I’ve been using Scrivener for a while, but I’m trying to do more of my research/planning/brainstorming in it than before.
In the early stages of a writing project, I dump ideas, facts, phrases, characters, scenes, etc. onto index cards. For each thought I make a new document in Scrivener, then hit the ellipsis button to autogenerate the synopsis, then copy the title over. A relatively simple 3-step operation, but it gets a little tedious after a few dozen documents/cards/thoughts. It would be fantastic to have a preference checkbox to autogenerate a title & synopsis by default, much as creating a note from the scratchpad does. Type the idea once and move onto the next idea. Done. When the braindump phase is over, I would simply uncheck the “autogenerate synopsis” option and return to the full flexibility Scrivener synopses currently offer.
If this has already been requested elsewhere, or if there’s a viable work-around, I apologize for double-posting in advance.
Thanks for such well thought-out software. If only every book were so good. Eagerly awaiting 2.0.
I’m afraid I wouldn’t want to add something like this, for the following reason. Not long ago I made it so that whenever you imported a document, synopses got auto-filled with the first few sentences of the imported document. It turned out that this was a bad thing, as it made many new users assume that the index card merely displayed the first few lines of text. They didn’t realise they could edit it, or that this was only intended as a convenience, and ended up wondering why the index card didn’t update with changes, and really were missing out on the whole point of the synopsis. An auto-auto-generating synopsis feature would just reinforce this and mislead new users (I’m dropping the automatic generation of synopses for imported documents in 2.0, leaving them blank by default). However, to compensate for this for users who like to use synopses in this way, 2.0 will have a Documents > Auto-Generate Synopses feature, which will allow you to select multiple documents in the binder and have synopses generated for all of them at once. So in your case, you could just generate the synopses for all of the new documents in one go after creating a few of them.
You can actually apply a keyboard shortcut to any command yourself - it’s a little known but very useful feature of OS X. You just need to use the Keyboard pane of the System Preferences to set it up.
All the best,
Keith