This training is provided by Literature & Latte, creators of Scrivener.

Transcript: Scrivener offers several different ways of viewing your work.

There are four view modes which can be accessed from the toolbar;

Single document mode, scrivenings mode, the corkboard, and the outliner.

These are displayed by and can be changed using this view mode selector in the toolbar.

You’re probably familiar with single document mode already.

When an individual file is selected in the binder, such as a text document, or an image, this mode simply displays it in the editor window.

The view mode component in the toolbar will display a single document icon.

When you select more than one document or a folder containing multiple documents, this shifts to scrivening’s mode, in which multiple documents are displayed as a continuous scroll, divided by a separator. 

A faint dashed line will appear in the editor to show you where one document rolls over into the next.

Using this mode, you can now view or edit multiple text documents as though they were a single document.  

The toolbar icon now looks like two pieces of paper representing a stack of documents.
The corkboard represented by the middle icon allows you to view multiple documents as index cards on a corkboard.

This can be either a selection of documents from the binder,  or if you choose a folder or a document with subdocuments, index cards for those subdocuments will appear. 

Each index card shows the title and synopsis for the document, or if no synopsis has been entered for this document, it will display a preview of the document text instead.

Note that if you are viewing a single document, it’s still possible to switch to corkboard mode, but the corkboard will appear blank until you select multiple documents or create sub-documents of the file you’re viewing.

The next icon opens the outliner, which like the corkboard, is another way of displaying groups of documents.

This time however they are displayed in rows with columns of additional information.
The document’s label and status appear here by default,  but other columns can be added depending on which data you want to view in the outliner.

When you’re viewing a document group you have the option of viewing it in single document mode, which will just show you the text of the top document, or toggling scrivening’s mode, which allows you to view the document and all its sub-documents as a continuous scroll.
The same thing applies if you have a folder which contains text at the folder level, as well as in the sub documents it contains.

In this case, you can toggle between these two view modes by selecting or deselecting the document stack icon.

We’ll cover the different view modes in more depth in other videos so look out for those if you want more information.

Thanks for watching,  and happy writing.

The post Mastering Scrivener’s View Modes appeared first on Scrivener.app.

This training is provided by Literature & Latte, creators of Scrivener.

Transcript: As writers ourselves, we’re aware of how important it is to be comfortable in your writing environment.

So Scrivener provides all sorts of ways you can customize how it looks and behaves, letting you adapt the Scrivener environment to better fit the way you work.

We’ll start by looking at options, which can be found in the File menu or opened using the F12 key.

You’ll find different categories of preferences here, starting with the general preferences, where you can adjust startup settings, such as whether Scrivener reopens projects that will open when you last quit, how often Scrivener auto-saves, the interface language, and so forth.

There’s also an author information tab, where you can enter details which will then autofill on some elements of your manuscripts like title pages.

If any of your projects have a bibliography, you can also link your preferred citation software from here.

The next pane controls your editing preferences and is split into four tabs; editing, formatting, notes, and revisions.

We’ll cover formatting preferences in a whole separate guide.

Notes controls the appearance of your notes, comments, footnotes, and inline annotations.

Revisions allows you to set the colors used by revision mode, a feature of Scrivener intended for when you’re revising a manuscript.

The editing tab controls the default editor settings. Things like the default zoom level and the units of measurement used by the ruler.

There are checkboxes which control elements like typewriter scrolling, whether your live count shows words, characters, or a combination, and options that let you switch the insertion point from a thin line to a chunkier block.

Let’s also take a quick look at the corrections pane. This is where you can set up spell checking options, smart punctuation, auto-completion, and a few other settings. There’s an option to stop Scrivener from automatically capitalizing the letter “I” for languages that don’t use it as a personal pronoun.

In the substitutions tab, you can also enable additional substitutions which will auto-replace common symbols and fractions with the corresponding Unicode characters when you type them out in your editor.

The appearance pane is where your preferences really start to open out.

As you might expect, this is where you can customize the appearance of different elements of Scrivener by selecting them from this list on the left.

You’ll find many of these have unique options, as well as the ability to change background colors, font, and text, for different sections of the interface.

Let’s take a look at the binder as an example. I can set a custom row spacing for binder items here in this tab. Navigating through the fonts menu, I’ve changed the font used by the binder to Palatino but you could easily choose another font like Courier for readability or just to match the atmosphere of your project.

If you make too many changes and you want to restore the defaults at any point, click manage, and you’ll find the default theme saved here, along with a few other preset themes.

Moving to the colors tab, you can set background colors and text colors for the many different elements of Scrivener here.

Bear in mind that affecting one may not affect the other, so if you change your editors’ background to a very dark color, the font won’t automatically become brighter, you will need to adjust that separately. But, if you prefer to look at light text on a dark background, to reduce screen glare, that is something you can set up here in the appearances pane. You can revert to the default colors anytime by clicking on the elements you want to change and clicking “use default color”.

