This is where you would type a synopsis of the document. Just a quick note before we begin: this tutorial assumes that you are using the default options. If necessary, you can reset them to the defaults by clicking on the “Defaults” button in the Options pane, available under Tools > Options… if you haven’t made any changes to the options, 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 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 your documents around. 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 Draft folder for printing or export. (As such, the Draft folder is unique in that it can only hold text files and folders.) The Research folder can hold text or media files (images, PDF files, video files and so on). 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. 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 Windows Explorer into the binder of your Scrivener project. You can change the current document by clicking on another item in the binder. Try that now—double-click a word in this sentence to select it (you’ll see why in a moment), then click on “Alhambra” inside the “Research” folder (you may need to expand the Research folder by clicking on the triangle, or plus sign, next to it first) and then return here (“Step 1: Beginnings”). See how the selection that you created before is saved and scrolled to automatically? Scrivener always remembers your cursor position and selection, even between sessions. Use this way of “bookmarking your spot” to your advantage as you progress through the tutorial. So now you know that this area can be used to view different types of document, not just text. Let’s try switching between documents again. You see the document on the left beneath this one, the one entitled “Step 2: Header View”? Click on it now. 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 web browser navigation arrows—they allow you step back and forth through the documents you have had open in the editor. The white 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 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. If you prefer the keyboard, you can use Alt-Shift-LeftArrow and RightArrow to do the same. If you click on the little icon next to the title of this document in the header bar, you’ll find some handy commands you can use. One of these is a “Go To” menu. This presents the contents of your binder in a hierarchal menu arrangement. You can thus easily jump anywhere in the Binder, even if it is hidden. 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 history buttons, for instance, the selection in the binder will not change. You can thus navigate around using the header view without losing track of the original document on which you were working in the binder. Try using the “Go To” menu in the header bar icon menu to find and navigate to “Step 3: Footer View”. You’ll need to first select the Draft sub-menu, and then “Part 1: Basics”… You made it to step 3! 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 (Ctrl+Shift+8) to force the binder to show you where you are. Right now, since you used a menu to get here, the Binder isn’t highlighting what you are looking at. Try using the shortcut or menu command to focus the binder selection on Step 3. This is especially useful if the item you are looking to locate is buried beneath many sub-folders and not even visible. 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 (135% 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 popup-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. Feel free to set that to a comfortable level for the remainder of this tutorial. 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. 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 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 Ctrl+\ 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. 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 and have a 3-hole punch along the left side, 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 (Ctrl-4) again to de-select screenplay mode. 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: Full Screen” in the binder. - No synopsis - Full screen is a very nice feature for blocking everything else out while you write. I’m not going to pretend it’s innovative or anything—I think Blue-Tec (now called 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 F11 or click on “Full Screen” in the toolbar above – do it now! You should now be in full screen mode—it’s just you and your text. Some things you need to know about full screen: 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), or its height by holding down the Alt key and using the alternate slider, fade the background in and out and view the word and character counts of the document. There are also buttons for displaying the Keywords 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 a Go To menu so you can switch documents without leaving full screen. On the far right, you’ll find a slider for setting how transparent the background is on either side of the paper, and button for exiting full screen. You can also hit F11 or the Escape key to exit full screen mode. You can only enter full screen mode for text documents. By default, full screen 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 (Windows Key+Ctrl+T), and you can also turn it on for the main editor if you wish, independently. You can customise the look of full screen mode. You can use the Appearance pane of the Options to change the background colours and you can change the colour of the text in full screen mode (so you could set it up to have a retro green-text-on-black-background look, for instance). Okay, let’s move on to “Step 5: The Inspector” while still in full screen mode. To do so, move the cursor to the bottom of the screen and click on the “Go To” icon so that the menu appears. Then, choose Draft > Part 1: Basics > Step 5: The Inspector. 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 lets you do. There are two ways of entering Scrivenings mode: 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. 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 the top of the binder and then, holding down the Ctrl 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 in 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 dashed dividing line between sections. 