I recently picked up Scrivener, and it’s been a fantastic investment thus far. I was sold primarily on the corkboard feature, which seemed a good deal more useful for my purposes than any similar software I had found. It’s been working out great save for one small hiccup.
I’m at a point in my outlining where I’m just spouting ideas for scenes, characters, and plot development in an almost stream-of-consciousness sort of way. Clicking back and forth between the corkboard and the notepad documents breaks me out of that mode. To combat that distraction, I end up just jotting all my notes on the index card itself and churning out ridiculously long index card synopses that then need to be individually copied and pasted onto the related notepad.
I would very much like to have the text from the index card synopsis (written on the index card itself) to be copied automatically to the notepad document associated with that card. Is there any option to enable this? I poked around a bit and couldn’t find anything on my own. If not, any suggestions to make the transition between document and corkboard run a little more smoothly?
Keyboard shortcuts could help with this. Set up the project window so you’re viewing both the editor and the inspector, and I’d widen the latter by dragging the splitter between it and the editor so that you have more room to view your lengthy synopses there. Then you can use the shortcuts for View > Go To > Previous and Next Document, Alt+Shift+Up and Alt+Shift+Down to move up and down the binder to each document. Select the text in the synopsis area of the inspector and just drag it to the editor to copy it, then, if you want to delete it from the synopsis entirely, just press either backspace or delete. (The focus stays in the inspector during the drag and drop, so you don’t need any further clicks for this first.) Alt+Shift+Down to the next document and repeat.
(I admit that if you are using a regular mouse and not a trackpad for your mousing, and especially if you’re not deleting the text after dragging it, it might be easier to just use the mouse entirely and click to each document in the binder. I don’t like having to mouse back and forth from one side of the window to the other, so keyboard shortcuts simplify this, plus it allows you to close the binder if you want.)
This seems a little out of my wheelhouse. I’m afraid the time I’d spend trying to figure it out would end up eclipsing the time it would save me in the end. Thanks, though. It was a great suggestion. Really, it’s not you; it’s me.
This is a much simpler plan than what I’d been doing. It could have saved me a good few minutes if I’d asked the question earlier. Unless the functionality I’m looking for ends up being implemented in future versions, I’m happy to do it this way. Thanks.