Another example we’ll touch on is the corkboard appearance settings, which have a number of options for the corkboard display.

These options allow you to set a different background for snapped corkboards, freeform corkboards, and label view.

And the drop-down list will let you set a corkboard texture or even a custom background image for one or all of these.

It’s worth taking a look for the appearance pane yourself if you’re the type of writer who likes to customize how their writing environment looks.

The behaviors pane allows you to fine-tune how some of the elements of Scrivener work, focusing on navigation, the corkboard composition mode, and how Scrivener handles media files.

The composition settings are worth noting if you have more than one monitor, as you can control where your manuscript appears in composition mode.

In the corkboard settings, you can choose whether double-clicking on an empty space navigates you to the parent corkboard or creates a new index card.

Navigation has some useful settings for return key behavior, how Scrivener handles folders and files, whether you can alt-drag a file to duplicate it, and where internal links will open when clicked.

The sharing pane has a few settings related to importing and exporting projects.

You might need to tweak some of the import settings if, for example, you’re importing documents from Word. But most of these can probably be left out there default. The backup pane is covered in a separate video which should be linked nearby.

Outside of your preferences, there are still some other ways to customize the Scrivener environment.

There’s a View button in the toolbar which can show and hide the binder, ruler, and format bar, as well as switching to page view.

These functions are also available from the View menu along with a handful of other options, including the ability to customize toolbars.

Selecting this will open a window which lets you customize both the format bar and the main toolbar.

Select which one you want to customize from the choices in the top right, then you will see a list of what’s currently in the toolbar on the right and all the available options on the left.

Selecting an item in either column you can use these arrow buttons to add, remove, or reorder toolbar items.

For example, if you want to take regular snapshots of your work, adding the snapshot button to the main toolbar could make that feature more easily accessible.

If you want to reset to the default toolbar at any point, just click this button labeled “restore defaults”.

Sometimes, you might want to customize elements just for this project, but not for Scrivener as a whole.

For this, turn to Project Settings in the Project menu. Here you can set up project metadata and create custom labels and status items.

Some of this will be covered in more detail in separate videos, but it’s worth taking a look at here and now. For example, the label list can be customized to keep track of point-of-view characters within your novel.

We’ll change the custom title for labels to POV and then assign labels to each character, depending on who that chapter centers on.

You can do the same with status and even set a default label or status for new documents, so each new document can be marked to do as soon as it’s created.

As you can see, the range of customization options Scrivener offers is very broad, and we recommend doing some exploring of your own.

In the meantime, you can visit our other guides, video tutorials, and the Scrivener user manual if you’d like to learn more about the features of Scrivener.

Thanks for watching, and happy writing.

The post Scrivener Tip – Customizing Scrivener appeared first on Scrivener.app.

This training is provided by Literature & Latte, creators of Scrivener.

Once you’re a few documents into your project, you might want to spend some time experimenting with the structure. 

The Corkboard is a great tool for doing this, especially in freeform mode,  which allows you to freely drag around and reorder the index cards,  and it won’t make any changes to your project structure unless you tell it to. 

To demonstrate I’ll load up this folder in Corkboard mode. You’ll see each of my chapters already has a title and a synopsis,  making it easy to see what’s going on in each chapter. 
Clicking this icon will switch to freeform mode. The cards no longer appear in a fixed layout. Instead, they can be dragged and dropped wherever you choose. It’s worth noting that none of this has affected the order of chapters in the binder as you might expect it to if you drag cards around on the regular Corkboard. 

The freeform Corkboard is there for you to experiment. With the synopsis visible, you can play around with what it would be like if one scene came much earlier in the manuscript than another.

If you decide you actually quite like that order, you can click on this Commit button in the bottom row. Scrivener will present you with a few different options to choose from,  depending on how you want it to interpret the order of cards on the Corkboard. 

 
For example, it may make more sense to you to arrange your index cards in horizontal rows, starting at the top, but moving right to left, or vertical columns starting from the left-hand side, and moving from top to bottom.

As soon as you click on any of these options, you will immediately see the binder update to put the document in that order. 

Remember of course, that this new order isn’t locked in for good. You can always change it later in a variety of ways if you need to. 

The post Scrivener Tip – Outlining and Structuring – Freestyle with Freeform Mode on the Corkboard appeared first on Scrivener.app.

This training is provided by Literature & Latte, creators of Scrivener.

Transcript: Backing up your writing is very important and can make all the difference if your original project becomes damaged somehow.

The post Scrivener Tip – Backing Up Your Work appeared first on Scrivener.app.

