to
“Manuscript”). The binder is where you organise your project by creating a
structure and dragging and dropping documents wherever you want.
The contents of the Draft folder represent the text fragments that will be
compiled into one long document when you export or print using File >
Compile…, which is the standard way of preparing your finished project for
printing or final formatting in a dedicated word processor. This is very much
the raison d’être of Scrivener - to assemble the text of your manuscript in the

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Draft folder for printing or export. (As such, the Draft folder is unique in that
it can only hold text files.)
The Research folder can hold text or media files (images, PDF files, video
files and so on), and is where media files will be placed by default if you
accidentally try to import them into the Draft folder at any point. You don’t
have to put all research files into the Research folder, though - you can create
other folders for your support materials anywhere you want (and even give
them custom icons).
The Trash folder speaks for itself; whenever you delete a document it
ends up there. Documents aren’t deleted completely until you select “Empty
Trash…” from the Project menu - so there’s no way you can accidentally
delete a file in Scrivener.

2. THE EDITOR
Next to the binder you have the main editor, which displays the current
document. The main editor is what you are looking at right now as you read
this text document. There are several ways to load a document in the editor,
but the one you will use most often is simply selecting a file in the binder, as
you did to load this one. Scrivener allows you to create or import any number
of text documents. You can also import image, web, QuickTime and PDF
documents. To import documents, use File > Import > Files… or simply drag
the files you wish to import from the Finder into the binder of your Scrivener
project.
You can change the current document by clicking on another item in the
binder. Try that now—click on “Alhambra” inside the “Research” folder (you
may need to expand the Research folder by clicking on the triangle next to it
first) and then return here (“Step 1: Beginnings”).
Done that? So now you know that this area can be used to view different
types of document, not just text.

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Let’s try switching between documents again.

Quick Start Note: If you’re viewing the “Quick Start” collection in the
binder, you can return to it now by selecting the “Quick Start” tab above the
binder.

You see the document on the left beneath this one, the one entitled “Step
2: Header View”? Click on it now. (Or, if you are going through the “Quick
Start” collection only, click on “Step 5: The Inspector”.)

You have just switched between documents. You might use different
documents for different chapters, different scenes, different ideas, articles,
characters, whatever you want. There are other ways of switching between
documents, too. Another one you will use frequently is the header view. See
that bar at the top of the text, the one that has the arrows on the left of it and
says “Step 2: Header View” in it? Well, that is the header view (which is
sometimes also referred to as the “header bar”). You can rename the document
by clicking into the title of the header view, and there are several options
available in a menu if you click on the icon next to the title.
The arrows on the left of the header view that point left and right are the
history navigation buttons and work much like Safari’s navigation arrows -
they allow you to step back and forth through the documents you have had
open in the editor. The up and down arrows on the right of the header bar
step through the contents of the binder sequentially. To see the difference, try
the following:

• Click on the “Alhambra” image document in the Research folder again

and then click on the left arrow in the header view. You will be returned

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to this document, because this was the one you had open last.
• Click on the right arrow and you will be returned to the “Alhambra”
image document again. (Make sure you come back here afterwards
though!)
• Now, with this document open, click on the down arrow on the right and
then click on the up arrow again to return here. Note how the down
arrow takes you to the next document in the binder, whereas the right
arrow takes you to the next document in the navigation history.

While we’re here, note that the selection highlight in the binder does not
necessarily follow what is being displayed in the main editor—if you change
the contents of the editor using the navigation arrows, for instance, the
selection in the binder will not change (and nor should it). You can thus
navigate around using the header view without losing track of the original
document on which you were working in the binder. Note however that the
up/down arrows do affect binder selection because they are intended as an
alternative way of navigating through the binder contents.

Another useful way of switching documents is to drag a document from

the binder into a header view. Try this now—grab the document entitled “Step
3: Footer View” on the left and drag it into the header view above. The
navigation bar will turn grey, and when you let go the document will
change…

You may notice that as with the history navigation buttons, dragging a
document into the header bar does not affect the binder selection. If you ever
find that after navigating through multiple documents you are not sure where
the current document is located in the binder, you can simply use View >
Reveal in Binder (Opt-Cmd-R) to force the binder to show you where you are.

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Try that now.

Okay, so let’s get familiar with the editor. At the bottom of the window,
you can see a grey bar containing a pop-up button with a percentage in it
(100% by default) and a live word and character count. This is the “footer
view”. Try typing something in the yellow area below:

Done that? You will see that the word and character count in the footer
view changes as you type. Now try changing the percentage in the pop-up
button at the bottom, too (click on it and select a new percentage)—you will
see that you can make the text bigger or smaller (useful for tired eyes).

SCRIPTWRITING MODE
The footer view will change depending on what you are viewing inside
the document. For instance, if you are typing a script (such as a movie
screenplay), the footer view will give you information on the various script
elements. Try selecting Format > Scriptwriting > Script Mode - Screenplay
from the main menu now. The word and character count will disappear and
you will see another pop-up menu appear on the right saying “General
Text” (this just means that the currently selected text isn’t recognised as a part
of a screenplay). Click into the text on the line below:

Click into this text.

Now try selecting different elements from the pop-up menu on the right
of the footer view. You will see that the above text automatically gets
reformatted to the script element you selected, and the footer view will show

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what will happen if you press the tab or enter keys (which will move you to
the next script element). Note that you can hit Shift-Cmd-Y to bring up that
menu automatically and then hit one of the keys specified in the menu to
select an element without taking your hands off the keyboard (you can also
use Opt-Cmd and the number keys to change elements).
Scriptwriting mode is saved on a document-by-document basis, so you
can switch between documents that use script formatting and regular text
documents. The icons of documents in the binder that use scriptwriting mode
are yellow so that you can easily tell them apart from other text documents.
Right, let’s return to normal prose mode now. Select Format >
Scriptwriting > Script Mode - Screenplay again to deselect screenplay mode.

NOTE:
If you ever find that the word and character count has disappeared from
the footer bar, it is most likely because you have accidentally switched into
scriptwriting mode, so even if you’re not writing a script it’s a good idea to
familiarise yourself with how to enter or leave scriptwriting mode, as
described above.

OTHER FILES
For PDF files, the footer view allows you to navigate between the pages.
Click on “spacewalk_info” in the Research folder to test this out, and then
come back here by clicking on the “back” arrow in the header view.

All good so far, I hope. Now let’s familiarise ourselves with some other
basic features. Click on “Step 4: Composition Mode” in the binder.

Composition Mode is a very nice feature for blocking everything else out

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while you write. I’m not going to pretend it’s innovative or anything—I think
The Soulmen, the creators of Ulysses, were the first to implement something
like this for a text editor—but it is very handy. Either hit Opt-Cmd-F or click
on “Compose” in the toolbar above – do it now!

You should now be in composition mode—it’s just you and your text.
(“Composition Mode” is essentially a full screen mode, but we call it
“Composition Mode” to avoid confusion with OS X’s standard full screen
window feature, which Scrivener also supports.)

Some things you need to know about composition mode:

1) Move your mouse to the bottom of the screen. You will see that a
control panel appears. From here you can change the text scale, set the
position and width of the “paper” (the text column), fade the background in
and out and view the word and character counts of the document. There are
also buttons for displaying the keywords panel and Inspector (we won’t go
into that right now, though, as we have yet to talk about keywords and notes
—come back and try them out once you’ve gone through the rest of the
tutorial) and for exiting composition mode. You can also hit Opt-Cmd-F or the
Escape key to exit composition mode.

2) You can only enter composition mode for text documents.

3) By default, composition mode uses “typewriter” scrolling (another

Ulysses first, I believe). This simply means that as you type, the text will
remain in the centre of the screen vertically so that you don’t have to stare at
the bottom of the screen all the time. You can turn this off via Format >
Options > Typewriter Scrolling (Ctrl-Cmd-T), and you can also turn it on for

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the main editor if you wish.

4) You can customise the look of composition mode. You can use the
Appearance pane of the Preferences to change the background colours and
you can change the colour of the text in composition mode via the Compose
pane of the Preferences (so you could set it up to have a retro green-text-on-
black-background look, for instance). You can even add a background image,
if you want, by going to View > Composition Mode Backdrop.

Okay, let’s move on to “Step 5: The Inspector” while still in composition

mode. To do so, move the cursor to the top of the screen so that the menu bar
appears. Then, from the View menu, choose Go To > Draft > Part 1: Basics >
Step 5: The Inspector.

You can leave composition mode now by hitting the Escape key on your

keyboard.

It’s now time to meet the Inspector.

Click on “Inspector” in the toolbar (the blue disc on the right, with the “i”

inside it - you may need to widen the window a little if it’s not visible). A third

pane will appear on the right of this view.

You may find this text a little scrunched up now. If so, click on the green

“zoom” button at the very top-left of the window (the third traffic-light button

that appears in most OS X windows - if you have changed your system

settings to Graphite, the traffic light buttons will all be grey, of course). In

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Scrivener, the “zoom” button is your friend. When you click on it (or Opt-click

on it on later versions of OS X - see the tip below), Scrivener does its best to

resize the window to accommodate all elements. (You can change the default

width of the editor in Preferences.)

TIP: On OS X Yosemite and above, the green traffic light button takes you
into full-screen mode - Scrivener’s window will take over the entire screen.
You can still get the old behaviour by holding the Option (Alt) key down
while clicking on the green traffic light button, though.

Right, let’s look at the inspector. At the top of the inspector, in the header

bar, you will see these buttons:

The padlock button on the far right allows you to “lock” the inspector to

a particular editor when the editor is split - we won’t worry about that for

now, though, as we haven’t looked at splitting the editor yet. The other

buttons allow you to choose what to view in the inspector (the number of

buttons that appear will depend on what you are viewing in the current

editor). The last two buttons, “Snapshots” and “Comments” (the one with the

camera and the one with the square speech bubble) are only available for text

documents, for instance. An asterisk next to one of the icons tells you that

there is content in that part of the inspector.

To begin with, make sure the leftmost button, “Notes”, is selected, and

then click on the next document in the binder, “5a: The Synopsis Index Card”.

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The first thing you will notice is the index card at the top. This appears in

the Notes, References and Keywords panes of the inspector (but not in the

Snapshots or Comments panes which require more space). The index card is

an important concept in Scrivener. You can type a synopsis of your document

into the body of the index card (note the header of the index card can be used

to rename the document, too). One of the core ideas behind Scrivener is that

every document (or chunk of text, or image, or whatever) is associated with a

synopsis, which is represented in the inspector by the index card. You can

then view these synopses in different ways (which we will come to later)

which will make outlining and organising your work easier. The best way to

understand this is to imagine that each document in Scrivener is a sheet of

paper that has an index card clipped to it containing a summary of the

document’s contents, which can then be viewed alongside other index cards

to get an overview of the whole.

You can also display an image in this area if you want. To do so, just click

on the icon of the index card with two arrows next to it in the header at the

top of the inspector and choose the image icon. The synopsis will be replaced

by a blank area containing the text, “Drag in an image.” You can then drag

image files from the binder or from the Finder into this area. (If an image is

selected for a document in the synopsis area of the inspector, it will also be

used to represent the document on the corkboard instead of the synopsis text -

we will come to the corkboard a little later.)

So that’s the index card. Below the index card are other tools to help you

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organise your work, starting with the General pane. Note that the Synopsis

and General panes can be collapsed by clicking on the disclosure triangle in

their respective header bars.

Please click on “5b: Meta-Data”. (Or, if you’re going only through the

“Quick Start” documents, click on “Step 6: End of Part One”.)

