My current project is called (not its real name or that of the author):
Zippity Doo by Da Zippity Day
The author has just reminded me that while his real name is Da Zippity Day, there is already a world-famous author of that title, so he works under the name Piffity Paff. In compiling his novel, I have changed the metadata to reflect this; however, it uses the project title for the name of the book. So I now have a book called:
Zippity Doo by Da Zippity Day
By Piffity Paff
If I close the project, rename it Zippity Doo and reopen it, will this cause terrible problems?
(Couldn’t wait, so did it anyway, but my author is still coming up as Da Zippity Day, despite having changed his name to Piffity Paff in all the Meta-Data settings. Now absolutely baffled.)
If you go to Project > Meta-Data Settings you will be able to change the project title there, without having to change your filename. Just edit the <$projecttitle> field.
But, no, it won’t cause problems if you close your project and rename it in Finder. When you open Scrivener, just use File > Open… to navigate to it and open it, because it won’t be in the Recent Projects list under its new name.
Changing the project title in Meta-Data didn’t do it, for some reason.
I’ve now renamed it, and changed the author’s name in the Meta-Data in all the Compile versions I can see - but his real name is still coming up! Help!
Is there some deeper level of Meta-Data within the project that may have retained this information?
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Answered my own question. The author’s name was in Project/Meta-Data, and that was overriding the Compile dialogue’s Meta-Data setting.
The Meta-Data pane under File > Compile… lets you set the meta-data to be associated with the file containing your compiled output. If you change “Compile For:” options, you’ll see that not all compile formats include meta-data, and that the available meta-data fields vary for those options that do support it. If you choose “Compile For: Print”, for example, there is no Meta-Data pane because meta-data cannot be assigned to printed output. If you compile to PDF, you can set the title, author, subject and keywords to be assigned as meta-data to the resultant PDF file; compiling to RTF adds the further options of company, copyright, comments and background colour. The Meta-Data pane under File > Compile… doesn’t do anything at all to the meta-data within your Scrivener project – it just sets meta-data in your output file.
Meta-data within your project, on the other hand, includes variations on the project title and author name, and you can edit these settings via the Project Properties pane under the Project > Meta-Data Settings option that I mentioned before. The corresponding placeholder tags are indicated next to the entry fields, so that you can see what to use if you wish to incorporate this data into your compiled output. And if you want more information on placeholder tags, you can find this via Help > Placeholder Tags List… .
Thanks, Astrid. What struck me as really odd was that the Project setting for Meta-Data was overriding the Compile setting for Meta-Data. It wasn’t until I changed the Project setting that I got rid of my author’s name, despite setting the pseudonym in the Compile settings.