Transcript: When you’re working in Scrivener, the binder typically shows your entire project. When you’re working with a larger project structure, it can be useful to only display a subsection of your project. To do this, select a folder and go to view, outline, hoist binder, the binder changes to display only the contents of this folder which can be navigated as normal.

if you’ve been clicking around the individual documents and want to return to view the folder as a group, simply click this curved arrow-like icon and you’ll go back to viewing the whole folder, from here you can switch between scrivenings mode, the cork board, or the outliner.

When you want to return to the full binder simply click the X in the top left here, or return to view outline and click on hoist binder.

Thanks for watching and happy writing.

The post Scrivener Tip : Work Close Up by Hoisting the Binder appeared first on Scrivener.app.

To demonstrate I’ll click through the first few chapters of our example project here, then press the back button provided in the editor’s header bar. I’m now viewing chapter two in the editor while our selection in the binder doesn’t seem to have changed chapter four is still highlighted over here in the binder. However you’ll notice that a secondary selection bar has appeared highlighting the chapter we’re looking at in the editor, this allows you to return to your previous place by clicking the selection in the binder that means the binder doesn’t jump around when you’re navigating using the editor, but you can still see where the current document is.

If you want the binder to select the document you’re currently looking at in the editor, hit command option R which is the keyboard shortcut for reveal in binder from the navigate menu. Scrivener allows you to split the editor so you can view two files side-by-side. It’s possible to navigate between documents in either editor by using the binder, but right now only the editor which is InFocus will be affected by what you click on in the binder.,

You can tell the editor is InFocus, when the header bar appears blue and that can be changed simply by clicking in the other editor. As you can see when I click on an item in the binder, it’s opening in the editor with the blue header. By holding down the option key when you click items in the binder, it’s possible to do the opposite preserving the document in the editor with the blue header and opening documents in the editor which isn’t InFocus.

Alternatively, by going to navigate binder selection effects, you can tell Scrivener to open documents in the other editor. You can even prevent an editor from being affected by the binder at all by control-clicking on the header bar and choosing ‘lock in place,’ or using the keyboard shortcut command option L to lock the editor which is currently InFocus.

The header bar then turns this orangey pink color and now any selection you make in the binder will automatically affect the other editor which you’ll notice it still has a blue header. This doesn’t mean you can’t make edits in the editor you’ve locked in place though, you can click in here and type as normal.

The editor focus is now shown by the thick line on the bottom border of the header bar. Watch how this changes as I click between each editor. When you aren’t working with a locked editor, the InFocus editor will have both the blue header and the thick divider. So, as you can see the binder and editor can interact in a variety of ways.

Thanks for watching and happy writing.

The post Getting Oriented in Scrivener’s Binder appeared first on Scrivener.app.

Transcript: If you’ve watched the other videos about view modes, you’re probably already familiar with single document mode, scrivenings mode, and the corkboard. In this video, we’ll explore another view mode- The Outliner.

As the name suggests, this is a great tool for building up a project outline. It may help to think of the outliner as a more detailed version of the binder, selecting a group in the binder whether it’s a folder, a document stack, a set of documents you’ve selected together, or some combination of these, and opening it in the outliner will display a list of contents in columns like this.

By default, you’ll see the title and synopsis, the label and status, and a few other columns with information about those documents. If you’ve selected multiple folders or your selection has subfolders, you’ll see triangles appearing next to the folder icons and you can use these to expand or collapse the folder’s contents.

As with the other view modes, you can create a new document or folder in the outliner using the ‘add’ button in the toolbar, the buttons in the footer bar, or their associated keyboard shortcuts. Note that you’re automatically prompted to type a title, hitting return will allow you to type a synopsis and then you can hit return again to finish editing.

If you want to create a document with only a title, simply hit return without entering a synopsis. Note that the synopsis line no longer appears which saves space in the outliner. To do the opposite creating a new untitled document with a synopsis, you can hit return without typing a title and enter your synopsis here. Once you hit return, the empty title line will disappear from the outliner but double clicking on this to edit will reveal it again, so you can add a title if you want to.

Synopsis entered here in the outliner will also appear on the related index card on the cork board and in the inspector, so you can view the synopsis alongside document text in the editor. If a document has no title and no synopsis but you’ve entered some document text in the editor, the first few words will appear here in light grey.

As with many of the other features of Scrivener, the outliner can be customized to suit your preferred way of working. In this case, you have a lot of control over which information you see or don’t see. For example, if you don’t want to see any synopsis in the outliner, a quick button to show or hide synopsis is here in the bottom right corner of the footer bar. You can add or remove columns from the outliner by clicking on this arrow icon here, and selecting or deselecting any of the options. For example, if I don’t need to see document targets but I would like a word count for this document, we simply check and uncheck the relevant options here and the outliner immediately updates.

Clicking custom columns at the bottom of this list will open the project settings dialog at the custom metadata section allowing you to create columns which aren’t part of scrivener’s usual project metadata. We’ll take a look at metadata in a future video, or you can refer to the Scrivener manual for more information.