The “General” pane in the middle of the inspector contains several meta-

data elements:

Label and Status

Label and status are just arbitrary tags you can assign to your document.

You can set up the project labels and status list via Project > Meta-Data

Settings… You might, for instance, rename “Label” to “POV” (for Point of

View) and use it to hold the name of the point-of-view character for each

document. This way, you could easily run a search on all chapters that have a

particular character as the protagonist by searching on label only (by typing

the name of the character in the search field in the toolbar and then choosing

“Label”—or “POV” if you have renamed it such—from “Search in” in the

search options menu, which can be accessed by clicking on the arrow next to

the magnifying glass in the search field). Status works much the same, except

that it is meant to keep track of the state of the document—for instance,

“Finished”, “To do”, “A mess” and so forth—although you can rename it and

use it for something completely different, should you so wish.

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Created/Modified Date
Switch between the created and modified date by clicking on the arrows

next to where it says “Created:” or “Modified:”. No surprises here—as you

would expect, the created date holds the date and time the document was first

created and the modified date holds the date and time the document was last

modified and saved.

Include in Compile, Page Break Before and Compile As-Is

These options affect how the document is compiled when you come to

export or print the draft (which we will come to later). They only have any

meaning if the document is contained inside the Draft folder. They are mostly

self-explanatory: “Include in Compile” specifies whether the document

should be included in or omitted from the draft when exported or printed;

“Page Break Before” specifies whether the document should have a page

break before it (useful if it marks the beginning of a chapter, for instance);

“Compile As-Is” tells the compilation process not to change the formatting or

insert a title for this particular document, no matter what the Compile settings

are.

Next, let’s look at the “Notes” pane.

At the bottom of the inspector is the notes area, where you can jot down

anything you want that will help you with your document. If you click in the

notes header bar (where it says “Document Notes”), you can flip between

Document Notes and Project Notes. As you would imagine, document notes

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are specific to each document and will change depending on the document

you are viewing in the current editor, whereas project notes can be viewed

from any document (project notes can also be seen in the inspector when you

select one of the special root folders—Draft, Research and Trash—which have

no associated meta-data or synopses). You can have multiple project notes

associated with your project (new project notes can be added using the Project

Notes window, available from the Project menu).

Please click on “5d: References” in the binder.

Click on the next button in the inspector header bar, the one with the

picture of a bookmark on it. This switches to the “References” pane (the index

card and meta-data area will remain where they are, only the notes will

disappear to be replaced by a list of references). The references pane allows

you to store references to other documents within the project, on your hard-

disk or on the internet. By clicking on the “+” button, you can choose to add a

reference to a file on disk or you can select a document inside the project. You

can also drag documents from the binder or the Finder (or the URL from a

browser address field) into the references table. Double-clicking on the icon of

a reference will open it: external references open in their default application;

internal references open inside Scrivener (you can determine exactly where

the latter get opened in the “Navigation” pane of the Preferences). Note that,

as with notes, you can store references at the document or project level - click

on the bar where it says “Document References” to flip between Document

References (which are specific to the current document) and Project References

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(which can be viewed from any document).

(If you have experimented and double-clicked on a reference, the editor

might have been split in two, with the reference document displayed in the

other pane. If this is the case, make sure the focus is in this pane, and then go

to View > Layout > No Split before continuing - we’ll be looking at splitting

the editor in detail a little later.)

Next click on the key button at the top of the inspector to view the

keywords pane and then move on to “5e: Keywords”.

As well as Label and Status, you can also assign keywords to your

documents. Keywords are useful for adding arbitrary tags to documents that

you can use when searching. So, for instance, you could add keywords for

characters that occur in a scene, the location a scene takes place, the theme,

authors referenced, or anything else (or you can just ignore keywords

completely). You can add keywords by clicking on the “+” button, or by

hitting enter while another keyword is selected. You can also assign keywords

via the keywords panel. Open that now by clicking on the “Keywords” button

in the toolbar (the golden key icon).

A translucent black panel will appear. This shows all of the keywords

that you have created or assigned to documents so far. You can also create

keywords inside this panel and drag them to the keywords table in the

Inspector. You can change the colour associated with a keyword by double-

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clicking on the colour chip in the keywords panel. (Another way of assigning

keywords is by dragging them onto documents in the binder or the outliner

and corkboard views that we will look at later, or by dragging them into the

header view. You can assign keywords to multiple documents at once by

selecting the documents in the binder and then dragging the keywords from

the keywords panel onto the selection.)

Try dragging the keyword entitled “Assign this one” to the keywords

table.

When assigning keywords from the panel, you can optionally assign the

groups to which they belong as well. To see this in action, click on the triangle

next to “Characters” in the black keywords panel to reveal the names of some

characters. If you dragged the name of one of these characters to the keywords

pane in the inspector, only the name of the character would get assigned.

However, try holding down the Option key whilst dragging “John” to the

keywords pane in the inspector. Note how not only the keyword “John” gets

added, but also the name of its group, “Characters”.

A quick way of searching for documents that have been assigned

particular keywords is to select the keywords you want to search for in the

keywords panel and then click on the “Search” button at the bottom. (If you

hold down the Option key, the “Search” button will change to “Search All”,

which will search for the selected keywords wherever they occur in the

project, including text, notes and so on, rather than limiting the search to the

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keywords associated with documents.) The binder will be replaced by the

results of the search. (To leave the search results list, click the “X” button in the

lower right-hand corner of the binder sidebar - we’ll learn more about

searching later.)

Now click on “5f: Custom Meta-Data” in the binder.

If you click on the button at the top of the inspector with the icon of a tag

on it, you will by default be presented with a blank grey area with the

message “No Meta-Data Fields Defined” and a button with the title “Define

Meta-Data Fields…”. This area can be populated with custom meta-data that

you create for your project, and the data that can be viewed here can also be

viewed as custom columns in the outliner. This provides a way of assigning

arbitrary information to your documents. For instance, if writing fiction, you

could add a meta-data field for the time at which a scene takes place (tip:

because custom meta-data fields are text-only, enter the date and time

backwards so that it sorts properly, e.g. “1984-12-31”), or you could add a list

of characters that appear.

We first need to define some custom meta-data fields, though. Let’s do

that now:

1) Click on the “Define Meta-Data Fields…” button (alternatively, you

can choose “Edit Custom Meta-Data Fields…” from the menu that appears

when you click on the gear button in the “Custom Meta-Data” bar, or select

“Meta-Data Settings…” from the Project menu and then choose the “Custom

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Meta-Data” tab).

2) Click on the “+” button in the bottom-left of the sheet that you’ve

opened, and enter “Date” into the row that gets added to the table.

3) Click on the “+” button again and this time enter “Characters”. For

this one, also click on the “Wrap Text” button.

4) Click “OK” to accept the changes and dismiss the sheet.

The Custom Meta-Data pane in the inspector will now show the two

fields you created above. Click into the field under “Date” and type

something, then do the same for “Characters”. Note that the “Characters”

field will expand to fit the text, because you selected “Wrap Text”.

You can view all custom meta-data in columns in the outliner view, too

(which is covered in Part 2).

For many projects you may not need to touch custom meta-data at all,

but if you ever find yourself wishing for an extra piece of information in the

outliner or inspector, then it’s good to know that it’s there.

Next on to one of Scrivener’s most useful features for editing documents:

“Snapshots”.

As a writer, the chances are that you will on occasion be nervous about
committing changes to your text. This is what the “Snapshots” feature is for.
Before embarking on the editing of a document, you can click on “Take
Snapshot” (cmd-5) in the Documents > Snapshots menu. You will hear the

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sound of a camera shutter which indicates that the snapshot has been taken.
Let’s try that now…

Once you have taken a snapshot, you can edit your document safe in the
knowledge that you can return to the old version any time you so wish. Click
on the “Snapshots” button (the one with the picture of a camera on it) in the
inspector footer bar to see what I mean (you can also switch directly to the
Snapshots pane and have the inspector open if necessary by going to
Documents > Snapshots > Show Snapshots). The inspector now shows a list of
snapshots at the top, which should consist of the one you took and one I took
while writing the first version of this tutorial back in 2006. Clicking on a
snapshot in the list reveals its text in the lower part of the inspector. You can
restore an older version of your text by selecting the version you want from
the list and then clicking on “Roll Back” at the top (at which point, you will be
given the option of taking another snapshot of your current version, just in
case you forgot).

If you wish to know what you have changed in the document since the
snapshot was taken, click on “Compare”. Do that now - select the snapshot
that was taken on the 23rd August 2006 and click on “Compare”. The text in
the inspector will change to show what has been added or removed. Text that
has been added to the document since the snapshot was taken appears
underlined and in blue; text that has been deleted appears struck out and in
red. Note that the comparison only shows textual changes - it does not show
changes to the formatting.

Click on the left and right arrows at the top of the inspector, next to the
“Roll Back” button, to navigate between the changes.

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You can alter the granularity (level of detail) of the comparison by

clicking on the downwards-pointing arrow next to the “Compare” button
(which should now read “Original”, because clicking on it again will switch
back to showing the text of the snapshot without any comparisons). Often you
will find that changing the granularity will give you different results on
different documents, depending on the scope of the edits. You will usually get
the best results by leaving “By Paragraph” ticked but playing with “By
Clause” and “By Word”.

You can also compare the differences between two snapshots by selecting
two different snapshots in the list and clicking on “Compare”: if one snapshot
is selected, clicking on “Compare” compares it with the current version of the
text; if two snapshots are selected, they are compared against each other.

If you ever want more space to read through a snapshot - if you find the
inspector too cramped - you can drag a snapshot from the list in the inspector
onto the header view (see Step 2) of the main editor to load it there. If you
hold the Option key down while dragging it, the snapshot will show
comparisons to the current version of the text when loaded into the editor.

So: Snapshots are very useful for keeping old versions of your text
around and for checking what you have changed.

Now let’s move on to Step 5h for information on the comments and

footnotes pane.

Now we’ll look at the “Comments & Footnotes” pane - don’t worry
about clicking on the button in the inspector footer bar just yet though (for
your reference, though, the “Comments & Footnotes” button is the one with

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the square speech bubble).

Comments and footnotes in Scrivener work a little like comments in

Word, Nisus Writer or Pages, but they’re not exactly the same. Let’s take a
look at them.

For a start, click on the yellow highlighted text in the sentence below:

This sentence has a comment attached[ Comments get displayed and

selected as soon as they are clicked on in the main editor.].

Note how the inspector automatically switches to the Comments &

Footnotes pane, and the comment associated with the text gets highlighted.

Next, click on the grey footnote directly below the comment in the
footnote.

This sentence has a footnote attached.1

See how clicking on the note in the inspector automatically selects the
text associated with it in the main editor?

If you click on a note in the inspector, the editor will automatically scroll
to the position in the text where the note has been placed. This allows you to
use the comments and footnotes to navigate the text, so that they act like
bookmarks in a way, too. Try scrolling to the bottom of this document, and
then clicking the comment in the inspector to return to the top.

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ADDING COMMENTS AND FOOTNOTES

Let’s try adding some comments and footnotes. There are a couple of
ways of doing this. First, select some of the text in the following sentence:

Select some of the text[

ghg
] in this sentence.

Once you’ve selected a word or two in the above sentence, either click on
“Comment” in the toolbar, the “+” button in the top “Comments & Footnotes”
bar in the inspector, or hit shift-cmd-8. A new comment will be created in the
inspector and it will be selected ready for editing - add some text. Once
you’ve finished typing in the comment, hit the Escape key to return the focus
to the main editor.