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 try to select a range of text that spans more than one document block and try to edit it, you will not be able to. Now it’s time to click on “Step 12”... In the first part, we look at the basic features of Scrivener that you will be using most of the time. In the second part, we look at the different tools available for organising your work in Scrivener. Welcome to Part 2 of the tutorial—you can close “Part 1” by clicking on the triangle next to where it says “Part 1” in the binder on the left. You can also hide the Inspector by clicking on the blue disk icon in the toolbar again. By now you have learnt some of the fundamental features of Scrivener. Now it’s time to move on to some of the organisational features. Firstly, 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 an arrow 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 page 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 click on them. We’ll come to that in Step 7. In fact, you can convert a folder document into a text document and vice versa very easily. Click on “Part 2: Organisation” in the binder to make sure it is selected, and then go to Documents > Convert > 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 click on the downward arrow next to the “Add” button, 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, binder sidebar footer and contextual menus. Hitting enter in the binder, outliner or corkboard will also create a new document. Okay, move on to Step 7 when you’re ready (you will need to expand “Part 2” by clicking on the disclosure arrow next to it). Or go get a cup of tea and a biscuit. Log: Removed --- (although this behaviour can be turned off via the Preferences) Here’s another synopsis. 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 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, which is great when you need to refer back to an earlier place in the file, but don’t want to lose the ability to keep typing in the current location. Note that through the Layout menu, you can also choose a Vertical Split, No Split to get rid of the split altogether, or to hide the header and footer views for the current document view. 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), after all. And naturally, we’re not. 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 focused editor turns blue. In the binder, click “ThisIsBuzzAldrin” from inside the “Research” folder. “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). 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. Ctrl+Enter will play or pause the file, for instance—without you having to click outside of this text. These shortcuts are very useful for transcription work, or for referring to a video file while writing. 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. You could hide the toolbar, the header and footer views and the binder and just have the two documents side-by-side while you work. 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 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 (well, actually, it does show them in tool tips if you hover the mouse over items there, but the binder is more intended as a table of contents). The corkboard, as we have seen, is a good way of viewing and editing the synopses of multiple documents, but not 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 the next level of subdocuments (or Alt-click on a disclosure triangle to open all subfolders inside the folder too, all the way down to the bottom of the hierarchy). Next, with the outliner still focused, click on “Part 2: Organisation” in the binder. The outliner will now show only the subdocuments of the “Part 2” folder. Choose which columns appear by clicking on the 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 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. 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). You can also use the Ctrl+Arrow Keys (up, down, left and right) to move documents around–this can be useful when you want a little more accuracy. You can also use these same shortcut keys in the Binder. 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. Okay, I admit it: I’m too lazy to think of anything witty to place in the other synopses. 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. 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 5”, represented as index cards. If you look in the binder, you will notice that these five folders are the immediate subdocuments (or “children”) of the Draft folder—that is, they are only indented one level from the Draft folder. The corkboard thus allows you to concentrate on individual 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 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 card. 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 or texture of your choice in the Corkboard section of the Options. You can also change the way the cards look, to get rid of the rounded corners to make them look more like real index cards, or switch to virtual pins instead of corner markers.) Controlling The Other Editor From The Corkboard Note the button containing the two arrows facing in opposite directions in the corkboard footer bar:  This is the “Auto-Load Button”. 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 Auto-Load 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. View Options Go to View > Corkboard Options > Show Pins. The result will depend on the look you have chosen for the label indicator in the corkboard Options. If you are using the default corner mark look, then each card that has a label associated with it will now have a colour chip in is top-right corner; if you are using the pin 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. Right 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 the 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 (they are all explained in the Help file though of course). One more thing to note, before we move on, is that graphics files get displayed on the corkboard as pictures. Click in the corkboard above to ensure it has the focus, and then click on the “Research” folder to see what I mean. Okay, we covered a lot there! Remember that you don’t have to use the features that don’t appeal to you, though. 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. In Part 3, we cover how to import and export documents in Scrivener. 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 Explorer 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 Windows Explorer into Scrivener’s binder and drag them out again to export. The following file types are supported by Scrivener’s import feature: RTF DOC DOCX (with Word 2003 onward installed) ODT TXT / plain text PDF Final Draft FDX (will be available in 1.1 update) HTML HTM WEBARCHIVE Most image files Any file supported by Quicktime (video and audio) (Note that you can also copy and paste content into Scrivener from any source. If rich text formatting is not critical it is recommended that you copy and paste first into a program like Windows Notepad to strip off formatting that may not be recognised within Scrivener and then copy and paste from Notepad into Scrivener. This method will ensure that text pasted from other applications is cleaned and usable within Scrivener.) It is important to note that some attributes may be lost for certain document types upon import. 