Items in the outliner can be dragged, rearranged, and grouped, the same way they can be in the binder. It’s also possible to rearrange outliner columns by clicking and dragging and to resize them by clicking and dragging the faint lines between each column header. If you’re working with a smaller group of columns, go in to view, outliner columns, center content will center the columns in the window.

Now if you hide all the columns except for the title and synopsis, what you’re looking at is a straightforward uncluttered outline of your project.

Thanks for watching and happy writing.

The post Getting to Know Scrivener’s Outliner appeared first on Scrivener.app.

Transcript: Hello and welcome to an overview of Scrivener for iOS. In this video, we’re going to cover the basics of the Scrivener app on the iPad. Scrivener allows you to have a lot of control over your project and you can be as detailed or in-depth as you’d like, but getting started is very simple.

Launch the app from your home screen, swipe through the tips if it’s your first time using the app and you’ll find yourself at the project screen. Here you’ll find a written tutorial which is actually an interactive Scrivener project.

If it’s your first time using Scrivener, it’s worth taking a look through this, but if you want to dive in and get writing straight away, you can create a new project by tapping ‘’create project,’’ give it a title, tap ‘’create’’ and your project will load up.

In the sidebar on the left, you’ll see your binder where your project files are organized by default. A Scrivener project contains three special folders. The draft folder is where you’ll be keeping the majority of your writing, and any text documents in this folder can be compiled into a single manuscript whenever you want. The research folder can store any kind of documents including media files, and the trash will hold on to anything you remove from your project until you empty the trash to delete it permanently.

Your draft folder will already have a blank untitled document waiting for you, tap anywhere in the editor pane on the right-hand side to bring up the cursor and keyboard, and you’re ready to start writing. Once you’re done writing, tap ‘’done’’ in the top right to leave edit mode. If you want to return to the project screen anytime, you can then tap ‘’projects’’ in the top left. It’s also possible to do this by swiping the sidebar from left to right.

You’ll notice that your new project now appears as an icon on the right as well as in the project list on the Left. If you’ve been using the desktop version of Scrivener on Mac or on Windows, you might be keen to sync your existing projects with your iPad. Let’s take a look at that now. Tapping the ‘’sync’’ symbol in the top right will bring up the option to link a Dropbox account.

If the Dropbox app is already installed on your device, it will load up and sign you in automatically. If you don’t have Dropbox installed, you’ll be asked to sign into your Dropbox account from within the Scrivener app. Once Scrivener has been allowed access to Dropbox, the app will ask you where you want to sync your Scrivener projects. It’s recommended that you create a dedicated subfolder for this, the app will create one for you if you like.

Now tap ‘’done’’ and Scrivener will be linked to this folder. From now on any projects in this folder can be synced between your iPad and the Dropbox folder on your Mac or PC. In Scrivener for iOS, these projects will appear in the drop box section in the sidebar, and in the icons on the right.

You can also drag projects created on your iPad into the Dropbox section by tapping ‘’edit’’ then dragging the project using the bars on the right-hand side. When you do this, a blue icon will appear indicating the project hasn’t been synced with your Dropbox folder yet, tap the ‘’sync’’ icon, and Dropbox will store your project in the cloud. Let’s load up this freshly synced project, and take a closer look at the interface.

In the sidebar, you’ll notice the project binder has some files which I’ve been working on in Scrivener for Mac. The draft folder contains a document with some nonsense in it, I’ve created a notes folder with a subdocument called pan grams, there’s a photograph of a chandelier in the research folder, and the trash contains a document which I’m planning to delete later. If you want to search for a specific document in the project, pulling list down will reveal a search field you can use for that purpose.

To create a new document, tap the ‘’plus’’ symbol in the top right of the editor, or the bottom right of the sidebar. You’ll be prompted to give the document a title and a synopsis, but you can leave these blank and edit them later if you like. The new document will appear in the binder and open in the editor ready for you to get writing. If you need to move the document to a new position in the binder, there are a few ways to do this. Swiping from right to left on a file or folder will reveal some options, tap the ‘’blue move option,’’ and you’ll be given a list of locations to choose from.

Another way to do this is to tap ‘’Edit,’’ then tap the ‘’four-way arrow icon’’ to enable move mode, then select a file or folder. You can now use the arrows at the bottom to adjust its position in the binder. Using the left and right arrows, you can nest documents within folders as subdocuments or bring them back to surface level.

The up and down arrows change the document’s position in the current folder. Alternatively, as with the project’s list earlier, you can tap edit, then hold and drag files around using the bars on the right-hand side. Last of all selecting a file or folder, then tapping the move icon in the bottom row will give you a list of locations you can move a file to. You can add a new folder to your project by tapping the ‘’new folder’’ icon, this works much the same as adding a new document.

