Sorry if this has been asked before - I couldn’t find an answer on the forums.
While I appreciate the genius of having the insert -> auto number function in Scrivener, I’m wondering whether it might be possible to auto-number my text documents (i.e. chapters) in the draft within the binder or outline view.
Background: I’m writing a crime novel in co-operation (or is it deep hatred?) with another author. I’ve imported the work-so-far into Scrivener. Each chapter gets a label stating which author has written it. All the chapter titles go: place, xx day xx month xx year, e.g. Cluny, Burgundy, 23rd August 1993. These are also the chapter titles in the binder and it is a bliss to be able to move them around. But as some chapters have the same name (because several things happen at the same place and at the same time) the thing becomes difficult. So far, we had a rigid numbering system.
I could yell at my co-author: »Why did you kill my favourite side-cast in chapter 23?«
»Because you poisened that good-looking female werewolf in chapter 18!« and so on.
»But chapter 18 is now chapter 12!«
»So what? Chapter 23 used to be chapter 18!«
and so on.
Now, if we had a way of numbering text objects in the binder / outline, we could carry on yelling at each other without getting confused and still shuffle chapters around. There are btw, a lot of chapters.
I’m afraid there is no real way of doing this. From a technical standpoint it would be very messy. The titles in the binder are the real titles, so putting any temporary characters that only display as certain numbers would be very difficult. It would also involve updating the titles in all the other display areas (inspector, cards etc) whenever a document is moved. It would also involve a lot of internal counting to keep track of the display and which number is which… Hmm, I’m not explaining this very well. In short, it would be pretty tricky technically, so I have no plans to implement anything like this in the near future.
Thanks for the suggestion, though!
All the best,
Keith
Thanks for the quick reply! It’s not a big deal, we will just carry on yelling at each other as confused as before.
It’s great, though, to see right away (i.e. in the binder) who’s written what (I use the label to mark the author) - using the cunning »tint icons with label color« function. Looks really neat, especially considering that it is now clearly visible that I’ve written two thirds of the book so far, while my colleague has killed 3 of my carefully layed-out characters. Looks like Scrivener is also the best multi-author tool on the market …
By the way: just another quick question – I’m rearranging chapters using the corkboard view. I have the habit of moving the cursor to the place where I’m reading. Yellow pop-up notes keep popping up and block my view (displaying the same text I’m trying to read on the index card). Is there a way to turn the bastards off? As I’m not a big fan of yellow pop-op cards anywhere it would be great to be able to turn them off globally (i.e. also for toolbar icons etc.) Otherwise I’ll just have to get rid of my cursor-fixated reading habits.
The delay time before tooltips (their silly name) pop up is set via the terminal. The property is called NSInitialTooltipDelay and takes an argument called “int” followed by the delay time in milliseconds.
So to change the delay to 10 seconds globally, type