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 15... 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 Windows Explorer. You can even drag the selected documents from the binder onto your desktop or Windows Explorer. All files in the Draft folder will be exported as RTF and all the other files will simply be copied in their native format. 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 16. 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 from Scrivener), you can choose whether to include document titles (or synopses and notes for that matter), set up a header and footer, 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, 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: Go to File > Compile… Ensure that “Custom” is chosen next to “Format As” (Custom represents the settings that have been saved into the project. In this case, the tutorial has been set up to compile a document that look as it does in the editor). Ensure “PDF (.pdf)” is selected next to “Compile For”. Click on “Compile”. Enter a destination and file name for the PDF and click Save. Open the PDF produced by Scrivener. 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 “Novel” format (be sure you choose “PDF (.pdf)” 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. That’s all you need to know for creating basic print-outs and exported files from your draft. At some point, though, you may find that you want more control over the document that gets produced. Try going back to the Compile dialog and clicking on the expansion arrow:  The Compile dialog 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. This time, with the compile dialog expanded to show all of the advanced options, try the following: Choose “Custom” from the “Format As” list again, to return to the tutorial project’s saved settings. Take a look at the “Contents” pane. This allows you to choose which 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.  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. 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. We’re going to override the formatting, though, so click on this button to tick it.  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 get 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. Click the “Modify” button and then into the bold “Title” text in the dialog window that appear. 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.  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 before the documents of the folder type whenever they start on a new page. (You’ll see what I mean in a minute.) 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 at the bottom will be updated to reflect your changes. Click the “Modify” button and then into the bold title in the dialog. 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. 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 the (who’d have thought it) line spacing. 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. 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. For the “Text separator”, choose “Page break”. For the “Folder and text separator”, choose “Single return”. This will ensure that the text of any documents following our folder get added straight after the folder titles which we set up in our formatting options. Right, at last, click on the “Compile For” drop down and select “Preview”. Then click “Compile” to open a preview. Take a look through the preview document to see what you’ve done—you’ve added titles and completely changed the way the text looks. Once you’re happy with that, click the preview click the “Close” button to return to the Compile dialog. We’re just going to make one tweak, as follows: Choose the “Formatting” pane again. Select the third row, the “Level 1+” with the single text icon next it. Click on the “Add formatting level” button:  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. Click on the “Add formatting level” button again so that a “Level 3+” row is created. Make sure the “Level 3+” row is selected and then click the “Modify” button and into the text area and change formatting to something glaring. Change the text colour to bright green or suchlike. 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 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). Now onto the fourth part… 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” (Ctrl+5) in the Documents > Snapshots menu. You will hear the 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). Snapshots are very useful for keeping old versions of your text around and for checking what you have changed. Now let’s move onto “Step 6: End of Part One”! NEW STUFF This is where I will put anything you need to know before using a new beta version. 19 N... SAVING A very important aspect of a program such as Scrivener is how it saves documents. Scrivener auto-saves so that you don’t have to worry about saving at all if you don’t want to. That said, if you’re anything like me, “not worrying” about saving is an impossibility, so here is how things work: every time you make a change to a document, an asterisk “*” appears next to the project title in the top-left of the window  At this point, Scrivener knows that it needs to save as soon as possible. It does so as soon as there is no activity for two seconds or more (although you can change the amount of time it waits in the “General” pane of the Options)—that way, saving a large document will not interrupt what you are doing. It also checks whether it needs to save when a project is closed and when you quit the application, and saves if so. Once things are saved, the asterisk disappears. Although the auto-save feature keeps your work safe 99.99999% of the time, and while I hope you never experience any crashes, every program has the occasional bug lurking around, so for the sake of your—and my—own sanity, there is a “force save” feature. This just works the same way as a normal save in a regular app. Hit Ctrl+S or go to File > Save to force any changes you have made to be saved without having to wait the two seconds for an auto-save. Note that because of the auto-save feature, if you close a project while the asterisk is visible, you will not be asked whether you want to save your changes, as many programs do, because the changes will be saved automatically. If you’re like many writers, you’ve probably grown accustomed to thinking of saving as a way of confirming a series of edits. You can save a file, work for a while, and if you like where things are going you can press Ctrl-S to save and continue one. If you don’t like