As your project grows, you might want to expand and collapse folders in your binder to conserve sidebar space. Swiping right-to-left on a folder in the sidebar will reveal the option to expand or collapse the folder hiding or revealing any subdocuments it contains. If a folder is collapsed, tapping on it will list that folder subdocuments in the sidebar and you can tap on a document to open it in the editor. However, tapping the corkboard icon will open the cork board which you’ll be familiar with if you’ve used the desktop version of Scrivener. Here you can view and interact with index cards containing the title and synopsis of any documents in that folder. If the folder contains images, by default they will appear as photos on the cork board but this can be disabled if you go into your project settings, tap ‘’cork board,’’ and toggle show images.

Holding a finger down on the index card will allow you to drag it around and this is another way of reordering your documents like you can in the binder. If a folder’s contents are already expanded in the binder the cork board icon won’t appear, but tapping on the folder itself will take you to the cork board this time. If you want the sidebar list view instead of the cork board, you can open that by tapping the circled [chevron?] on the right.

Next, let’s take a look at the editor. First of all, if the text is too large or too small, you can use a pinch gesture to grow or shrink the text. Note that this only adjusts the zoom level, the font size itself is unaffected. When you’re writing in edit mode you’ll notice the icons in the top row change. From left to right here’s what they do. The full-screen icon will hide the binder, so all you see is the text you’re working on. To reveal it again, tap the back arrow or your project title in the top left. The sync symbol will appear when a project is stored in Dropbox and tapping it syncs your document with Dropbox so you can save your changes without having to return to the project screen.

The circled T enables typewriter scrolling which keeps the current line centered in the display. A word count for this document will be displayed in the center. Tapping this will display a word count for your entire draft folder and allow you to set a target word count for the manuscript.

The paintbrush icon opens the formatting palette which is split into three tabs, style, where you can adjust font options and formatting, choose from presets and create a numbered or bulleted list, indents where you can adjust first line and paragraph indents, and spacing where you can adjust line spacing. The clock icon opens a list of recent documents so you can quickly navigate around anything you viewed recently. The search icon opens ‘’find’’ which can be expanded to find and replace using the ‘’cog’’ icon.

The editor also makes use of the extended keyboard row. By default, this contains commonly used punctuation, options for selection and navigation, and formatting tools. Holding down a finger on any of these buttons allows you to swap them out from a wide variety of other options, so it’s customizable any way you like. You can reset these to the defaults any time.

Whenever you aren’t in edit mode, an ‘’I’’ icon appears in the top row, tapping this will open the inspector pane in the sidebar allowing you to edit metadata for this document. The title and synopsis can be added or edited here.

If you like to organize your documents using colored labels or mark their progress with the status, you can also do that here. However, labels and statuses must be enabled in the project settings before they will appear in the binder. To do this tap the ‘’settings cog,’’ tap binder and you’ll be able to toggle show labels, tint rows with label colors, and show status.

You can also add document notes in the inspector this is a place to keep any notes related to the document which you don’t want included when you compile. At the bottom, you’ll find document settings where you can toggle whether this document is included in the compiled manuscript, you can convert the document into a folder, and you can change the icon that appears alongside the document title in the binder.

You can also enable scriptwriting mode for the document here, but this option is currently hidden because scriptwriting mode is disabled for the project. To enable it, tap the sidebar cog to open project settings, open the editor options, and toggle allows script writing. Now when we go back to the inspector, the script providing option is available and toggling it on will make script elements available at the top of the editor.

The inspector can also be open from the sidebar by holding a finger down on the relevant document in the binder, or from the cork board by double tapping the index card for that document. If you’ve got more than one document in a folder, for example, the draft folder, you can view them all consecutively using the draft navigator by tapping this icon in the bottom left. While in this view, tapping on a document will open it in the editor and double tapping will open it with the cursor at the tab location.

Last of all let’s take a look at how to compile your manuscript. To open the compile menu, tap the ‘’compile’’ icon at the bottom of the sidebar, or swipe from right to left on the draft in the sidebar, and tap the ‘’green compile option.’’ Here you can choose from a variety of file formats, appearance, presets, and page options. Once you’re ready to export your project tap ‘’compile’’ and you’ll be shown a preview of your manuscript.

You can now use the icons in the top right to share the compiled output or open it in another app such as pages.

That’s going to be all for this overview if you have any questions or feedback about Scrivener for iOS, you can reach us at ios.support@literatureandlatte.com, you can also find our contact information from within the app anytime if you return to the project screen and tap ‘’getting help.’’

Thanks for watching and happy writing!

The post An Introduction to Scrivener for iOS appeared first on Scrivener.app.

