Auto-Generating an Abstract

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

My advisor and committee want me to send them an abstract of my dissertation along with each draft. This means that I need a few paragraphs for each chapter which are not technically part of the content, but are associated with each chapter.

I decided to implement this by putting the abstract in as the folder text for each chapter. I can then use the compile options to include or exclude this text depending on whether I want a full draft or just the abstract. This works fine.

However, sometimes I want to work on just the abstract text, and I’d love to be able to see it all together in one place without the rest of the content interfering. I tried creating a collection with just the folders in it, and none of the subdocuments, but as soon as I select more than one of them, the subdocuments all show up.

Is there any way to hide subdocuments in Scrivenings and just see the combined text of the top level documents?

Is there a better way to do what I’m trying to do?

I tried putting a document in each chapter for the abstract and labeling it or giving it a status to flag that it was the abstract and not the content, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to include or exclude documents from a compile based on these. It would appear that I can only control the content of the compile by manually toggling the “Include in Compile” checkbox, or by discriminating by the level in the document hierarchy (which is what I’m trying to do).

Thanks!

2

Perhaps I can do what I want using the Compile filter. If only I had more than one of those…

3

So did you succeed in creating a collection with just the folders, or did you find it impossible to add just the folders to that collection?

If it’s the latter, you might try creating a “abstrct” keyword (misspelled to avoid finding other documents that might contain the word “abstract”) and assigning it to the folders, then doing a search on that keyword and saving the search. New folders that you assign the keyword to would automatically be added to that collection.

Hope that helps.

4

Yeah, I think I have a workable solution at this point. You can restrict the scope of the search just to keywords so no need to misspell. Thanks!