how things are going, you can use the program’s revert feature, or just close without saving and re-open the document. Since Scrivener auto-saves continually in the background, you might find this new way of working to be a little jarring to this habitual routine. I recommend getting used to using Snapshots (Ctrl-5) in the same way that you’ve used Save in the past. Whenever you feel like you’ve reached a small milestone, just hit Ctrl-5, listen for the camera shutter, and then move on. If you don’t like how things went with the last batch of edits, you can use the Snapshots pane to revert back to the last checkpoint. Periodically I like to wipe out all of the untitled snapshots just to keep things clean and to reduce confusion between those as the big milestones I want to keep around for longer (I usually name those). Once you get used to the new shortcut, we hope you’ll find this way of working to be superior to the old. For one, your work is always saved, second you get an automatic trail whenever you “save” with snapshots, rather than just replacing one single copy on your disk over and over, and third due to how Scrivener encourages working on small pieces of your draft instead of long files, your snapshots will be relevant to the specific portion of text you were working on, allowing a non-linear approach to retrieving older edits. LAYOUTS If you find yourself opening and closing the binder and inspector frequently, or spending a lot of time setting up the corkboard or outliner view to appear in the right place for a particular task, check out the Layouts feature, which can be accessed by selecting “Manage Layouts” from the View > Layout menu. This allows you to save the state of the interface and quickly return to it at a later time. SCRATCH PAD If you have to gather a lot of research in other applications and find yourself doing a lot of copying and pasting into Scrivener, the Scratch Pad feature may be useful. You paste or type any notes into it and send them to one of your open projects straight away or at some point later. The Scratch Pad is separate from your projects, but can be called up from the Tools > Scratch Pad menu command. When inactive it will apppear ghosted so you can see behind it, but it will otherwise always float above every window on the system. BACKING UP YOUR WORK Back Up To... (available from the File > Back Up > Back Up To… menu command) is your friend... Use it frequently to save copies of your project (you can save copies as archived .zip files, too) to ensure that your work is always backed up. Think of this as your “global snapshot” feature. In addition to this, Scrivener will by default automatically back up your project each time you close it. These backups are stored in your AppData folder, and so are invisible in a default installation of Windows. However you can easily get to them by loading up the Tools > Options… window, select the Backup tab, and then click on the “Open Backup Folder…” button at the bottom. You can also specify an alternate location for where backups should be saved. This can be pointed at a network synchronised folder like Dropbox for additional redundancy. For the most part this all will happen without your knowledge; an invisible safety net. However in the case of projects that grow to be quite large, you might find a drop in performance while closing the project. Consult the user manual for tips on how to optimise the system for larger projects. FILE FORMAT Just a quick note on the file format, by the way: the .scriv folder is a cohesive complex of files and sub-folders and should not under any circumstances be tampered with by anything other than Scrivener. All of your work is actually stored as multiple RTF and XML files inside various sub-folders within the .scriv folder including the .scrivx project file. This means that even in the worst possible crash case, if a .scriv folder became hopelessly corrupted (although I hope this will never happen), you would still be able to open and edit all of your work in another program (such as WordPad). That said, you should not edit the RTF files inside a .scriv package in any other program if you intend to keep using them inside Scrivener, as this may cause problems with Scrivener’s footnotes, links and search features. Use the File > Export > Export Files… feature if you want to get your files out of Scrivener. It’s also probably not a good idea to store your own files inside the “My Project.scriv” folder. While we’ll make every attempt to not disturb that which Scrivener has not created, we cannot guarantee the safety of the files you put inside this curated folder. If you have auxiliary support files you’d like to store along with your project (such as compiled versions), we recommend putting them all into a folder alongside with the .scriv folder. Log: Removed --- (scratch pad notes are saved in a folder on your hard drive that you can specify in the options) This is the index card where you write your synopsis... You can leave full screen mode now by hitting the Escape key on your keyboard. We’ve now covered the basics of navigating between documents and using full screen mode for distraction-free writing. Now it’s time to meet the Inspector. Click on “Inspector” in the toolbar (the blue disk on the right, with the “i” inside it; or press Ctrl-Shift-I). 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 “Maximize” button at the very the top-right of the window (the middle icon that appears in most Window’s windows). Right, let’s look at the inspector. At the bottom of the inspector, in the footer 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 button, “Snapshots” (the one with the camera) is 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. In the screenshot above, the document has a snapshot (an older version of it has been saved to memory for safe keeping). This document you are reading has a “Reference”, which will cover soon. 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”. 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 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. Part 4... Well, Part 4 covers the other stuff. 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 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. Next we’ll look at some of the text options available in Scrivener. 