Transcript:  Hi, I’m Keith Blount, and I’m the developer of Scrivener. In this video, I’d like to show how easy it is to start using Scrivener. Whether you’re starting a new writing project or want to edit an existing one, Scrivener has a lot of powerful features but don’t let that daunt you; you only have to use what you need. It’s designed to work around you not the other way around.

So in this video, I’m going to show you the fundamentals of Scrivener, everything you need to get started using it in under 10 minutes. The features I’m going to show in this video are in fact the features I designed Scrivener for in the first place. Although we’ll be using the Windows version in this video, everything you see here applies to the Mac version too.

First, let’s fire up Scrivener and create a new project. You’ll see I’m presented with a window that allows me to choose from different project templates for novels, scripts, academic writing, and so on. I’m going to pick the most basic template, the blank one which will create a blank project- all other templates are based on this one by the way.

Okay so here we have Scrivener’s main window, you’re now ready to start writing in the main editor. On the left here we have the binder which is the source list showing all documents in the project. I can show or hide that using the binder button. The other main aspects of the interface are the inspector which I can show or hide by clicking on the blue disc here, and the ability to split the editor in two which I can do by clicking here, we’ll come back to those in a moment.

So I’ll type some text and format it as I want using the format bar or menus. Now one of the key ideas behind Scrivener is that it’s easier to manage writing a long text if you break it down into smaller chunks. It’s entirely up to you how large or small those chunks are though. Chapters, scenes, paragraphs, arguments, whatever.

As soon as you want to create a new chunk, we just click on the Add button and it appears beneath the selected documents in the binder, add a title and we’re ready to start typing there too.

Let’s take a quick look at the binder, note that there are three folders there by default although you can add more. The draft folder is the most important, that is where you put together your actual manuscript or text, and the thing inside that will be compiled into one long document for printing or exporting when the time comes. You can place pretty much anything you want to support your writing in the research folder, images, PDF files, notes, and so on. Anything in there and anything else that’s not contained inside the draft folder won’t be included in your final manuscript.

The trash folder is self-explanatory. That holds any deleted documents until you empty it. Of course, if you’re new to Scrivener but chances are that you have some work you’d like to import, that’s easy enough. I’ve got a Word document that I want to bring into my project, to do so I just go to file, import files, and select it. Alternatively, I could just drag it into the binder… here it is I want to break it down further though so I’m going to split it up. To do so, I just place my cursor where I want to split it and use documents, split at selection, or hit command K- control K on Windows.

I can navigate between the different documents in my project by selecting them in the binder like so, and I can drag them around to rearrange their order. I can also create folders anywhere I want until I’m happy with the structure.

If I want to make the rest of my screen disappear while I write, I can just click on full-screen mode. Once I’m finished, I hit escape to return to the main window again. The best-selling novelist is using Scrivener, you don’t use many more features than the ones I’ve just shown you. So that’s writing in Scrivener. Now let’s look at some of the structural tools.

Let’s open the inspector- note the index card at the top. Every document in your project has an index card associated with it. The index card is used to show the title and a synopsis of your document. Let’s enter a synopsis here. Now, look what happens when I click on the draft folder we switched to corkboard mode. And here you can see the index card, but it’s associated with the document I just had opened.

I can edit it, and I can use the cork board to rearrange my documents. See how it has moved in the binder. If I open that document again, you’ll see its index card reflects the edits I’ve made. The best way of understanding the relationship between documents and index cards is to imagine that each document has an index card clipped to it, and in corkboard mode, you see only the index card.

The corkboard shows two subdocuments of whatever folder is selected. So at the moment, I can see the contents of a draft folder, but if I click on my chapter folder I can now see what’s inside that. So the cork board allows you to get an overview of your documents by seeing only their titles and synopses, and it allows you to move them around by moving their associated index cards.

We can also create a new index card on the Corkboard which creates a new blank document. I’m going to use an index card to write a synopsis of what I intend to be in this scene which I’ll write later on. When I’m ready to return to the writing, I can open my new document and see from the index card in the inspector what I’d planned to write. But maybe you’re not partial to cork boards, that’s fine you don’t have to use it, if I click on my folder again I can switch to outliner mode instead.

The outliner works in exactly the same way as the cork board. It shows me just four titles and synopses of the subdocuments of a selected folder, and I can edit them, rearrange them, and create new documents and write synopses to remind me what they should be about when I come to write them.

You can also show other information in the outliner but we won’t worry about that here. The corkboard and outliner tools can, therefore, be used to restructure writing you’ve already done or to plan an outline writing you’ve yet to do. So you can plow ahead and hammer out your first draft without touching these tools and then use them for the editing process afterwards, or if you’re the sort of writer who prefers to map everything out in advance, you can use them right at the start of your project to create an outline then do all the writing afterwards, or you can do a bit of both of course.