Alternatively, you can just click into or after a word to add a comment or
footnote to it. This time, just click into the word “commented” below so that
the blinking insertion point (or caret) is somewhere inside it:

This sentence will be commented.

Again, click on “Comment” in the toolbar, the “+” button in the

inspector, or hit shift-cmd-8. Note how the whole word “commented” gets a
comment associated with it.

Let’s try it with a footnote too. This time, place the cursor right at the end
of this sentence, after the full stop:

This sentence will have a footnote after it when exported or

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printed.

This time, click on the “+fn” button in the inspector (note that you can
add a “Footnote” icon to the toolbar by using View > Customize Toolbar…).

Note how the footnote gets attached to the word “printed” and the full
stop after it. It generally doesn’t matter where you attach comments, because
they are usually for your own (or collaborators’) reference only, but with
footnotes you should always ensure that the footnote link (the grey highlight)
ends at exactly the place you want the footnote number to appear when
printed or exported. So, because we associated the footnote with the word
“printed” and the footnote ends at, but includes, the period at the end of the
sentence, the footnote number in the exported or printed text will appear
straight after the full stop, which is usually what you would want.

TIP: In some languages, footnote markers are placed before the final period
of the sentence rather than after it. If you write in such a language, you can
turn on “Terminate footnotes and comments before punctuation” in the
“Formatting” pane of the Preferences.

CHANGING THE COLOUR OF COMMENTS

You can change the colour of comments by ctrl-clicking on a comment (or
comments) in the inspector. The contextual menu offers a choice of default
colours, or you can open the colour panel to choose a custom colour. You can
also select a comment and hit shift-cmd-C to open the colour panel directly
and change the colour that way. (Note that you cannot change the colour of
footnotes, which use a single colour to differentiate them from comments,

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although you can choose the colour for all footnotes in the “Appearance”
pane of the Preferences.)

The contextual (ctrl-click) menu also allows you to convert comments to

footnotes and vice versa, and to revert comments or footnotes to their default
formatting (you can set the default fonts in the Preferences).

If you have a lot of comments, you can collapse individual comments

and footnotes by clicking on the disclosure triangle (the downward-pointing
arrow) in the top-left of each comment box. (You can also collapse or expand
all using cmd-0 or cmd-9 when the focus is in the inspector.)

Comments and footnotes are thus tucked away in the inspector until you
need them. When you come to export or print - which we’ll come to later -
you have a lot of control over how comments and footnotes get included in
the document. For instance, you could have all comments removed but
footnotes included as proper footnotes, or you could have comments exported
as footnotes and footnotes exported as endnotes. But if that sounds
complicated, it’s not something you need to worry about right now - just
know that if you want to make notes on your document, or add footnotes, this
is one way to do it.

Right, on to “Step 6: End of Part One”!

This brings us to the end of Part 1 of the tutorial. In the next section you
will learn about different ways of viewing and organising the documents in
your Scrivener project. With that in mind, in a moment you will be asked to
click on “Part 2: Organisation” in the binder. As will be explained, folders -
not just folders, but we’ll come to that shortly - can be viewed in several

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modes, but for now all you need to know is that when you click on “Part 2”,
you want to see the text of the folder document (folders are really just a
special type of text document, and can contain text just as regular text
documents can).

So after you click on “Part 2: Organisation”, take a look at the “Group

Mode” segmented control in the toolbar and ensure that all modes are turned
off. The control should look like this (note how nothing is selected):

If one of the segments is selected, just click on the selected segment to

turn it off. This will leave you with just the text of “Part 2” in the editor, ready
to read.

Go ahead and try that now.

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Welcome to Part 2 of the tutorial. You can now hide the Inspector by
clicking on the blue disc icon in the toolbar again if you so wish.

Quick Start Note: If you are only going through the “Quick Start”
collection, for this part of the tutorial, I recommend returning to viewing the
full binder. (If you do not, this part of the tutorial may not make as much
sense when you are asked to click on different documents and folders in the
binder.) Do so by clicking on the “X” in the bottom-right of the binder area.
(Ignore this if you did not choose only to view the “Quick Start” collection
when you started this tutorial.)

You have now learned some of the fundamental features of Scrivener. It’s

now time to move on to some of the organisational features. First, notice that

this document is actually a folder in the binder. There is no real difference

between text and folder documents aside from their icons, and the fact that

folder documents always have “disclosure triangles” next to them in the

binder (and other outline views) regardless of whether or not they have

anything inside them. Note that the folder icon for this document (“Part 2:

Organisation”) has a little text icon in its corner. This means that this folder

contains text - the text you are reading now. (It does not have anything to do

with the fact that it also has text documents inside it, such as “Step 7” and so

on.) The other major difference between folders and text documents is the

default way they get viewed when you open them. We’ll come to that in Step

7.

In fact, you can convert a folder document into a text document and vice

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versa very easily. Click on “Part 2: Organisation” in the binder to make sure it

is selected, and then go to Documents > Convert > To File in the main menu.

The folder icon changes into a text stack (the stack indicates that the text

document has subdocuments). If you go back to the Documents > Convert

menu, you will see that now you have the option of converting it back to a

folder - do that now. The idea behind this flexibility is that you can choose to

have different visual indicators for different levels of organisation, and also

you don’t have to plan in advance how you structure your project, because if

you end up using a text document as a container for other files, you can

always convert it to a folder later, and vice versa.

To create new documents, click “Add” in the toolbar. If you hold the add

button down for half a second, a menu appears that lets you choose which

kind of document you would like to add. You can also add documents via the

Project menu, footer views and contextual menus. Hitting enter in the binder,

outliner or corkboard will also create a new document (although this

behaviour can be turned off via the Preferences).

Okay, move on to Step 7 when you’re ready (you will need to expand

“Part 2” by clicking on the disclosure triangle next to it). Or go get a cup of tea

and a biscuit.

Scrivener’s editor has four modes - four different ways of viewing your
work - and learning how and when to switch between them will make your
Scrivener experience much more comfortable. The four modes are as follows:

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1. SINGLE DOCUMENT MODE

In this mode, the editor shows the contents of a single document,
whether it’s a text document, an image, a PDF file or whatever. The editor is in
single document mode right now.

2. CORKBOARD MODE
In corkboard mode, the editor shows the subdocuments of the current
document as index cards on a corkboard. Let’s take a look at how that works
right now:

a) Try clicking on the “Part 2: Organisation” folder in the binder, and then
click on the image of the corkboard in the toolbar (the one in the middle of the
group of three View/Group Mode icons) so that it is selected:

Once you’ve taken a look at the corkboard, return here. See how the
subdocuments of the folder you had selected appeared as index cards? If you
open the inspector right now and select the “Notes” pane, you will see the
index card associated with this document - which you will have seen on the
corkboard, because this document is a subdocument of the “Part 2:
Organisation” folder.

b) Now - well, after you’ve read this bit, so you know how to get back -
click on the corkboard icon again, while viewing this document. You will see
that the corkboard is blank. This is because this document (“Step 7: Changing
Editor Views”) doesn’t have any subdocuments - but it could. After you’ve

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seen the blank corkboard, click on the text icon to the left of the corkboard
icon in the toolbar icon to see the text of the document again:

3. OUTLINER MODE
Outliner mode is much like the corkboard mode, allowing you to see the
subdocuments of the current document, except that it shows them as rows
and allows you to view various columns of information. Try repeating
everything you did for the corkboard mode above, but this time instead of
choosing the corkboard icon, click the outliner icon on the right (and
remember to come back here afterwards):

4. “SCRIVENINGS” MODE
“Scrivenings” is the term for Scrivener’s combined text mode, and it is
one of Scrivener’s coolest features. It allows you to view or edit multiple text
documents as a composite - as though they were one long document.
Scrivenings mode is available when there are multiple documents available to
view as one. If you look at the “View Mode” control in the toolbar at the
moment, you will see that the left-most icon shows a single sheet of paper.
This indicates that the composite text mode is not available here, because you
are viewing a single document that has no subdocuments. So, let’s look at one

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that does.

After reading this part, once more click on “Part 2: Organisation” in the
binder. When you do so, you will notice that the “View Mode” icon in the
toolbar changes. In fact, it even gets renamed - it becomes “Group Mode”:

(You will notice that when you select the “Part 2” folder again, it returns
to outliner mode - this is because Scrivener remembers which mode you last
used to view a group, and will automatically use it for viewing groups until
you change it again.)

The single text icon on the left has now changed into a stack of paper.
This means that it is possible to enter Scrivenings mode. To do so, you simply
click on the button with the icon of the stack of papers. Try that with the “Part
2” folder now, and after selecting the stack of papers icon scroll all the way
down to the bottom of the editor, then return here by clicking back on “Step 7”
in the binder.

Done that? You should have seen that the text from all the various
subdocuments of the “Part 2” folder - including this one - were combined into
one long document, with dividers between them. You could have edited the
text, and your changes would have automatically been applied to all of the
individual files you altered.

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WHAT TO REMEMBER WHEN SWITCHING VIEWS

You’ve now switched between all the main views. The main thing to
remember is that when you are viewing a single document that has no
subdocuments, there are only three view modes available - because you can’t
enter Scrivenings (composite text) mode when viewing only a single
document. In this case, the three view mode icons in the toolbar are labelled
“View Mode” and the left-most icon is a single sheet of text. You click on the
mode you want to view - single document mode, corkboard mode, or outliner
mode.

When you are viewing a folder or a document that has subdocuments,

though, there are four modes available - the single document, corkboard and
outliner mode, and also Scrivenings mode. When this is the case, the three
view mode icons in the toolbar are labelled “Group Mode” and the left-most
icon is a stack of papers. In this mode, you can return to single document
mode by deselecting all of the segments of the Group Mode control - that is,
click on the one that is selected to deselect it - just as you did at the end of Step
6 to view the text of the “Part 2” folder.

You can also switch between view modes using the top three items in the
View menu, or using the cmd-1, cmd-2 and cmd-3 keyboard shortcuts.

I know, I know - now you really do need that cup of tea, and probably
another biscuit too. Once you’re done, we’ll take a look at some of these view
modes in more detail.

Before delving further into the view modes, let’s pause to check out
another important feature of Scrivener. The chances are that from time to time
you are going to want to split the editor so that you can view two parts of the

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same document, or two entirely different documents, alongside one another.

So let’s do that now. Go to View > Layout > Split Horizontally. Alternatively,
click on the button in the right of the header view above (the square with the
horizontal line through its middle):

Suddenly, this document is displayed in two panes. Note that through

the Layout menu, you can also choose a vertical split, to get rid of the split
altogether, or to hide the header and footer views for the current document
view. (You can also Opt-click on the header button to create a vertical split, or
to toggle to a vertical split if you already have a horizontal one and vice
versa.)

All well and good, but we don’t want to be limited to viewing only one
document at a time, do we? We can do that in any word processor worth its
salt (whatever that means[ No need to write in: it refers to the fact that Roman
soldiers used to get paid in salt. (The great thing about these tutorials is that you’re
always getting users writing in to point out your mistakes or tell you stuff about Romans.
If you spot any mistakes or have any interesting but relevant factoids, please don’t

hesitate to write to contact@literatureandlatte.com.)]), after all. And naturally, we’re

not limited at all. Click on any document in the binder, and it will be shown in
the editor that currently has the focus. You can tell which editor currently has
the focus because when there is a split, the header bar of the focussed editor
turns blue. You can also drag a document from the binder to the header view
of the editor in which you wish to view it. Let’s do that now. Make sure that
this document, “Step 8”, is visible in the bottom pane, and then drag
“ThisIsBuzzAldrin” from inside the “Research” folder onto the header view of

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the top pane. “ThisIsBuzzAldrin” is an audio file, so you won’t see much
other than a media control bar in the lower part of the top pane (actually, that
audio file is the beginning of the coolest phone message I ever picked up;
sadly, the message was not for me, but for my wife).