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 the text colour or highlight buttons in the format bar, 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 customise what appears in the format bar with the Tools > Customize Toolbars… menu command. THE FORMAT MENU The Format menu provides various ways of formatting your text which are standard in many applications along with some that are unique to Scrivener, the latter of which are listed below. HIGHLIGHT Pretty straightforward, this one. Choose from several standard highlighter pen colours to highlight your text. INLINE ANNOTATION AND FOOTNOTES 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—these will be available in the 1.1 release). Inline footnotes and annotations look like this: This text has a footnote after it. This is a footnote. When the text is compiled, exported or printed, this footnote will be turned into a “real” footnote (or endnote). And this is an annotation. Annotations can be completely removed from the text when you compile, print or export. 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 in the Appearance tab of Options). When you export your work, ranges of text defined as footnotes can be turned into real RTF footnotes that can be read by Word, OpenOffice.org, WordPerfect and other major word processors. Ranges of text defined as annotations can be turned into RTF comments (which Word can read) or omitted 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. SCRIVENER LINKS Scrivener 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 split pane. 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 new pane. Close the split pane and then move on to “Step 19” in the binder. This has been a fairly thorough tour of all of the main features of Scrivener. You probably won’t use half of the features you’ve just learnt of 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 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 or dedicated scriptwriting program 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 Manual from the Help menu. Note that it is a PDF, so while you are learning the program you might consider importing it into your working project binder’s research section for easy access. 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: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/wiki 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 support@literatureandlatte.com. We hope you enjoy using Scrivener and find it a useful tool, and offer our 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!  Scrivener Tutorial For Microsoft Windows IMPORTANT NOTE BEFORE WE BEGIN This tutorial is a Scrivener project which has been provided to help you get started. Once you’ve finished the tutorial, go to File > New Project to begin your own project. WELCOME TO THE TUTORIAL Hello, and welcome to Scrivener. I hope you find Scrivener a useful addition to the tools you use for writing. This tutorial is designed to get you up and running as quickly as possible by introducing you to Scrivener’s main features. For further help and a more comprehensive description of all of Scrivener’s features, please refer to the manual, which is available from the Help menu. Feel free to ask for further assistance—and to report any bugs or problems you find—on the forums: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/forum WHAT IS SCRIVENER? Scrivener is aimed at writers of all kinds—novelists, journalists, academics, screenwriters, playwrights—who need to structure a long piece of text while referring to research documents. Scrivener is a ring-binder, a scrapbook, a corkboard, an outliner and text editor all rolled into one. It is primarily intended to be a first draft tool—although it is possible to complete a project that requires only basic formatting—such as a novel or short story—in Scrivener, often you will want to take your draft to a dedicated word processor or layout program for final formatting. Scrivener is intended to be a kind of “writer’s shed” for those of us who don’t have a spare shed. This tutorial should take about one to two hours to complete and will give you a good idea about the sorts of things Scrivener can do, and whether or not it is the tool for you. By the time you have completed this tutorial, you should have a good grasp of how to start using Scrivener for your own projects, and you will be able to learn other features as you need them. So, without further ado, click on “Step 1: Beginnings” in the list on the left to begin. Note: British spelling used throughout this tutorial. A PDF document from NASA about space walking. 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 project folders end in “.scriv” which might seem a little strange. This is to maximise the cross-platform compatibility of the project. When viewed on a Mac, the folder will look and act like a single file. You will need to open Scrivener projects by double-clicking on the main project folder and then double-clicking the file ending in “.scrivx”. That file is not your entire project, it is the master control file that keeps track of all the pieces. If you wish to copy your project to another computer or back it up, make sure to send the whole folder ending in .scriv. You can also open .scrivx files using the File > Open… command, or if you’ve worked on the project recently, it might be listed in the File > Recent Projects sub-menu. 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: 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. This can be as simple as you like, maybe just a few tweaks to Blank. Select “Save As Template…” from the File menu. 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”. Go to File > New Project… 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. Okay, on to Step 20, the “And Finally…” bit. Part 5 shows you how to create customised projects. This is what will represent this document throughout the project. 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 pane 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 auto-generate a synopsis by clicking on the  button in the top-right of the inspector: if any text is selected in the editor, it will be copied into the synopsis; if no text is selected, the first few lines of text will be used. 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 editor, binder or from Windows Explorer 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 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”. GENERAL META-DATA The General Meta-Data pane 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. 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. You can view all meta-data in columns in the outliner view, too (which is covered in Part 2). 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 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). Please click on “5d: References” in the binder. This is the notes area right here... Here you can jot down any thoughts about your current document or drag in images if you so wish...  Click on the next button in the inspector footer bar, the one with the picture of several book spines 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 within the project you are working in,Windows Explorer, 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. 