You’ll notice with the control which allows you to switch between the corkboard and outliner has a third option, let’s look at that now. If you click back on this folder, we’ll be back in outliner mode. If we click on my third button, we switch to what we call ‘scrivener mode,’’ this allows you to view some or all of the documents in a folder as though they were all part of one long text.

This works on any folder with text files in it. This gives me a way of working on my manuscript as one long document, as individual chapters, or as pieces as large or small as I want. And that’s the fundamentals of Scrivener covered.

I’ll just show you two more things before we wrap it up though. First I mentioned a split view earlier, I can split the editor horizontally, or vertically, I can then view different parts of the same document or different documents entirely alongside one another.

I can also bring in research files such as images and PDF documents, and view them alongside my text as I write. Finally, when you finish writing your manuscript, you just go to file, compile, and compile the whole thing for exporting to another program or for printing.

You can also generate a PDF file. All of the text files that are inside the draft folder will be compiled into one long document. Compile is a very powerful feature allowing you to completely change the formatting of your exported document if you want, making it easy to generate your manuscript in different formats such as standard manuscript format, MLA format, ebooks, and so on, but I won’t worry about that here.

And that’s really it. There’s a lot more to Scrivener and we have a range of video tutorials on our website to talk you through various more advanced features when you’re ready. I hope this video has given you some idea of what Scrivener can do and how easy it is to use.

Thanks for watching!

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Transcript: Hello, I’m Keith Blount the creator of Scrivener. In this video, I’m going to show you how easy it is to use Scrivener for your writing, and how it’s useful for working on long documents. First, let’s fire up Scrivener and create a new project.

To create a new project, go to file, new project, you’ll see I’m presented with a window that allows me to choose from different project templates. There are templates for novels, scripts, academic writing, and more. Here, I’m going to choose blank, which will create an empty project without any template information.

Now, I choose where to save my project. It’s up to you where you keep your Scrivener projects so be sure to pick somewhere you’ll remember. Once that’s done, Scrivener’s main project window appears and I’m ready to start writing. On the left here there’s a list showing all the documents in the project, we call this the Binder because it acts like a ring binder, you throw into it everything you need to get your writing done.

Not just the writing itself, but also research, notes, and anything else you want to refer to. I can go ahead and start writing in the editor. You can format your text however you want using the familiar tools in the format bar above the editor or by using the menus or keyboard shortcuts. If you prefer writing on virtual pages, you can switch to page view. I like working with page view turned off though.

One of the key ideas behind Scrivener is that it’s easier to work on a long text if you break it down into smaller more manageable chunks. It’s entirely up to you how large or small those chunks are, you could divide your work up into chapters, scenes, paragraphs, arguments, or anything else. Here I’ve written one short section and I now want to create another. To do so, I click on the Add button and I get another blank document beneath whatever was selected in the binder.

I can add a title and now I’m ready to start typing out my new section. Actually, you know what, I’ve realized that this section would work better as two separate sections, that’s easy to fix. I just put my cursor where I want to split it and go to documents, split at selection. Not only that, I’ve also realized what the section I split off would be more effective if it came first, that’s easy to fix too. I just drag and drop it into place in the binder.

Talking of the binder, let’s take a quick look at it. Note that every Scrivener project contains three folders that are always there. You can add as many folders as you want, and we’ll get to that in a moment, but these folders are special. The draft folder is the most important, this is where you create your actual manuscript or text. All the different sections in this folder can be printed or exported as a single long document. We’ll see how soon.

Supporting material that’s not part of the manuscript, you can place in the research folder. You can put pretty much anything in here; PDF files, images, notes, anything you need to reference while working on your project. In fact, I have a couple of files that I know I’m going to need to refer to later, so I think I’ll bring those in now. Over in the finder, I have a PDF file containing some information about a town I’ll be writing about and a photo of one of the town’s landmarks, I’ll just drag those into my research folder like so.

The Trash folder stores any documents that you have deleted from a project. They stay there until you delete them permanently by choosing to empty the trash. Incidentally, you can rename any of these three folders and the draft folder is titled manuscript in some of the project templates. You can always recognize them from their special icons though.

To move between the sections of my project what I need to do is select the section in the binder to open it in the editor. If I want to block out the rest of my screen while I write, I can click on the full-screen composition button. Once I finish, I just hit escape to return to the main window.

Okay, I’ve written a few sections now. My initial plan was that each of these sections would be a single short chapter, but I’ve changed my mind. I now think that for this book it would be better to have several sections in each chapter. For this, I’m going to arrange them into folders.

To create a new folder, I just click on the add folder button. The new folder will be created below whatever is selected in the binder, I’ll give it a name and drag it where I want. Now I’m going to drag some sections inside it, I’ll do the same for my other sections, you can structure your writing however you want even nesting folders inside folders. I’m happy with the way this is organized though.

