It’s usually quite helpful that Scrivener remembers the cursor position for a text document. When you return to the text document after working on something else, you can continue writing where you left off.
Sometimes, though, I don’t want to start at my old cursor position - i just want to open a series of text documents, one after the other, and see each one at the very beginning. For a scene in a novel that i’m polishing up, I have a folder with a lot of small fragments, all as separate text documents. I’d like to be able to zap quickly through the fragments, and see at a quick glance which one I’m looking at. That’s easiest if the fragments all open at the beginning, and not somewhere in the middle, as then I have to scroll back to the beignning again to see which fragment I’m looking at.
Is this possible? Can you ‘reset’ cursor position for a series of text files?
No, this isn’t possible, but maybe the Synopsis field can help?
If you haven’t assigned a Synopsis to a document, Scrivener 3 will autofill the first few lines for you. You can then see these lines in the Corkboard, the Outliner, or anywhere else that the Synopsis is visible.
Thanks for the reply, Katherine! Too bad this isn’t possible - scrivener devs, if you are reading this, perhaps consider making this feature in a future update - I’m juggling a lot of little fragments that I’m now trying to make into one coherent text, and during this process it’s helpful if scrivener doesn’t remember the cursor position for some text docs.
For now I’ll check if the synopsis feature can help me handle those unwieldy fragments,
Katherine (or anyone else interested in this thread), do you know if it’s possible to expand the amount of words that the auto synopsis on the corkboard consists of? THen I could just make the corkboard cards bigger, and have more of an overview of what’s in the fragments.
The auto-generated synopses can’t be increased in length, but you can select as much of the text as you want from each document and then press SHIFT OPT CMD I (the letter I for Indigo) to make that block of text be the synopsis for the given document. In this way, synopses can be any length you want (though difficult to read on the corkboard’s cards if overly long).
Scrivener devs, feature request:
How about being able to select a folder with text fragments, and from the control-click (or right click) menu being able to select something like ‘reset cursor position’? That option would then put the cursor at the beginning of the text fragment for all selected text fragments.
I can’t say what Keith might or might not be willing to implement. But I will say that “seeing at a quick glance what a document is about” is exactly what the Synopsis field is intended to do.
You could also just view your documents in Scrivenings mode, with “Show Titles in Scrivenings Mode” turned on in the View menu somewhere. Then you just scroll down from the first document, skimming over whatever is past the beginning of it; the titles would be a visual cue to slow down your scrolling to review what comes immediately after. And while you’re doing that, you could click into that first paragraph, which should “reset” where that document’s cursor position starts when you load it individually.
Another way would be to use an Inline Annotation as a tag at the first line of the documents. Then use Find by Formatting > Inline Annotations > Containing Text (the tag) to jump to the top of each tagged document.
If you need help finding any of these features, don’t be shy to ask.
Sure, I get it. It’s just that I’m quite used to working with word documents, and in the mac finder you just go to a folder containing a bunch of them, click on the first one, hit space bar, and boom - you have a ‘quick view’ window of the first one, and then you can zap through them with the arrow keys. Super efficient for quickly finding the right file. I find myself struggling to reproduce this in scrivener.
I think working with the auto synopsis will be my workaround. I’ll view the folder with the text fragments on the corkboard, and then I can indeed see the first few lines as a synopsis. I’ll then use ‘open as quick reference’ (I’ve created a keyboard shortcut for it for easy access) to view the fragments. That still means I can’t zap to the next one with a keyboard shortcut, but that’s fine, I think.
I also like the suggestion of looking at the texts in scrivenings mode, with titles displayed - since the fragments are short that might also work…
For me, having a ‘reset cursor position’ would still be my preferred option, though. I guess you could also do it by hand - I myself don’t have that many files that this would be undoable. But it feels odd having to do this, having scrivener be able to do this automatically seems like a logical feature to add.
If you use the Outliner instead of the Corkboard you can see all the synopsis at once and downarrow if you want to open one particular document in a QR window.
Apple > System Preferences > Dock > Prefer tabs when opening documents > Always
In Scrivener, select all the items in the binder that you want to quick look and then press the space bar to open them as tabbed quick reference windows
Press CTRL SHIFT TAB to move between the tabbed quick reference windows (you can set up your own keyboard shortcut, if desired, to reverse the tab order)
I opened the Tutorial project and realized that if there is no synopsis for a document, Scriv is showing the first few lines of text on the Corkboard card for that document. So there is no need to create a synopsis to get a quick glance of the first few lines. Select a folder/document with subdocuments in the Binder, click on the Corkboard icon if it’s not already active, and … voilà! You see the beginning of each document on its card.