Now you can play the audio file in the top pane whilst typing in this
bottom pane. You can control the media file using the keyboard shortcuts
defined in the View > Media menu. Cmd-Return will play or pause the file,
for instance—without your having to click outside of this text. These shortcuts
are very useful for transcription work, or for referring to a video file while
writing. Also note the button in the lower-right of the media control bar:

That is the “pause and rewind” button. If you click it, it will turn blue,
indicating that it is on. When “pause and rewind” is turned on, whenever you
pause the media file it will automatically be rewound a couple of seconds
(you can determine exactly how many seconds it gets rewound in the
Navigation pane of the Preferences). This is another useful feature for
transcription work.

But of course, you can use the split view to view any two documents in
Scrivener alongside one another. The snazziness of this feature should
immediately be apparent: you can refer to another text, PDF, image or
QuickTime document in one view while typing in another.

TIP: Double-clicking on the central divider will resize the two editors so
that they are of equal height or width.

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Make sure this bottom pane has the focus (click in it if you are not sure)
so that its header view is blue, and click on “Step 9” so that it opens here.

The corkboard is one of Scrivener’s most distinctive structural tools, so

let’s look at that now.

BASIC USAGE
The corkboard shows the immediate subdocuments of the selected
document. To see what I mean, click into the top editor to give it the focus (it
should still be showing the “ThisIsBuzzAldrin” media file; if so, click
somewhere in the control panel - near the volume control slider for instance -
so that the header bar of the top editor turns blue, or blue-grey if you use the
Graphite theme in your system Preferences). Once the top editor has the focus,
click on the “Draft” folder in the binder, and ensure that the capsule “Group
Mode” control in the toolbar has the corkboard selected.

Note how the corkboard in the top editor now shows the folders, “Part 1”
through to “Part 6”, represented as index cards. If you look in the binder, you
will notice that these five folders are the immediate subdocuments of the Draft
folder - that is, they are only indented one level from the Draft folder. The
corkboard thus allows you to concentrate on different levels of your structure.

Next, in the corkboard itself, double-click on the folder icon in the second
card, which is titled “Part 2: Organisation”. This will drill down to show the
contents of the “Part 2” folder represented as index cards. Each card shows
the title of the document and a synopsis area that can be used to remind you
of the content of the document or to note what you intend to write in the
document later. You can edit the synopsis or title by double-clicking into a

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card, and you can drag the cards around (and into the binder) to reorder your
documents.

If the inspector is open while the corkboard (or outliner) is open, it will
show information for the currently selected document.

You can change the corkboard settings - the number of cards that get
drawn across, their width and so on - by clicking on the button with the image
of four index cards in it in the right of the footer bar beneath the corkboard:

(Incidentally, if you don’t like the corkboard background, you can change
it to a colour of your choice in the Corkboard section of the Preferences. You
can also change the way the cards look, to get rid of the rounded corners and
make them look more like real index cards.)

CONTROLLING THE OTHER EDITOR FROM THE

CORKBOARD
Note the button containing the rightwards-pointing arrow in the

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corkboard footer bar:

Click on it now. You will notice that it turns blue, to indicate that it is on.
When this button is on, selecting documents in the corkboard (or outliner) will
open them in the other editor if there is a split. Try clicking on the “Step 7”
card, then on the “Step 8” card, and then on the “Step 9” card (which should
bring you back here).

See how clicking on the cards opened the documents associated with
them in this editor? That’s a useful trick, as it means you can hide the binder
and use the corkboard or outliner to navigate if you want to, or just use the
corkboard or outliner as secondary navigation tools.

Click on the arrows button again so that the arrows turn back to grey,
then try clicking on the cards in the corkboard once more - this time nothing
will happen, because the button has been deselected.

FREEFORM MODE
Scrivener’s corkboard is not like a real corkboard in that it is linear and is
really just another way of displaying the subdocuments of a folder or
container. However, you can enter a freeform mode, which allows you to
move cards where you want and experiment. You switch between freeform
and regular modes using the capsule control on the right-hand side of the
corkboard’s footer bar - try clicking on the part of the segment with the three
stacked cards now:

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You will now be presented with the cards arranged in no particular order.
You can drag cards around, and you can select multiple cards by clicking and
dragging the mouse to create a marquee rectangle to enclose the cards you
wish to select. Dragging the cards around in freeform mode has no effect on
the order of their associated documents in the binder (unlike in regular mode).
If you arrange the cards in an order you would like to be used in the binder,
though, you can click on the “Commit Order” button in the footer bar to have
Scrivener change the order of the documents in the binder to best-fit their
arrangement on the freeform corkboard.

Feel free to play around with the cards (but don’t commit the order
unless you want to mess up the order of the tutorial!), and once you have
finished, return to regular corkboard mode by selecting the grid segment of
the capsule in the corkboard footer bar.

CORKBOARD STACKS
You aren’t limited to displaying the contents of only one container on the
corkboard - you can show the subdocuments of several containers by
“stacking” the corkboard. This is really easy to do:

1. Click into the corkboard in the top editor to make sure that it has the
focus (remember, the header bar of the top editor should be blue to indicate it
has the focus).
2. Click on the “Part 1” folder in the binder.
3. Holding down the Command key, click on “Part 2” in the binder.
4. Holding down the Command key again, click on “Part 3” in the binder.
5. Repeat with “Part 4” and “Part 6”.

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Now scroll down through the corkboard. Note how the subdocuments of
each of the folders you selected are all displayed on the corkboard, with a
dividing line between each section (and alternate sections have a darker
background colour).

Also take a look at how the regular mode/freeform mode capsule control
in the corkboard footer bar has now been replaced by a capsule control that
allows you to choose how the different sections should be arranged - as a grid,
in rows, or in columns:

Try clicking on each of the different options to see how they affect the
corkboard.

VIEW OPTIONS
Go to View > Corkboard Options > Show Label Pins and ensure that it is
ticked. The result will depend on the look you have chosen for the index cards
in the Preferences. If you are using the default, rounded look, then each card
that has a label associated with it will now have a colour chip in its top-right
corner; if you are using a more traditional index card look, then each index
card will now display a pin holding it in place that is the colour of the label
associated with the document. Alternatively, you can select View > Use Label
Color In > Index Cards to tint the actual cards with the colour of the label. You
can also select Show Stamps via View > Corkboard Options, which places a
diagonal stamp on the cards—this stamp shows the status associated with the
document represented by the index card.

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Ctrl-clicking on an index card brings up a contextual menu that allows

you to change the label (and thus the colour of the pin) and status - you can
use the contextual menu to assign a label or status to multiple cards, too, by
selecting all the cards you wish to affect before Control-clicking on one of
them.

There are other viewing options available in the View > Corkboard
Options menu, but we won’t cover them here (though they are all explained
in the Help file, of course).

One more thing to note, before we move on, is that media files get
displayed on the corkboard as Polaroids. Click in the corkboard above to
ensure it has the focus, and then click on the “Research” folder to see what I
mean. (You can turn off this behaviour in the Preferences if you would prefer
all files, even images, to be represented as regular index cards.)

Okay, we covered a lot there! Remember that you don’t have to use the
features that don’t appeal to you. Not all writers like corkboards - some
Scrivener users never touch the corkboard at all, preferring the outliner, which
we’ll come to next.

When you’re ready, then - after a stretch of the legs, a glass of wine, a
good curse at the prolixity of this tutorial’s author, whichever helps - let’s
move on to “Step 10” and look at the outliner in more depth.

The binder is a very useful organisational tool, but one of the key
concepts behind Scrivener is the linking of synopses to documents – and the
binder does not show synopses. The corkboard, as we have seen, is a good
way of viewing and editing the synopses of multiple documents, but not

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everyone likes corkboards and besides, the corkboard only shows one level of
a group’s subdocuments at a time. This is where the outliner comes in: it
provides a way of structuring multiple levels of your project at the same time
as seeing much of the data associated with your documents.

Click into the upper pane (which should still show the corkboard) so that
it receives the focus (its header bar will turn blue), and then click on the
“Draft” folder in the binder. Next, select the “Outliner” segment of the
“Group Mode” capsule in the toolbar:

The upper view will now have turned into an outliner, showing all of the
items contained inside the Draft (because that is what we selected in the
binder). Click on a disclosure triangle next to one of the folders to reveal more
documents (or Opt-click on a disclosure triangle to open all subfolders inside
the folder too).

Next, with the outliner still focussed, click on “Part 2: Organisation” in

the binder. The outliner will now show only the subdocuments of the “Part 2”
folder.

You can click on the “Hide Synopses” button in the outliner footer bar to
get rid of the synopses and show titles only.

Choose which columns appear by clicking on the downward-pointing

arrow button in the top-right of the outliner title bar, or via the View >
Outliner Columns menu. The outliner allows you to edit the titles and

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synopses of various documents, assign the label or status, set the “Include in
Compile”, “Page Break Before” and “Compile As-Is” flags and reorganise
documents by dragging them around. You can also view various other meta-
data, such as the word and character counts of documents. The “Characters”
and “Date” custom meta-data you created in Step 5f are also available in the
list of columns, so you can add those for viewing and editing in the outliner if
you wish.

Dragging Tip: By default, when you drag items around you can drop
them on other items as well as between them (dropping “on” places the
dropped document inside the document it was dropped on, below the other
subdocuments). Holding the Option key down while dragging restricts drops
to between-only – this can be useful when you want a little more accuracy.

Some traditional outlining features are available in Scrivener via the

Documents menu (such as Move > Up, Down etc), so be sure to check that
out.

The columns of the outliner can be sorted by clicking on the column

headers. Click once to sort in ascending order (e.g. alphabetical), click again to
sort in descending order, and click again to get rid of the sort:

As with the corkboard, you can select multiple folders in the binder to
view their subdocuments in the outliner - try clicking into the outliner (to give

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it the focus) and then selecting “Part 1” and “Part 2” in the binder, for
instance.

We can get rid of the split now. To do so, click on the button in the right
of the header bar for this editor:

Once you’ve done that, go to Step 11.

Let’s take a closer look at “Scrivenings” mode. The whole point of

Scrivener is to make working on a long text easier by allowing you to break it
up into smaller pieces, but you will often want to see how those smaller pieces
fit into the greater whole. This is what Scrivenings mode does.

There are two ways of entering Scrivenings mode:

1) You can select a folder or container in the binder that contains text
subdocuments, and use Scrivenings mode to view all of the documents inside
the folder (including the folder itself, if it has text associated with it) as though
they were one long document.

2) You can select arbitrary documents in the binder and view them as
though they were a single document.

We already did (1) in Step 7, so let’s try viewing arbitrary documents this
time. Once you’ve finished reading this paragraph, click on “START HERE” at

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the top of the binder and then, holding down the Command key, click on
“Step 7: Changing Editor Views” and “Step 11: Scrivenings”, so that all three
documents get selected. Once that’s done, ensure that the stack of papers is
selected in the “Group Mode” control in the toolbar, and then scroll down
towards the bottom of the text that gets loaded into this editor and look for
the pink highlighting below—do that now.

Back here yet?

