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: 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!

The post An Introduction to Scrivener 3 appeared first on Scrivener.app.