I have my novel split into parts > chapters > scenes, and I’ve labelled the scenes by my four POV characters with the expectation that I could select all scenes with the same label and review/edit them together in scrivenings mode (not as easy as I would have thought).
If I go to outline mode and sort by label, I can select all scenes with Character A and choose ‘open in other editor’. They then open in other editor, out of order (ie - ch17 sc2; ch6 sc1; ch30 sc3; ch30 sc1; ch1 sc2; etc).
Does anyone know:
a) why this might be happening? they are in chapter order when selected from outline mode
b) a better/simpler way to view all scenes with a common label or metadata at the same time, in order?
Hello Tomenator! I’ll start by answering question b since I think this suggestion may make question a moot.
Have you considered using Scrivener’s Collections tools for reviewing each POV character’s related materials?
If you haven’t, then you might want to read through Section 10.2 in the Scrivener manual, which you can obtain in PDF from Scrivener’s Help menu.
Using collections would allow you to search for and review different parts of your project in any order you’d like. You can even save the collections as a handy way to return to each character’s relevant materials.
That behavior looks like a bug to me. Since your outliner is sorted in a particular order, and I assume you selected that series of documents in that order, it makes no sense that the editor on the right isn’t in the same order as your outline shows.
But as RuthS suggested, a search-based collection/saved search for each PoV character would actually be quicker once they’re created, and will present your scenes in Binder order, so selecting them from the search results should give you an in-order Scrivenings session.
@Rdale: That behavior looks like a bug to me. Since your outliner is sorted in a particular order, and I assume you selected that series of documents in that order, it makes no sense that the editor on the right isn’t in the same order as your outline shows.
Yes, this is the actual problem. At the moment the Windows version is oblivious to the visual order of what you are selecting (a failure that extends broadly to all manner of functions, such as merging documents, duplicating selections, compiling with ‘Current Selection’ etc.).
I believe the only exception may be manually arranged collections (and then only for some tasks). Thus, at the moment the only way to view a chunk of text in non-binder order, unless I’m missing some corner of the software, is:
With the selected items, use the Documents ▸ Add to Collection ▸ New... command.
Manually mimic the sorted order, using the sorted outliner in the main editor as a reference.
When done, click the ↪ button in the collection header bar to load its contents into the main editor.
Yes, I had a fiddle with collections last night, and searching by keyword. They do seem to work quite well, and a more flexible within the file structure.
Cheers for the tip.
@Rdale@AmberV what an odd bug! It’s strange that it always sorts into the same random order too. I wonder what causes it?
I’ve added a custom metadata field for a timestamp, ie the time in story that the scene takes place (YYYYMMDDHH). I try to keep the story in chronological order, but with multiple POV characters and events taking place across a continent all at the same time, i wanted to do some testing.
With this metadata set, I can sort my scenes into actual chronological order in outline mode, however here I run into the same problem - I can’t open that list in scrivenings mode in the custom order.
Any ideas for a solution, without manually re-ordering them in a collection? There will end up being something like 150-180 scenes in the completed novel, which would be an absolute pain to do by hand.
No, sorry, like I say they have not programmed this part of the software yet so there is no way around it. All of the things you might think to do to re-order things automatically and then take a list from that order do not work.
I’ve bumped the priority on the bug report, but that’s about all I can do at the moment. It’s a rather core part of the software design to have left out, so hopefully it gets fixed sooner than later.
I occasionally need to sort documents in certain folders in the binder OTHER THAN alphabetically (ie using Edit > Sort). I know how to sort documents in Outline view, but NOT how to make the sort order stick in the binder. Some people have claimed that although Scrivener does not offer this functionality, there was nevertheless a workaround to achieve this: after sorting the documents as required in Outline view, by selecting all documents and dragging-and-dropping them back into the folder, the NEW sort order would be copied to the binder. Whereas this seems to work for some people, I was not able to reproduce this. Why not? I run Scrivener for Windows v3.1.5.1 on Windows 10.
I seem to remember that it was possible to sort files in the outliner without changing the order in the binder but that it was also possible to then transfer that sorting to the binder or a collection. But I can’t seem to figure out how.
Is it at all possible?
My scenario: I have a collection created from files in a binder folder. The order in the collection seems random (possibly the order in which I added them to the collection). In the outliner, I have sorted them by title (they are numbered, so now they appear in the order their are in the original binder). The final step: I would like to transfer this sorting to the files in the collection.
How do I do that?
I realise that for this specific scenario, I can go to Edit → Sort → Collection into Binder Order
But what if I want to use the outliner column sort for a sort that isn’t the same as the Binder?
If you move documents in the outliner it immediately reflects in the binder…
Any changes to documents’ order will affect the binder without you doing anything else.
Binder and outliner behave as one single thing.
It is the opposite that one can’t do.
If you mean the visual sorting that the outliner can offer, that’s something else completely. (And it is exclusive to the outliner.)
Ah, OK. I guess sorting by metadata in the outliner is a visual sorting. Thanks!
So creating an export based on that visual sorting, as an example, isn’t possible, right?
Yes and no.
There are good reasons NOT to allow resorting of the binder like that. (Imagine the mess should it be by mistake… How do you fix that afterwards??)
This said, if you use the Outliner as a second binder in a split editor, you can sort it visually whichever way you want.
At the bottom left of the Outliner, that button toggles automatic loading of a selection in the other editor :
Click that so it is blue, that function will be activated.
→ Have your second editor display as normal text.
. . . . . .
There, you now have a sortable “binder”.
. . . . . . . .
That I don’t know. Never tried, but I wouldn’t be surprised that once sorted like that, the print function would allow this order to prevail. Then you could print to file, I suppose.
Perhaps export would work just the same. You’d have to try it.
Or through a collection.
Sort the outliner → select all → collection → compile or export.
. . . . . . . .
[EDIT] I tried a couple of things. It doesn’t seem to be so doable.
The best I could do was to drag the documents from the outliner to a new empty collection by hand. It works if you don’t drag all of them at once. (If you do, sorting is not respected. – No idea why.)
Drag the firsts documents to the collection, then a bunch at a time, going down the outliner.
Then export the collection.
So… @AmberV, [since the thread got merged here] I guess I had a misconception about it?
It is intended that the binder be resorted as per the Outliner’s sorting?
Labels, metadata fields, etc etc (?) (Seems odd, though.)
Yup! The visual order is always supposed to matter, in just about any combination of features and contexts you can think to mix. As to that one specifically, the ability to drag a custom organisation (from a manual collection) or automatically sorted result, back into the folder the items came from, was deliberately added so that we didn’t need to have dozens of commands in the Edit ▸ Sort submenu—a solution that would still limit you to only sorting as a way of restructuring (Collections being the manual side of that equation).
I’ll admit to feeling very slow at the moment.
I followed the steps but I can’t wrap my head around what this means:
Thanks for your testing. it made me realise that for whatever reason, the Print view has never worked on my computer. Something I’ll have to look into…some day
Thanks for sharing this! I was wondering what I’d done because I couldn’t figure out what was going on with the order when I used the “Add to Collection” feature.