Do you see what just happened? “Scrivenings” temporarily combines the

selected documents into a single text. You can select non-contiguous
documents or you can choose to view and edit the contents of a folder or
group. If you were writing a novel, you could therefore write each scene of a
chapter in isolation and then view and edit the whole chapter as though it
were a single document using Scrivenings; or you might run a search on a
particular character and view the results as one long text so that you can see
how the storyline for that character pans out in isolation.
So that you can see where one document ends and the next begins, there
is a horizontal dividing line between sections, but if you prefer you can also
display the document titles above each section by going to the Format menu
and selecting Options > Show Titles in Scrivenings.
The Inspector displays information about the chunk of text you are
currently editing.
An important point to note about Scrivenings is that you cannot make
textual edits across the individual document boundaries, so if you select a
range of text that spans more than one document block and try to edit it, you

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will just hear a beep. (You can change formatting across boundaries though.)
Now it’s time to click on “Step 12” (or, if you’re taking the “Quick Start”
route, skip ahead to “Step 17”)…

We’ve looked at how to split the editor so that you can view more than
one document at the same time. The main window limits you to two editors,
because of the way they interact with one another (and for space reasons), but
sometimes you may wish to have more than two documents open at the same
time - and this is what QuickReference panels are for.
QuickReference panels are Scrivener’s internal variation on Mac OS X’s
Quick Look feature. They allow you quickly to open, view and edit the
contents of any document in the project. Let’s try opening a couple now.
We’ll start by opening this document in a QuickReference panel so that
we can keep it open while we open some others. Click on the “QuickRef” icon
in the toolbar, and then resize the window that appears as you wish, and
scroll to the bottom of its text.
…
Right, you should now be reading this document inside the
QuickReference panel. Next, go to the Window menu and select “Float
QuickReference Panels”. This will make it so that QuickReference panels
always stay open and on top of the main window as we open other
documents. Now click on “Alhambra” in the Research folder of the binder
and then hit the space bar.
You should now have a second QuickReference panel open, this one with
an image in it.
Now, go to View > QuickReference > Research > spacewalk_info. Now
you should have a PDF file open in a separate window too.
Note that you can change the label and status associated with the
document using the pop-up buttons in the top corners of the Quick Reference

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panel. You can also view the synopsis, notes and other meta-data associated
with the document using the pop-up button in the bottom-right of the
window, which currently says “None”. Click on that button in this window
and select “Notes” to see what I mean.
You can therefore use QuickReference panels to refer to other documents
while you write, and they work great with composition mode too.
Let’s return to where we were in the binder. Make sure this
QuickReference panel has the focus (click into it if you are not sure) and then
select “Reveal in Binder” from the View menu. Once you’ve done that, close
all of the QuickReference panels and move on to Step 13.

At the risk of telling you the blindingly obvious, project search allows
you to search for documents inside your project that contain a particular
word, phrase, label, keyword and suchlike. The way it works will be familiar
to anyone who has used Mail - just click in the search field on the right-hand
side of the toolbar and type the phrase you wish to search for.

TIP: Clicking on the downwards-pointing triangle next to the magnifying

glass in the search field brings up a menu that allows you to modify the
search options. For instance, you can tell Scrivener only to search in the
main text of documents, or only in the labels, and so on. If you hold down
the Option or Command keys while clicking on one of the search
parameters, the selected parameter will be added to any already selected.
That is, normally if you have previously chosen “Synopsis” under “Search
In” in the search menu and then choose “Notes”, this will tell Scrivener to
search in document notes instead of in document synopses. However, if you
hold down Command or Option while clicking on “Notes”, this will tell
Scrivener to search in document notes as well as document synopsis.

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Click in the search field now and type “collection”.

Note how the binder is replaced by a purple-striped “Search Results” list.
This is a list of documents that contain the word “collection” somewhere
within them. Also note that the search term - in this case “collection” - is now
highlighted in red in the current document. So you can click on the documents
in the search results list and easily see at a glance where the term you searched
for is in the document. For longer documents, just click into them and go to
Edit > Find > Find… (or hit cmd-F) to bring up the Find panel, which will be
automatically loaded with the current search term, so that you can search
through the document contents.
To get rid of the search results list, you can click on the “close” button on
the right of the search field:

Or on the button in the footer bar of the search results:

Simples.
Now on to “Step 14: Collections”.

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Are you still with us? We’re most of the way there, I promise.
We’re going to look at a feature called “Collections” next. Collections
provide a way of keeping lists of documents that have nothing to do with
their binder order. The easiest way to understand what I mean is to create a
collection, so let’s do that now.

CREATING AN ARBITRARY COLLECTION

Click on the “Collections” button on the left-hand side of the toolbar. You
will see an extra area appear at the top of the binder with a blue and purple
tab in it, entitled “Binder” and “Search Results”. Try clicking on the “Search
Results” tab.
See what happened? The last search you ran gets run again, and its
results appear where the binder was.
Now click on the “Binder” tab to return to the binder.
Next, click on the icon in the header view to bring up the header bar
menu, and click on “Lock in Place”:

The header bar will turn pink. This indicates that the editor is now
“locked”, which means that clicks in the binder will have no effect. Try

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clicking on different documents in the binder to see what I mean - they will no
longer get loaded into the editor when selected as they normally do.
Now hold down the Command key and click on several documents in
the binder to select them. Once you have selected five or six - it doesn’t matter
which ones - click on the “+” button in “Collections” bar at the very top of the
binder:

The binder will temporarily disappear, to be replaced by a flat list

showing only the documents you selected. You haven’t moved those
documents, though - they are all still in their rightful places in the binder. No,
you’ve just created a collection (more specifically, an arbitrary collection) and
when you created it, the selected documents were automatically added to it.
To see what I mean click on one of the documents in the collection list and
select “Reveal in Binder” from the View menu. This will show you where the
document is located in the binder. Click back on the collection tab once you’ve
tried this, to return to the collection.
You can rename the collection to anything you want, and you can change
its colour by double-clicking on its colour chip:

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Go ahead and try changing the title and colour.

Note that the new collection gets created behind whichever collection is
selected. Because we had the binder open when we created our new
collection, it got added behind the binder tab. You can drag and drop the tab
to be behind the Search Results tab again if you want, though.

Let’s add some more documents to the collection. Click back on the
Binder tab and select some different documents. Once you’ve selected some,
drag and drop them onto your collection tab.

Then click on the tab again to return to the collection - you will see that
the documents you dragged onto the tab are now in the collection too. (Note
that if you hold the mouse over the tab for a moment before you drop, the
collection will be shown automatically.)

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TIP: If you hold the Option key down while dragging a folder onto a
collection, then all its subdocuments will get added to the collection too.

You can drag and drop the documents in the collection list to arrange
them into any order you want. If we unlocked this editor, clicking on
documents in the collection would open them in the editor, just as happens
when selecting documents in the binder.

Collections can be used for whatever you like. You might, for instance,
use them to gather together documents you need to do more work on, or you
might use a collection to experiment with the order of documents before
committing to the arrangement. (Once you were happy with the arrangement,
you could select all the documents, ctrl-click on them, and use Move To from
the contextual menu to move them all to the location in the binder you want
them.)

SEARCH COLLECTIONS
There’s another way of creating collections, too - you can save your
search results as collections. Let’s create a collection of all documents with
their status marked “To Do”:

1) Click on the downwards-pointing arrow next to the magnifying glass

in the search field in the toolbar, and select “Status”.
2) Click in the search field and type “To Do”. The binder will be replaced
by the regular purple search results list (with its associated “Search Results”
tab selected in the Collections pane above). You will see that the status for
each is marked “To Do”, as you would expect.
3) Click on the downwards-pointing arrow next to the magnifying glass
in the search field again, and this time select “Save Search As Collection…”

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from the bottom of the menu.

4) Enter a name for the search, e.g. “To Do” (it will use the search phrase
by default) and hit “OK”.

The search results will now change colour and you will see that a new tab
has appeared in the list of collections named “To Do”. Again, you can rename
this or change the colour to one of your choosing. The magnifying glass icon
on the left of the tab indicates that this is a search collection. These are
different to regular, “arbitrary” collections in that you can’t arbitrarily add
documents to them or move them around. Instead, every time you click on a
search collection, the search gets run again. To see what I mean:

1) Click back on the Binder tab.

2) Click on the “START HERE” document at the top of the binder and hit
the space bar to bring up a QuickReference panel.
3) Click on the pop-up button in the top-right of the QuickReference
panel and choose “To Do” from the list of options to change the status.
4) Repeat this with a couple of other documents if you like.
5) Now click on the “To Do” collection again.

Note how the “START HERE” document is now part of the “To Do”
collection, because we set up the “To Do” collection to include any documents
that have “To Do” set as their status.
Search collections can be used in various ways. You could use one to
keep track of the storyline of a character in a novel, to highlight documents
that contain a word you know you over use, and so on.
The “Search Results” tab is itself really just a special type of search
collection - it will always show the results of the most recent search, even after
you close and reopen the project.

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To delete a collection, just select its tab and then click on the “-” button in
the “Collections” bar. Deleting a collection has no effect on its constituent
documents - they are not deleted and remain in their place in the binder.

There’s lots you can do with collections - or you don’t have to use them
at all. Like most things in Scrivener, they are available if you need them but
can be ignored if you don’t.

Let’s unlock the editor now. Click on the icon in the header view again
and this time deselect “Lock in Place”. You can also click on the “Collections”
icon in the toolbar to hide the collections pane if you want.

Now it’s on to “Part 3”. Expand the “Part 3” folder if it is collapsed, and
then click straight on “Step 15: Importing”.

As far as it regards you.

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If you decide Scrivener is the program for you, the first thing you are
going to want to do is import your existing work. This is simple. Just go to
File > Import > Files…, select the files you wish to import, and click the
“Import” button. All files and folders that are supported by Scrivener will be
imported, including subdirectories, maintaining the file structure from the
Finder in the binder. (Note that if you have selected a document that is
contained inside the “Draft” folder in the binder, when you go to File >
Import > Files… you will only have the option of importing text file types; this
is because files are imported at the location of the selection in the binder and
the “Draft” folder only supports text files. Thus, if you wish to import media
files, make sure that the selection is not in the “Draft” folder.) You can also
drag files directly from the Finder into Scrivener’s binder.

The following file types are supported by Scrivener’s import feature:

▪ RTFD
▪ RTF
▪ DOC
▪ DOCX (Leopard and above only)
▪ ODT (Leopard and above only)
▪ TXT / plain text
▪ PDF
▪ Final Draft FDX
▪ Final Draft FCF
▪ HTML
▪ HTM
▪ WEBARCHIVE
▪ Most image files
▪ Any file supported by Quicktime (video and audio)

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(Note that the one main file format we are unable to support is the Apple
Pages format. This is because Apple does not make the .pages format publicly
available, and so it is not possible for developers or companies outside of
Apple to read and write files in the .pages format. To import Pages files, you
should therefore use the File > Export To feature of Pages to create copies of
your documents in one of Scrivener’s supported formats - most likely Word
format.)

You can also import web archives directly from the internet by selecting
Import > Web Page… From the File menu.

You can actually import any file at all - it doesn’t have to be one of the
supported formats listed above. If you import an unsupported file type, it will
appear in the editor as an icon. Double-clicking on the icon will open the file
in the program associated with it on your machine.

On to Step 16...

