Once you have created the keywords Tree, Sky, Green, etc. click on the Project Keywords icon to display a keywords list.
Then select the documents in the Binder (whether chapters or scenes) you wish to have specific keyword combinations allocated to, e.g. Trees and Sky (I note you have differing combinations for certain scenes).
Next, highlight Trees and Sky in your Keywords list, then right click and select Apply Keywords to Selected Documents.
My understanding is: your need is different combinations to specific Folder and/or Documents, i.e. a many-to-many (many combinations of keywords to many, but not all, folders/documents) allocation of keywords.
If my interpretation is wrong, then apply keywords to templates from the outset of your creative work.
A template might contain pre-selected keywords in specific combinations, identified by a unique name that is clear to you. Then add those templates to your work in progress as required.
But, there’s no way to simply say to a folder, pull in the keywords from your contained files, other than manually.
Hi.
I know Scrivener relatively well, and I can’t think of any way that would qualify as “simple”, “fast” or “efficient”.
(I can think of a way, actually, but it would involve designing a python script, and high risk of destroying your project purely and simply. So, pretend I didn’t mention it.)
This said, if you tell us why you want that, the purpose, someone might be able to suggest an alternative approach to the question that will get you where you are trying to go.
The fastest way I can think of to do it (yes, other than scripting), is the knowledge that you can drag from the inspector onto any selection of binder items (or just one), to assign those dragged keywords to them.
Setup:
Make the window as narrow as possible to reduce drag distance.
Select section 1 in the group and open the inspector to the Keywords list, clicking into it so it has focus.
Execution (repeat list):
CtrlA / ⌘A to Select All.
Drag onto section 1’s parent folder.
AltShift↓ / ⌥⌘↓ to advance to the next section (section 2).
That all said, I would never bother with all of that. I would use the concept of a hierarchy to your advantage. We put things into other things so that the things above them (the parent items) can conceptually, and to a degree even mechanically, inherit the qualities of their descendent items. If a search result for “Tree” comes up with “Section 32” in the sidebar, that’s all I need to know, because there are multiple ways for me to either passively view or navigate to the parent (or any ancestor beyond that point). I don’t need “Subsection F” to be listed explicitly in the search result list, it’s already there without being said out loud.
Why does it matter. The scenes with text in them are what you are searching for and not a usually empty placeholder.
What advantage do you gain by having keywords assigned to an empty chapter?
For me anyway, it is often useful to know that concept X, which is defined by the branching forks of sub-concepts nested beneath it, has in some cases classifications assigned to those components of that thing that we think of as concept x.
But perhaps it is a radically different concept of what an outline is, between you and I. You refer to a folder as being “empty”, which is not how I would refer to it in this particular context (nor would I say can we know that from the original description, it might have thousands of words of notes in it), because it has descendent items—some of which have keywords. For how I think of an outline, the higher level node is as much the things beneath it as it is itself. Those things are just ways of clarifying, or articulating, what that thing is, rather than completely separate entities that have nothing to do with it. Otherwise, why nest anything at all? That is what nesting in an outline is, a declaration of definition for the thing you’re nesting stuff into.
I suppose if we’re going to switch over from that to very specific genre-related terms like chapters and scenes, for the same reason we would not ever say that a chapter is “empty” if it has scenes in it (they don’t even have to have text yet, that is still content. These things are all the same thing, just expanded out into a more detailed reckoning of that thing. Ultimately, everything is a description of the Draft.
An aphid on a twig can be important to know of about the branch it grows from, if you want to know which branches, at a higher level, have twigs with aphids on them.
That said, the kind of specificity you are looking for, where you only want to see nodes in the outline that definitely have an assignment made directly to them, is useful too. That’s why Scrivener works that way by default, and then provides tools for tracing back up the lineage of those things that do match, when you need a more holistic view.
The reason I want chapter folders to reflect the combined keywords of their scenes is to get a quick overview of which topics, characters, or places appear in each chapter.
It’s a large, complex project with many intertwined themes, people, and locations. Sometimes I need to zoom out and assess what’s going on at the chapter level – not just in isolated scenes.
Right now, that information is only available scene-by-scene unless I manually copy keywords up to the folder, which is slow and error-prone. I was hoping there’s a smarter or more efficient way to do it.
OK.
Well, there is what @AmberV suggested. (I think that if you get used to using search + “look up” what chapter the reported files are in, you could get somewhere. Though not as immediate/ideal.)
Another way that came to my mind is that you’d have a dedicated dummy project left open in the background.
You could make it so narrow that almost only the binder and inspector are visible.
If you drag a folder (chapter) from your real project to this dummy project, then merge the master folder + the sub files, the master folder will inherit all the keywords featured in the sub files.
You could then copy those back, all at once, in your real project.
If you look at your manuscript in the outliner view and select the keyword column, then if the inspector is opened to metadata you will see the keywords for each scene. Now click the top one and then ctrl + shift on the bottom to select all and drag list at once into the chapter folder and repeat for each scene. Not automatic but you can quickly move 10 keywords as a group from the scene to the chapter.