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 (which can be viewed from any document). All right, you can close the split by using the View > Layout > No Split menu command. Make sure the cursor is in this document before doing so, otherwise you’ll end up in Part 6 from the other split! Next click on the key button at the bottom of the inspector to view the keywords pane and then move onto “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. You can also assign keywords via the Project Keywords dialog. Open that now by clicking on the “Keywords” button in the toolbar (the black box with the key inside it) or Ctrl-Shift-O. A floating window (that means you can keep it open while you work, and it will always “float” on top of the other windows) 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 window and drag them to the keywords table in the Inspector. You can change the colour associated with a keyword by double-clicking on the colour chip in the Project Keywords window. (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. You can assign keywords to multiple documents at once by selecting the documents in the binder and then dragging the keywords from the Keywords dialog onto the selection). Try dragging the keyword entitled “Assign this one” to the keywords table. You can assign multiple keywords at once. To see this in action, click on the triangle next to “Characters” in the black Keywords dialog 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 “Ctrl” key and selecting multiple keywords then dragging all of the selected keywords into the inspector keyword table. Note how all the selected keywords are added. 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 Project Keywords dialog and then click on the “Search” button at the bottom. Try that now, with the “Themes” keyword. The binder list to the left will be replaced by a search result list. Only this one document should be listed. To leave the search result list, click the “X” button in the lower right-hand corner of the binder sidebar. We’ll learn more about searching later. Next onto one of Scrivener’s most useful features for editing documents: “Snapshots”. You should now be looking at the subdocuments of the “Part 2: Organisation” folder on the corkboard. (This card is used for the synopsis of Step 7.) 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: 1. Single Document Mode In this mode, the editor shows the contents of a single document, whether it’s a text document, a folder, an image, a PDF file or whatever. The editor is in single document mode right now since we used it to view the text of the “Part 2: Organisation” folder. 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 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 and allows you to view subdocuments of subdocuments to any depth. 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 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.:  (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. 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 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 ways of viewing the editor available—the single document (disregarding the content of any children items), corkboard and outliner mode, and also Scrivenings mode. You can return to single document mode by de-selecting all of the segments of the Group Mode control—that is, click on the one that is selected to de-select 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 Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2 and Ctrl+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 each of these view modes in more detail. - No sleep till Brooklyn - 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. This will even be saved in between sessions, and we’ll soon learn how you can save more than one search permanently as tabs. Now click on the “Binder” tab to return to the binder. Next, click on the icon in the editor’s header view to bring up the header bar menu, and click on “Lock in Place”:  The header bar will turn dark pink. This indicates that the editor is now “locked”, which means that clicks in the binder will have no effect. Try 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. This useful ability can be toggled with Ctrl-Shift-L, too. Now hold down the Ctrl 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; they can even be from the Research folder or elsewhere—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. 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 right-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:  Go ahead and try changing the title and colour. You can also drag and drop tabs amongst one another to change their order. 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. You will see that the documents you dragged onto the tab are now in 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, removing them as you are satisfied with them. 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, right-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”: Click on the downward-pointing arrow next to the magnifying glass in the search field in the toolbar, and select “Status”. 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 could check with the Inspector and see that the status for each is marked “To Do”, as you would expect, were the editor not locked. Click on the downward-pointing arrow next to the magnifying glass in the search field again, and this time select “Save Search…” from the bottom of the menu. 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 within the list of other search results. Instead, every time you click on a search collection, the search gets run again. 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. To delete a collection of any kind, 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 de-select “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 14: Importing”. 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. Just click in the search field on the right-hand side of the toolbar and type the phrase you want to search for. (When clicked 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.) Click in the search field now and type “collection”. Note how the binder is replaced by a darker coloured “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 yellow in the current document wherever it appears. So you can click on the documents in the search results list to 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 Ctrl-F) to bring up the Find panel, which can be used to search within the documents themselves. 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 sidebar:  Do so now, and then move on to “Step 13: Collections”.