What if you want to use Scrivener but are worried about being locked in?
The Scrivener project file format (.scriv) is unique, so what happens if you
want to move your work elsewhere? Fear not: you are not locked in at all.
Simply select all of the files you want to export in the binder (everything if
you so wish) and then go to File > Export > Files… Enter the name of the
directory that will be created to hold all of the files, choose your preferred text
file format and whether you want to include notes and meta-data in the
export (which will include the synopses), then hit “Export”. All the selected
files will be exported with the binder structure intact; that is, the virtual
folders in the binder will become actual folders in the Finder. (Wait, the

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folders in the Finder are virtual, too… I need to get out more.)

That’s how you can get anything out of Scrivener. Generally, however, the
files you have inside a Scrivener project are there to support your writing - the
text you have been slaving over - writing, editing, cutting up, rearranging - in
the Draft folder. The whole point of Scrivener is to produce that text, so at
some point you are going to want to export or print it as a single document or
manuscript.

To find out how, go to Step 17.

Quick Start Note: If you are only going through the “Quick Start” notes and
are eager to get up and running, you might want to skip this section and
come back to it later, as this is quite a long section. It is a very important
section, though, as it covers how to compile the contents of your Draft
folder into a single text for exporting and printing. So if you don’t want to
read this now, be sure to come back and read it before you need to export or
print your work. (If you want to skip it, you can click on the “Quick Start”
tab above the binder again, or simply move on to “Step 24: And Finally…”.)

Scrivener’s purpose is to provide a sort of writer’s studio; a place where

you throw everything, all of your research, ideas and scribblings, with the aim
of mashing it together into a draft which you can then either print for posting
off to a publisher, or export, whether to another program for tweaking or to an
e-book format for self-publishing. This is where Scrivener’s Compile feature
comes in.
The Compile feature takes everything that is in the Draft folder and
generates a single, formatted document from it. You have complete control
over the output - you can choose from various file formats (or print directly

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from Scrivener), you can choose whether to include document titles (or
synopses and notes for that matter), set up headers and footers, and even
completely change the font and paragraph formatting if you so desire—so
there’s no need to write in the same font you use for printing and exporting
unless you want to.

“Compile…” can be found at the bottom of the File menu. Try selecting it
now, but then click “Cancel” and come back here.

At first glance, it probably doesn’t look like much. This is because it is set
up by default to show only the most basic options - you can choose a preset
from the “Format As” pop-up button and a file format from the “Compile
For” button, modify a few basic options, change the font if you so wish, and
then click on “Compile” to create a basic document containing the merged
contents of your Draft folder.

Let’s try that now - we’ll generate a PDF preview of the draft of this
tutorial project:

1) Go to File > Compile…

2) Ensure that “Original” is chosen next to “Format As” (this is the
default setting, and exports all of the text in your draft as it appears in
Scrivener).
3) Ensure “Print” is selected next to “Compile For”.
4) Click on “Compile”.
5) The print preview pane will appear. You could click on “Print” to print
your manuscript, but we want to see it as a PDF. So instead, click on the
“PDF” button in the bottom-left of the panel and select “Open PDF in
Preview” (note that you can choose “Save as PDF…” to save a PDF document

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to disk, which does exactly the same as choosing “PDF” from the “Compile
For” menu).

Preview will open to show you the entire contents of the Draft folder
combined into one long document… It seems I wrote a lot.

You can choose from one of the other “Format As” presets to format your
draft differently. For instance, try compiling again, just as you did above, but
this time choose “Standard Manuscript Format” format (be sure you choose
“Print” from the “Compile For” list again, as changing the “Format As”
option can affect the selected file format). This time, you will find that the
draft has been compiled using a Courier 12-point font with double line-
spacing.

TIP: Most of the presets in the “Format As” menu will apply different
formatting to your manuscript - different fonts, different page settings, titles,
separators and so on. If you find yourself getting frustrated when trying to
tweak the Compile settings, or if you want to start from scratch, it is often a
good idea to select “Original” and start from there. “Original” is set up so as
not to override any of the formatting - the exported or printed manuscript
will look just like the text in the main editor. You can then work through the
Compile options, setting them up as required.

The other most important options in this area are “Front matter” and
“Font”. “Front matter” allows you to choose a document, or a folder of
documents, in the binder that should be used to provide front matter for your
manuscript (title page, contents page, dedication and so on). You could just
insert the title page and other front matter at the top of the Draft folder and
not worry about this option. The benefit of using this setting, though, is that it

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makes it easy to switch between different sets of front matter for different
formats: while your body text will always stay the same, you may want
different front matter depending on whether you are submitting to an editor
using standard manuscript format, self-publishing, or creating an e-book.
The “font” setting allows you to change the font for everything in the
manuscript to a particular font face. This is just a quick and easy way of
changing the font - much more control is available, as we’ll see (this setting
the same as “Quick Font Override” in “All Options” - see the yellow tip box
below for more information).

That’s all you need to know for creating basic print-outs and exported
files from your draft. You may have noticed, though, that the options we have
currently been looking at are all inside the “Summary” tab of the Compile
panel. It’s called the “Summary” tab because it just shows a few of the most
commonly-used options, and allows you to make quick changes to existing
formats. At some point, however, you may find that you want more control
over the document being produced—at which time you’ll want to play with
the full range of options available. Let’s look at them now. Try going back to
the Compile sheet and clicking on “All Options”:

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The Compile sheet will expand to show a whole raft of options. You
don’t really need to worry too much about all of these settings at the moment
- the main thing to know is just that this is where you come to export or print
your entire manuscript, and that the Compile settings provide complete
control over how your manuscript will be formatted should you need it.
Let’s try a quick custom compile though. (You may wish to open this
document in a QuickReference window, by clicking on the “QuickRef” panel
in the toolbar, so that you can refer to it easily while the Compile sheet is
open.) This time, with the compile sheet expanded to show all of the
advanced options, try the following:

1) Choose “Original” from the “Format As” list again, to reset the
formatting.
2) Take a look at the “Contents” pane. This allows you to choose which

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documents get compiled. The pop-up button at the top, which currently says
“Draft”, can be used to choose only a subfolder of the Draft (so that you could
compile and print only a single chapter, for instance) or to choose one of the
collections we created in Part 2 (so you can compile only the documents that
appear in a particular collection). You can uncheck the “Include” button for
any document you don’t want included in your compiled document, and
there are some filter options at the bottom of this pane, too. You can thus fine-
tune which documents go into your final manuscript. All we’re going to do is
click on the pop-up button at the top that currently says “Draft”, and choose
“Part 1: Basics” - that is, we are only going to compile the “Part 1” folder.
3) Now, from the list of settings on the left, choose “Separators”. This
section allows us to choose how our documents should get stitched together -
whether we should put page breaks between the different components or just
line breaks and so forth. (Note: you can also insert page breaks between
documents by selecting “Page break before” for individual documents in the
“Contents” pane or the main editor inspector. That is usually best used as a
last resort, however - it’s generally better to set up page breaks in
“Separators” if possible.)
4) For the “Text separator”, choose “Page break”.
5) For the “Folder and text separator”, choose “Single return”. This will
ensure that the text of any documents following a folder will be added
straight after the folder title—which we will now set up in our formatting
options.
6) Click on “Formatting”. This is the part of the Compile sheet that allows
you to choose how your text looks - what font it uses and suchlike. At the top
is a list with a folder, text group and text document in it, each saying “Level
1+” next to them (text groups are just text documents that have other text
documents grouped inside them - have a look at “Step 5: The Inspector” to see
an example of one). Each document type can be formatted separately.

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7) At the top of this pane you will see a button entitled “Override text
and notes formatting”. It is unchecked at the moment, which means that the
text (and notes should you choose to include them) of each document will
appear in your compiled manuscript exactly as they do in the editor, just as
they did the first time you compiled using the “Original” setting. We’re going
to override the formatting, though, so click on this button to tick it. You’ll see
that the text in the blue text area at the bottom turns black - it was grey before
to indicate that its format wasn’t being overridden.
8) Click on the top item in the “Type” list, the “Level+” row with the
folder icon in it. Note that each row has tick boxes for “Title”, “Meta-Data”,
“Synopsis”, “Notes” and “Text”. These tick boxes determine which parts of
the document will be included in your text. So at the moment, only the text of
folder documents, text groups and text documents will be included, because
only the “Text” button is ticked for each. Let’s change this. Click on the “Text”
button in the folder row to remove “Text” and then tick the “Title” button
instead. Note how the text in the bottom pane has changed to show the word
“Title” in bold. This bottom text area gives you a preview of what the
document will look like, so in this case it shows us what folder documents
will look like when exported or printed - they will show only their titles, in
bold text.
9) Click into the bold “Title” text. Note how the ruler and formatting bar
become active when you do so. Click on the centred text button, and click on
the “A” button to choose a different font. Make the font big.
10) Above the formatting bar, click on the “Page padding” stepper
control to change the page padding to “8 lines”. This will add eight lines of
blank space at the top of folder documents whenever they start on a new
page. (You’ll see what I mean in a minute.)
11) Next, click on the text group row (the middle one), and tick the “Title”
button. Leave the “Text” button ticked for this one, though. The blue text area

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at the bottom will be updated to reflect your changes.

12) Click in the bold title in the blue text area. Get rid of the bold and
change it to underlined and italicised instead using the format bar, and
change its colour to blue using the colour control (hold down on the black
rectangle next to the yellow one for a second to see a palette with colour
choices in it - this will allow you to change the colour).
13) Click into the main text area and change the formatting to whatever
you want - use the “A” button to change the font, the ruler to change the
paragraph indenting, and the line spacing control in the format bar to change
(who’d have thought it?) the line spacing.
14) Click on the last row, the text icon with “Level 1+” next to it, and do
the same again, but this time choosing a different format for the title and text.
15) Right, at last, click on “Compile” and open a PDF preview in
Preview.app again.

Take a look through the PDF document to see what you’ve done - you’ve
added titles and completely changed the way the text looks.

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TIP: The “Formatting” pane gives you complete control over the fonts,
indents, line spacing and other paragraph styling that the various elements
of your compiled document will use. If all you want to do is change the font
face, however, you can use the “Quick Font Override” pane instead. This
allows you to change the font used throughout the compiled document
without having to worry about all of the other settings. It’s mainly useful for
making a quick change to an existing compile format. For example, suppose
you select the “Standard Manuscript Format” preset from the “Format As”
menu. As noted above, this is set up to compile your manuscript using a
Courier 12pt font and double-line spacing, using Courier headers and
footers too. What if you want to print or export using this exact manuscript
format, except that you want to use Times New Roman or Arial instead of
Courier? In this case, all the settings are just as you want them except for the
font face. You could go through the “Formatting” pane and change the fonts
for all the various elements there, and change the font used for headers and
footers in the “Page Settings” pane too. But if all you want to do is change
the font face, then it’s much easier to use “Quick Font Override” for this
instead. In that pane, simply tick “Override all fonts with face” and choose
the font face you want to use, and you’re done.

Once you’re happy with the PDF file you’ve created, return to Scrivener
and select “Compile” again - you can just click on the button in the toolbar to
save going through the File menu. We’re going to make another tweak, as
follows:

1) Choose the “Formatting” pane again.

2) Select the third row, the “Level 1+” with the single text icon next it.
3) Click on the “Add formatting level” button next to the “Options…”
button:

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A “Level 2+” row will appear, slightly indented below the “Level 1” text
row. The “Level 1” row will no longer have the plus sign after it, either. I’ll
explain what this means in a moment. If you click between the “Level 1” and
“Level 2+” rows, you will see that the formatting in the text area at the bottom
is the same for each - that’s because the new formatting level is created using
the same formatting as the selected row by default.
4) Click on the “Add formatting level” button again so that a “Level 3+”
row is created.
5) Make sure the “Level 3+” row is selected and then click into the blue
text area and change formatting to something glaring. Change the text colour
to bright green or suchlike.
6) Click on the “Compile” button again and once more view the results in
Preview, this time looking out for the green or lurid text formatting you
added.

