I write edu text for alot of courses in my field. My goal is to have one main book/draft with all text ordered by subjects.
I think the collections could be the tool for extracting text from the main book into smaller books target each course. But when I add a folder to a collection and hit print only the folder(parent) is included. not the children?
One last thing would be hierarchy, otherwise the compiling wouldn’t make sense?
These two features dont break the current usage and would not cause any circular references,
Edit: Tried the label function, something like that could also do the trick - except missing abillity to apply multiple labels - e.g… “book A”, “book B” on same piece of text.
I’m new to scrivener, I’ve searched the forum but I can’t find a way of doing this already? Again, great application.
Use Opt-drag on containers to add their descendants to a collection, rather than just the container itself. I note you have a split platform user tag, so this works only on the Mac for now (but then that is probably where you will prefer to compile at this point in time, anyway).
I’m not sure I follow, what last thing would be hierarchy, and why doesn’t compiling currently make sense?
Collections are necessarily flat lists, but in the Mac version it’s possible to compile your Draft using the collection as a filter, rather than simply compiling the collection list straight up, so perhaps that would work for you. That maintains the binder hierarchy but only includes items that are in a given collection.
I’m not quite clear what you’re trying to do with the labels–maybe this is related to creating a search collection?–but take a look at keywords for this. You can assign as many as you want to an item and they can be used as the basis of search collections as well.
AmberV: I’m mac user when in scrivener, got the part opt-drag via manual - just expected to see the same hierarchy as draft - haven’t tested if hierarchy is preserved when compiling a collection?
Mimetic: Thanks will try using collection as filter on draft - since that might actually do the trick - gotta test it. //labels. not sure myself, made a simple test whether to use it as filter - but it wouldn’t work since its not possible to set multiple labels (ala google apps) - guess keywords could do as filter to it as well.
Definitely use the filter method instead of choosing the collection as the compile group, if you need hierarchy for formatting structure. The ability to select a collection as a compile group is nice for limited cases (especially for those that write in one flat outline list of files), certainly handier, but filtering is the intended route to take if you are using collections to decide which parts of a complex outline to cut or include. I use the filter method for the user manual to cut out Mac or Windows specific parts of the user manual and it does a great job for that. I use labels for that, because I only have a binary choice. I need all of one platform’s sections cut one way or the other. There is no third output to contend with. I’ll probably have to rework that when Linux is official, but for now three states is good enough (on/off and N/A for sections that apply to both platforms).
Collections will be the tool you want to filter off of if you are producing volumes where one item might appear in multiple editions, since you can only choose one label to include or exclude off of. MM’s tip of using keywords and search collections (remember that running a project search creates a temporary collection!) might be of use here, since multiple keywords can be assigned to an item. An item might be set to be included in topics B, F, and G. When it comes time to compile the G edition, you just open the keyword panel, select G, search for it, and then compile off of your search results (as a filter) to get all parts of the manuscript tagged as G, regardless of whether they are tagged for other topics too. So that would be one way of approaching it, rather than manually putting things into collections based on topic.