Exactly what preferences and settings and setups are transferred through Scrivener’s Export Settings function? Barring that, what happens when one saves a project as a new name and then selects and deletes all Binder docs… and then drags and drops all of the binder items from another project into the first project? What settings and setups survive and which don’t? What are the risks of doing so? Does the data structure get screwed up in any way? Is creating a project template an option that would retain and clone project settings AND scrivener preferences?
Where are you seeing the “Export Settings” command?
Generally speaking, window colors, export/import options, and anything else set through the Scrivener -> Preferences panes is Scrivener-wide. Formatting, metadata, and anything set through the Project -> Project Settings pane is project-specific. Compile formats can be scoped to either the specific project or all of Scrivener. Window layouts are remembered by the project, but can be saved for reuse elsewhere. Styles are specific to the project or Compile format where they are defined.
If you delete all of the documents from a project, you’ll be left with the project-specific keywords, any project-specific Compile formats, project-specific autocompletions, that sort of thing. New documents that you drag in will bring their metadata with them – labels, keywords, and so on. Obviously you should make sure you have good backups before this kind of radical reorganization, but there’s nothing inherently risky about it: Scrivener is designed to support cross-project moves.
Collections specifically are associated with projects, not with files. If you delete all of the files that belong to a Collection (or that meet the search criteria for a Search Collection), the Collection itself will still exist, it will just be empty.
Yes, a project template is the recommended way to clone a project’s settings. No, the template won’t carry Scrivener’s own preferences with it. If the new project is opened on the same computer, it will get all the same Scrivener-wide preferences anyway. If it’s on a different computer, the assumption is that the user of that computer has already configured the preferences they want.
Some of these questions are probably best answered as hands-on lab exercises – see which settings you personally care about survive the various manipulations.
So let’s say the docs one imports into a project have custom metadata attributes assigned to them… do the full medata from the document’s original project become embedded into the recipient project?
I think so, but you should test with your specific example before doing this with large amounts of data.
What do you mean by “full metadata?” A document will bring the keywords specifically assigned to it, for example, but it won’t bring the full set of keywords that exists in its original project.
Let’s say that I have set up a custom metaData called “Number of Limbs”, of type “list”, and that list is defined as “0,1,2,4,6,8 ,>8”. If I copy a document called “Black Widow” from that project and past it into another project, will the recipient project now have a custom list metadata called “Number of Limbs” as existed in the project “Black Widow” document was imported from, and will that “Number of Limbs” metadata have the same list of options (“0,1,2,4,6,8 ,>8”), and will the “Black Widow” document in the recipient project retain its “Number of Limbs” custom metadata setting of “8” as set in its project of origin?
Well, just did a test and found out that custom metadata settings specific to a document do not follow a document dragged from one Scrivener Project into another Scrivener Project. So I am asking how to do that? How can I bring project specific settings from one Scrivener Project into another Scrivener Project (note: I also want to retain all of the settings already defined in the recipient Scrivener Project).