What just happened?

What you should have seen is that all documents contained inside the
“Step 5: The Inspector” group came out using your lurid formatting, but
everything else stayed the same as the previous compile. Why? Because you
can set up the formatting on a per-document-level basis if you like, and that’s
what we just did. If you look at the binder, the folders “Part 1: Basics” and so
on are all contained in the Draft folder at the first level - that is, they are one
level deep in the Draft folder. If you then look at “Step 1”, “Step 2” and so on,
these are two levels deep in the Draft folder, because they are contained inside
the “Part 1” folder which itself is contained in the Draft folder. “5a: The

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Synopsis Index Card” and the other documents grouped inside the “Step 5:
The Inspector” document are on the third level. And so it was only these
documents that were affected by our “Level 3+” formatting settings.
Incidentally, the “+” indicates that this is the last level we have set up
formatting options for, and so it will be applied to any levels of document in
the Draft that go deeper (so if we’ve only set up two formatting levels,
documents three or four deep in the binder will receive the same formatting
as those at two levels deep).

TIP: When you click on rows in the “Formatting” table, the documents that
will be affected by that level and type are highlighted yellow in the binder.

Right, one final tweak. Because this is a tutorial project, I have numbered
all the documents in the binder - “Part 1: Basics”, “Step 3: Footer View”, and
so on. You wouldn’t normally do this. Instead, you would just give documents
meaningful titles and let Compile handle the numbering for you using the
auto-numbering tags available from Edit > Insert > Auto-Number. To see what
I mean, let’s go back to the “Formatting” pane of Compile once again and do
the following:

1) Click on the “Level 1+” folder item at the top of the list.
2) Click on “Section Layout…”.
3) In the “Title Prefix and Suffix” tab, enter “Chapter Eins” followed by a
single return in the “Prefix” box, then click “OK”.
4) You will see that “Chapter One” now appears at the top of the preview
area - “Zwei” is the tag for title-case numbering. You can format this the same
way as you do anything else, by clicking into the text and using the format
strip to change the font, spacing, alignment and suchlike.
5) Click on “Compile” and once again check the results in Preview. Note

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how “Part 1: Basics” now has “Chapter One” above it.

6) Back in the “Formatting” pane of Compile, untick “Title” for the
“Level 1+” folder icon, compile, and open in Preview again.

Note how the prefix can be used on its own - now it just says “Chapter
One” at the top of the document. Chapter numbers are added to the novel
template and other templates that come with Scrivener in exactly the same
way. A complete list of tags that can be used with Compile is available by
going to the Help menu and selecting “Placeholder Tags List…”.

There’s a lot more, but this should be enough to get you started - take a
poke through the various option panes available in Compile (the list on the
left will change to show different options depending on the export format).
Also take a look at the “Options…” and other “Section Layout…” panels
available from the “Formatting” pane - you’ll see that you can do all sorts of
things, such as choose the case for titles and set the first pararagraphs of each
section to have no first line indent.

Okay, onto the next section…

Quick Start Note: If you are taking the “Quick Start” route, you can now
click on the “Quick Start” tab above the binder again, or simply move on to
“Step 23: And Finally…”.)

Okay, so you imported all your work into Scrivener. But you had a lot of
long documents and now you want to chop them up so that you can
experiment with moving the various parts around. No problem. The
Documents menu features Split > At Selection and Split > with Selection as

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Title. These features allow you to chop up existing documents very easily and
quickly. With “Split at Selection”, you simply click inside a text document so
that the cursor is at the point where you want to split the document. Selecting
this menu option will split the document into two at the cursor point.

“Split with Selection as Title” works in much the same way, except you
select a range of text before clicking on it. The selected text will become the
title of the newly-created document. This is useful, for instance, if you have a
long document containing several chapters each with a title you want to use
as the document title.

You can also merge documents. Selecting several documents in the

binder and then choosing Documents > Merge will merge the selected
documents into one (their meta-data—the stuff that appears in the inspector—
will be merged too).

Next we’ll look at some of the text options available in Scrivener.

PAGE LAYOUT VIEW

You can switch to page layout view to view your text on virtual pages by

clicking on the “Wrap” button in the toolbar or by going to View menu and

selecting Page View > Show Page View. Note, however, that the pages you see

on screen may not match exactly what you see when the text is compiled for

print or export. The concept of pages is largely meaningless in Scrivener,

because you work on the different parts of your manuscript in smaller pieces

and can completely change the formatting and insert other elements, such as

titles, during the Compile process. So the final arrangement of the pages isn’t

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really known until the text is compiled into one document. Thus, unlike

traditional word processors where the page layout view is intended to show

you exactly what you will see when you print out your text, in Scrivener it is

intended mainly for writers who just feel more comfortable seeing pages fill

up on the screen. (Scrivener’s page view will use the page size set in File >

Page Setup, which is also used to set the page size when using File > Print.)

The page layout view is also useful for screenwriters who use the rule of

thumb that one page of script equals one minute of screen time.

THE FORMAT BAR

The format bar runs horizontally just below the toolbar and allows you to

access common formatting commands easily. From the format bar you can

change the font, text alignment, line spacing, text and highlight colour, and

create lists. You can turn the format bar on or off by choosing “Hide Format

Bar” from the Format menu. Note that if you click and hold the text colour or

highlight buttons in the format bar for a second, a menu will appear that

allows you to choose from a list of colours (clicking on the buttons applies the

currently-selected colour). You can add colours to these menus by dragging

colours to the swatch in the standard colour palette (available by choosing

“Show Colors” from the Format > Font menu).

THE FORMAT MENU

The Format menu provides various ways of formatting your text which

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are standard in many Cocoa applications (such as TextEdit) along with some

that are unique to Scrivener, the latter of which are listed below.

INLINE ANNOTATION AND FOOTNOTES

We looked at inspector comments and footnotes in step 5h, but there’s

another way of adding notes to your text, too. Inline annotations and

footnotes allow you to make notes right inside your text (whereas inspector

comments and footnotes are hidden away in the inspector until you need

them). The two types each have their own advantages, so it’s up to you which

you use - or you can use a mixture of both. Inline footnotes and annotations

look like this:

This text has a footnote after it.2

Each was created by selecting the text and choosing either “Inline

Annotation” or “Inline Footnote” from the Format menu. Alternatively, you

can also just choose “Inline Annotation” or “Inline Footnote” with no selection

and start typing (note that you can change the colour of an annotation by

clicking in it and changing the font colour using the Show Colors panel or the

format bar). When you export your work, ranges of text defined as footnotes

can be turned into real RTF footnotes that can be read by Word, Nisus Writer,

Mellel and other major word processors. Ranges of text defined as annotations

can be turned into RTF comments (which Word can read) or omitted

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altogether. One thing to note is that when you create inline footnotes, the grey

bubble should start exactly where you want the footnote marker to appear in

the printed or exported text.[ Christian Elz, 19.09.17, 11:11]

REVISION MODE
Revision mode simply allows you to use a different text colour while

editing or revising your text, without having to change the colour again every

time you click into a different part of the text. To enter revision mode, select

one of the colours (“First Revision”, “Second Revision” and so on) from the

Format > Revision Mode menu (you can set your preferred revision colours in

the “Appearance” pane of the Preferences). In revision mode, no matter where

you click in the text, when you start typing the text will appear in the chosen

revision colour.

SCRIVENER LINKS
Step 19: Text EditingScrivener links are much like web hyperlinks, except

that they link to other documents within the current Scrivener project. To

create a Scrivener link, select the name of the document to which you wish to

make a link from the Scrivener Links menu in the Edit menu. This will create

a hyperlink in your text document. Alternatively, choose “New Link…” to

bring up a sheet that allows you to create a new document to which to link, or

to choose from existing documents in the project. Clicking on a Scrivener link

will open the linked document in a QuickReference panel by default, but you

can change this behaviour in the “Navigation” pane of the preferences and

choose how you would like links opened. You can also create Scrivener links

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by dragging a document from the binder, outliner view or corkboard and

holding down the Option key while dropping the document into the text (if

you don’t hold down the Option key, the content of the document will get

dropped into the text if possible). Scrivener links can be useful for creating

tables of contents or references within your research.

Try clicking on the Scrivener link below:

spacewalk_info

A PDF document will be opened in a QuickReference panel. Close the

panel and then move on to “Step 20” in the binder.

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As you have learned, by default any new Scrivener project will have
three root folders - the Draft, Research and Trash folders. These folders cannot
be deleted or moved into other folders (although they can be moved into a
different order). You’re not limited to having only these three main folders,
though - you can create as many as you need. Let’s try that now:

1) Lock the editor again so that this document stays on screen (by
clicking on the icon in the header view and selecting “Lock in Place” from the
menu that appears).
2) Click on the Research folder.
3) Click on the “Add folder” button in the footer bar right at the bottom
of the binder (or hit Opt-Cmd-N).
4) Note that a new folder is created inside the “Research” folder. Rename
the new folder “Characters”.
5) From the Documents menu, choose Move > Left. Your new folder is
now a root folder - that is, it is now as far left as it can go, on the same level as
the Draft, Research and Trash folders.

So, we’ve created a new root-level folder, but at the moment it looks
fairly generic. This is where Scrivener’s custom icons feature comes in - you
can assign a custom icon to any file or folder in the binder so that its purpose
is more immediately recognisable. In our example, we are going to use our
new folder to store notes about different characters in a novel, so we want to
assign an icon to it that will allow us to find it easily and quickly. Here’s how:

1) Ctrl-click on the “Characters” folder.

2) Select “Change Icon” from the contextual menu that appears. Choose
the “Characters” or “Characters (Photo)” icon (although you could just as
easily choose any icon).

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A number of icons are provided with Scrivener for use in your projects,
but you can also create your own (or download some) and import them by
choosing “Manage Icons…” from the Documents > Change Icon menu.

In this way you can customise your projects to contain whatever main
folders you need (note that you can assign custom icons to individual
documents, too, but the feature is more likely to be useful for customising
folder icons). If you create a Scrivener project from one of the templates that
are provided (such as the novel template), you will find folders in the binder
that have been created and customised in just this way.

Unlock the editor and move on to Step 21.

One of the key philosophies behind Scrivener is that it shouldn’t try to

force you into a particular workflow. You should be able to write any sort of
long-form text in Scrivener and set up your project to fit the task at hand.
Likewise, if you’re using Scrivener to write a novel, Scrivener doesn’t
automatically assume that you must therefore want character sheets to fill in
for each character, or prompt sheets for information about locations and so on
(I apologise for the fiction-biased examples). Every writer is different - some
novelists find filling in character sheets an essential part of their process,
others hate such things. So, just as Scrivener allows you to create top-level
folders and customise their icons, it also gives you the means to set up
document templates for generating things such as character sheets. Document
templates allow you to set up a document in the project and use it as the basis
for creating new documents.

(Note: Document templates should not be confused with project

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templates. A project template is something you pick from the New Project
panel, which is used as the basis for creating an entire project - see Step 22 -
whereas a document template is a file inside a project.)

This probably sounds more complicated than it is in practice. Let’s create

a couple of document templates to see what I mean.

