Hi! I usually put off dividing my scenes into chapters because of how spaced out the binder becomes when you add folders. I go from seeing the vast majority of my scenes to only a few chapters at a time, and it requires much more scrolling to get past. I feel like there’s quite a bit of wasted space and I wish I could shrink the binder UI to be more compact, like you can on gmail and outlook.
I also find it pretty cumbersome to expand and collapse all/multiple folders within the binder. It’s doable in the outline, but not the binder as far as I know. I want the chapters for compiling, but these two things make the feature tricky for me!
A good solution in your case could be to use collections to have less of the binder visible documents-wise.
Each parent folder/file is individually expandable-collapsable. If you haven’t noticed it, they have a tiny arrow to the left.
When I work on a project (novel) that at some point has so many files that I have somewhat your issue, what I do is that I divide it (the binder, the project) into parts by adding level-1 folders. These parts have nothing to do with the novel itself (I ditch them before I compile or set things to ignore them), and are only there to allow me to more efficiently view (by collapse or expand) segments of the binder that are of current interest.
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Another trick you could do, if you don’t use both editors, is you can turn the left one into a second binder (outliner view). Which allows you to access files that are at the top in one, while seeing the bottom – or whichever part you need – in the other.
An alternative approach would be to create a “Chapter Start” Section Type, and simply apply this to each scene doc that is to occur at the start of a chapter. No folders needed! Your compile format can be adjusted to recognize this special section type and format such documents in the way you want to see the beginnings of chapters formatted. It could also be set to grab the title of such documents and use them as chapter names.
Thank you so much for this detailed reply! I appreciate it and will mess around with options. I do have 3 Act folders, then chapter folders, then scenes. I ran into a new problem today, though. I loved being able to mass-select my scenes and screenshot all of them in one go. This wouldn’t be an issue if I didn’t have to manually expand all 30 little folders to select the scene, but it’s tedious to both expand and collapse chapters unless I’m missing something.
That’s what I meant in my original post you highlighted in your response—I know I can individually open them, but I hate manually opening 30 individual subfolders in my binder.
You can tie a manual save to a snapshot.
This will take a snapshot of the documents that were modified since the last manual save.
(Not so much of a point of snapshotting those that haven’t changed a bit since the last time…)
Back up to if you want it in a specific location. Back up now to trigger a backup that will land in the same folder as any other. (Be aware, though, that if you’ve set a maximum number of backups to be retained, that could forfit the purpose. Your backup will eventually be deleted by the system.)
Thank you! On Reddit, I found out there were collapse all/expand all options to add to the toolbar. That + you telling me I can lower the line spacing in the binder were the two things I needed. I swear I have looked through the manual, haha, but still learning new things 10 years later!
Sounds like everything is working out, but just as an extra: Seems like a Saved Smart Collection (which someone suggested earlier) could be useful here too. Craft a Binder search that will only include your scene docs and save it as a Collection. That way you can call up a scene-doc-only view of the Binder whenever you like. Selecting and snapshotting those would be a snap, I suppose. And it would have the desired viewability virtue too, as suggested earlier.
@kamryndk : This wouldn’t be an issue if I didn’t have to manually expand all 30 little folders to select the scene…
So, going off of a narrow interpretation of the definite article here, might the actual problem be that you’re inserting 50 things into your binder when all you need is 25? Or you’ve naturally found a way of working more efficiently for how you structure your work, but aren’t then going on to apply that to your project’s structural settings, so it’s confused about what you’re doing, and that in turn confuses default compile settings—hence the “solution” of contorting your structure into the default settings at the end of the process, once you start needing to compile.
I could be wrong, maybe I’m misreading, but if that isn’t making sense, try a few of these:
Sorry—I’ve read your message a few times and I’m struggling to grasp what you’re saying. I also read your links.
I have chapters. Some chapters (folder) are just one scene (doc), but some chapters (folder) are multiple smaller scenes (docs). I don’t want to combine the multiple docs into one because when I have multiple docs within one chapter, they should have a break in-between (this is all functioning as I want when I compile).
Are you suggesting that if the chapter is just one scene, skip the folder and only have the doc? And then only use a folder if the chapter contains multiple docs? I feel like it would be a little bit of visual chaos to have a mix of folders and docs in one manuscript but I don’t know!
Based on how you work, Chapters as folders and Scenes as documents, keep working that way, even if a chapter is one scene.
I do and it keeps me sane.
Some like to name their scenes, I don’t, except to call it Scene 1, Scene 2… or just Scene if it’s on its own. Those names are not set to carry through during compile anyway.
If I’m ever lost (rarely), I right click on a scene to reveal its relative position in the Binder (using Reveal in Binder). It also shows its hierarchical position to its parent chapter. Simply hovering over the scene name in the Binder would also show you it’s full path.
Or if you assign every scene the same section type(classically called a scene) then do a dynamic search for the scene section type. Call collection “scenes” and as write new scenes will be included in the search and the acts and chapter folders will be ignored . You can all change binder font to compress view.