Breaking things down into small sections is a great way of working on a long document, but what if you want to work on a complete chapter or even the whole manuscript to get a feel for how it flows? In Scrivener this is easy and we call it Scrivenings mode. All I need to do is click on the draft folder in the binder, and then change the editor to scrivenings mode which is this icon in the toolbar. Now the editor shows me all the sections in my manuscript as though they were part of a single text.

I can show titles using view, text editing, show titles and scrivenings. I can type and edit my sections here just as I can when viewing them individually. Clicking on a folder shows the sections inside that folder. Wait, I’ve just realized that there are some details I need to check but I don’t have time right now, for this I think I’ll set up a little area in my project where I can make notes to myself.

I’ll create a new folder and place it above the research folder. I’ll name it ‘’to-do.’’ Using documents, change icon, I’ll give it a custom icon too so it’s easy to pick out, and now I’ll add my note to it.

Great, now I can return to my writing, happy that I won’t forget to check these details later. I now need to refer to some of that research I imported earlier, this is simple I just click this button in the header bar to split the editor in two. Holding down option or alt when I click, switches between a vertical and horizontal split.

To load my research, I just click into the editor in which I want to show it and then I click on the research document in the binder. Alternatively, I can just drag the research onto the header bar of the editor I want to load it in. I can also load different text sections in the other editor so I can refer to other parts of my project as I write. To close this bit, I click on the button header again.

I’ve now reached a point in my project where I’ve realized it would help to plan it out a little more, for this I’m going to use Scrivener structural tools. First I’ve got an idea for a section that I need to write later, but I don’t know exactly where it fits yet. For this I’m going to create a new document in the draft, but for now I’m going to leave a text blank, instead I’m going to open the inspector by pressing on this blue disc icon and in the index card on the top here, I’m going to write a short summary of what this section is going to be about that way I’ll know what I need to write later.

I can use the notes area beneath the index card to jot down anything else I need to remember when I come to write this section. I think I’ll put this into an unplaced sections folder for now. Every document in a Scrivener project has a synopses index card like this associated with it. Synopses can be used to work with a higher level overview of your manuscript. To see what I mean, let’s look at some of the sections in the first folder now that the inspector is open, I haven’t added a synopsis for any of these sections because I wrote them without any planning.

If I want, I can always add a synopsis after writing a section though. I don’t have to do this, but it makes it easier to get an overview. For example, let’s add a synopsis to this section. Now if I select my folder containing these sections and click on the corkboard icon in the toolbar, the editor switches to corkboard mode. In corkboard mode, you can see the index cards that are associated with the sections inside the folder.

So, on this index card you can see the synopsis I just typed out, I haven’t added any synopses for other sections in this folder. So the index cards for those just show the first lines of a text. The corkboard gives me a great overview of everything that’s in this folder, in this case, it shows me a summary of my chapter. I can edit the synopsis by double-clicking into the cards, and I can rearrange the sections by dragging them around on a corkboard. Looking at this overview I’ve realized that I need to add another section to fill in some details, I can do this right in my cork board by clicking the Add button. This creates an index card that represents a new blank document inside the folder.

I’ll add a synopsis of what I intend to be in this section which I’ll write later. When I’m ready to write it, all I need to do is click on the section in the binder, and I can see from the index card in the inspector what I need to write. The corkboard is one great way of working with an overview of your manuscript, Scrivener’s outliner is another.

If I click on the first folder again and this time click on the outliner icon in the toolbar, the editor switches to outliner mode. Like the corkboard, the outliner shows me titles and synopses of the sections in my project. I can view a lot more information in the outliner though, or I can keep it simple.

If I click on the draft folder, I now have an overview of my entire manuscript. I can edit titles and synopses, create stubs for new sections I need to write later, create new folders, and reorganize until I’m happy that my manuscript has the most effective structure and reading order.

Whether you use these features to plan out your whole manuscript before you begin to write, or as editing tools later in the process is entirely up to you. Well, I’ve been working on this book for a while now, it’s time I shared it with someone.

For this, I use the Compile feature. This will take everything I’ve written in the draft folder and stitch it together into a single exported file or print out. I can create all sorts of files including Word documents and eBooks, but right now I’m just going to send it to a friend as a PDF file so she can give me some feedback.

I choose how I want the manuscript to look using these options on the left. For sharing with my friend, I’m going to choose the modern format. Now I just tell Scrivener how the parts of my manuscript should look.

I want groups to be shown as chapter titles, and text sections to appear with breaks between them. In your own projects, you might have all sorts of different groups and text sections which all need formatting differently. That’s easily done but we won’t get into that here. Now I just compile and have a nicely formatted PDF file ready to share with my friend.

And that’s really everything you need to know to make effective use of Scrivener. I hope that this video has given you a good idea of how you can use Scrivener with your own projects and that you’re ready to get writing.

Thanks for watching!

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