First, go to the Project menu and select “New From Template”. Note how
there is just a dummy menu item in there saying “No templates folder set for
this project”. Then, try clicking and holding down the green “Add” button in
the toolbar - hold it down until a menu appears (but don’t choose anything -
we’re not going to add anything, we just want to take a look). You’ll see there
are three items in there: “New Text”, “New Folder” and “Import Web
Page” (which will be disabled if a document contained in the Draft folder is
selected in the binder, because you can’t import web pages into the Draft
folder, which is text-only). We’re going to add a couple of different types of
document to these menus.

Next, take a look inside the Research folder in the binder (expand it if
necessary by clicking on the disclosure triangle next to it). Inside it you will
find a “Sheets” folder, which contains two documents - “Character Sheet” and
“Location Sheet”. Take a look at these documents. They contain text that could
be used for very basic character or location sheets, which you might fill in for
each character or location you are going to write about in a novel. They are
just regular text documents, though - you can have whatever you want in
there. To see what I mean, select the “Location” document and then click on
“Add” in the toolbar so that a new blank document gets created. Name it to
anything you want, and then type something inside the document.

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Now we’re going to tell Scrivener that the documents inside the “Sheets”
folder should be treated as document templates - that is, that we want to be
able to create new documents based on them:

1) Click on the “Sheets” folder to select it.

2) Go to the Project menu and choose “Set Selection as Templates Folder”.

The icon of the “Sheets” folder will change to be a white “T” against a
blueprint, and the “T” will appear in the corner of each document inside it.
This indicates that the folder is now acting as the templates folder and that
anything inside it can be used as the basis for a new document. (Note that
once you have set a templates folder, the “Set Selection as Templates Folder”
item in the Project menu will change to “Clear Templates Folder”. Because
each project can only have one templates folder, if you want to change the
templates folder in the future, you will need to use this to reset things before
“Set Selection as Templates Folder” becomes available again.)

What does this mean? Let’s try returning to the menus we looked at a
little earlier:

1) Click on the “Characters” folder with the custom icon that you created
in step 20. It should currently be empty.
2) Go to the Project menu and select “New From Template” again. You’ll
notice that it’s no longer empty - it shows the contents of the “Sheets”
templates folder.
3) From the menu, select “Character Sheet”. A new document will be
created inside the “Characters” folder - a document that is identical to the
“Character Sheet” document in the templates folder. Change the title and edit
the text in the document itself.

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4) Now click on the green “Add” button and hold it down for a second
again. This time there will be more items in the menu that appears - the
contents of our templates folder is there, too. This time choose “Location
Sheet”.

The two new documents you just created are copies of the documents in
the templates folder. And that’s really all the templates folder is - somewhere
for you to put documents that you want to use as the basis for other
documents, and which, in combination with the New From Template menu,
makes it very easy to create copies of those documents anywhere you want in
the project.

You can even tell certain folders that they should use a certain template
document as the default type when adding documents. Try this:

1) Select the “Characters” folder you created earlier.

2) Go to Documents > Default New Subdocument Type and select
“Character Sheet”.
3) Now, with the “Characters” folder still selected (or a document inside
it), click on the green “Add” button in the toolbar.

Now how when you click on “Add”, instead of a new blank text
document being added, you get a new “Character Sheet” document. This is
because you have told Scrivener that the “Character Sheet” template should
be the default document type for the “Characters” folder.

We’re nearly there. On to Step 22…

Anything

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At this point, we’ve covered all of the major features of Scrivener. If you
haven’t done so already, then soon you are going to want to create your own
project so that you can start work. Generally you will want a separate
Scrivener project for each writing project you are working on. To create a new
project, select “New Project…” from the File menu, which will open the
project templates chooser panel. From there, you can choose a project type
from one of the categories (novel, screenplay, thesis and so on). Once you’ve
done so, click on “Choose…” to specify a location at which to save the project.
Scrivener projects have the file extension “.scriv” and act just like any other
file - you can double-click on them in the Finder to open them, or choose to
open an existing project file via the File > Open… menu.

TIP: Some projects use information from Contacts (Address Book on

systems earlier than 10.8) to fill in your name and address on title pages and
suchlike. By default, it takes this information from the “me” card in Contacts
(the entry that says “me” under the picture and has the head-and-shoulders
icon next to the name in the contacts list). If you would like Scrivener to use
different contact details for your projects, simply type
“(Scrivener:UseMe)” (with no spaces and including the parentheses)
somewhere in the “note” area of the entry in Contacts you wish to use.

Note that the “Blank” project type is the basis for all other project types.
That is, all the other project templates were created by starting from a blank
project, adding some documents and changing the settings relevant for the
project type, and then saving the resulting project as a template. If you find
that none of the existing templates are quite right for the sort of writing you
do, you can create your own project templates in the same way, like this:

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1) Create a new project - either from the Blank template or from any other
template - and edit it so that it contains all the elements and settings you
will want in a new project whenever it is created from your template.
2) Select “Save As Template…” from the File menu.
3) From the “Save As Template” sheet that appears, enter a title and
description for the new template, and choose a category and icon, then
click on “OK”.
4) Go to File > New From Template… You will find the template you just
created available as the basis for new projects. At this point you can delete
the project from which you created the template, if you wish.

Next on to “Step 23: Syncing with iOS” - you’ll find that in the “Part 6”
folder.

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(You can skip this section if you don’t plan on syncing projects with Scrivener
for iOS.)

Scrivener is also available for the iPad and iPhone (via the iOS App
Store), so that you can work on your projects anywhere. Follow the
instructions below to sync your Mac projects with our iOS version. Note that
you will need a Dropbox account (http://www.getdropbox.com) to sync. If
you don’t have or want a Dropbox account, you can copy projects via iTunes
(see below).

SYNCING WITH DROPBOX

1. Any projects you want to share with the iOS version must be placed in
your Dropbox folder. When you set up sync in Scrivener for iOS, you
are asked to choose a subfolder inside Dropbox, and the iOS version
will sync anything inside the folder you choose. The default setting is /
Dropbox/Apps/Scrivener, so we’ll use that as our example. We’ll
assume the folder already exists in Dropbox (it will do if you’ve set up
sync in the iOS version - follow the instructions in the iOS tutorial for
details on that if necessary).
2. To sync an existing project, first make sure it is closed on your Mac, then
move it into the /Dropbox/Apps/Scrivener folder in the Finder. You
can then open it again on your Mac from its new location in Dropbox if
you wish.
3. To create a new project that you want available on iOS, go to File > New
Project, select a project template, and choose to save it inside the /
Dropbox/Apps/Scrivener folder when prompted for a save location.
4. Before opening a project on iOS, ensure that Dropbox on your Mac has
fully synced (check that there is no activity indicator in the Dropbox
icon in the menu bar).

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5. Whenever you have made any changes to projects on your Mac, be sure
to tap the sync button in Scrivener for iOS so that all changes get
downloaded.
6. Edit your project on your iPhone or iPad and tap the sync button in the
iOS version when you’re done.
7. When returning to your Mac, once more ensure that Dropbox has
finished syncing by checking the icon in the menu bar.
8. You can now carry on working on your project. You are free to leave
your Scrivener projects open on the Mac while editing them on iOS.
When Scrivener on the Mac detects that changes have been made in the
iOS version, it will tell you that it needs to incorporate those changes
into the project. It will then do so, closing and reopening the project. (If
the project was closed, it will do all of this when you next open the
project.)
9. Scrivener on the Mac detects changes whenever it becomes active. If
you know you’ve made changes on iOS and Scrivener for Mac doesn’t
tell you about them, simply choose Sync > with Mobile Devices from
the File menu. This will force Scrivener to check for any changes.
⁃ Note that “Sync > with Mobile Devices” just looks for changes
that have been made to the current project on iOS devices. No
changes will be found if the project has not been edited on iOS, or
if it is not stored in the Dropbox folder.

Dealing with Conflicts

When syncing across devices, it’s important to remember that each
device stores its own copy of the project (if it didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to
access projects without an internet connection). When you sync, Scrivener
updates the copy on your Mac and the copy on your iOS device so that they
are both the same. If you make edits to the same document on more than one

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device without syncing, however, conflicts may arise because the two copies
will be different.
For instance, suppose you edit a scene on your iPad, then return to your
Mac without syncing and start editing the same scene - in this case, there will
now be two different versions of it, one on your iPad, and one on your Mac.
When this occurs, on the next sync, Scrivener will tell you that conflicts have
been found. Scrivener will always do its best to resolve all conflicts without
requiring you to do anything, but in a case like this, it will create a “Conflicts”
folder at the bottom of the binder and place one of the versions of the
document inside it as a separate document.
If this happens, be sure to compare the two versions of the document and
decide which one you want to keep. You can open Scrivener’s split screen
feature to look at them side-by-side and copy between them, and then delete
the one you do not need. This won’t normally be a problem, however - it will
only happen if you make changes to the same project on two devices without
syncing before moving between devices.

COPYING BETWEEN DEVICES USING ITUNES

If you have the iOS version but don’t want to use Dropbox, you can copy
projects to and from your iPhone or iPad using iTunes as follows:
1. With your device plugged in, open iTunes.
2. Select your device.
3. Select “Apps” in the sidebar.
4. Scroll down to “File Sharing”.
5. Select Scrivener in the “Apps” list.
6. Drag Scrivener projects from the Finder into the “Documents” list in
iTunes to copy projects to your device (or click on the “Add…” button).
7. Select a project in the “Documents” list and click on “Save to…” to copy
a project from your device to your Mac’s hard drive.

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Okay, on to Step 24, the “And Finally…” bit.

This has been a fairly thorough tour of all of the main features of
Scrivener (or not so thorough if you only went through the “Quick Start”
documents, but enough to get you up and running, I hope). You probably
won’t use half of the features you’ve just learned about for some time - in fact,
on a daily basis, you will probably only use the most basic features of writing
in the editor, creating new documents, and moving documents around in the
binder. Everything in Scrivener gets out of your way until you need it - but at
least you know what’s available and have a good idea of what you can do.

There’s plenty of other stuff in there, too. For instance, I neglected to

mention the project targets and statistics features in the Project menu, which
you may well use frequently if you need to write to a particular length. They
are fairly self-explanatory, though, so just try them out.

What else? Well, once again, remember that Scrivener expects you to put
everything that you want to export as part of your manuscript (okay,
typescript for the pedants) inside the Draft folder. And remember that
Scrivener is really about “hammering out” that draft; it is not a word
processor or full page layout program, so at some point—unless you just want
a very basic manuscript—you may well want to move your work into a word
processor for final formatting.

Experiment! You should be able to work out the rest by playing with the
program. If you get stuck, be sure to check out the comprehensive Scrivener
Help from the Help menu. If you still have a problem, check out the FAQ on
our wiki, or take a look at some of our tutorial videos on the web page:

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http://scrivener.tenderapp.com/help/kb
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/videos.php

And of course, if you are still baffled, post a question on the user forums!

http://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum

Likewise, if you encounter any bugs or glitches, no matter how small—

and especially if you experience a crash—please post to the forums or e-mail
us at mac.support@literatureandlatte.com.

I hope you enjoy using Scrivener and find it a useful tool, and offer my
heartfelt thanks to you for choosing Scrivener (or considering it) as the tool for
your own writing.

NEXT STEPS
You are now ready to begin your own project - go to File > New Project to
get going. Happy writing!

1
This is a footnote. In order for footnotes to get exported properly, it’s important to add them in
such a way that the link ends exactly where you want the footnote to appear in the exported or printed
text.
2
This is a footnote. When the text is compiled, exported or printed, this
footnote will be turned into a “real” footnote (or endnote).

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