I tried to search for this, but couldn’t find anything, so I apologize if I missed it.
I know in the options you can have the binder show the label color. (either on the icons, the text, whatever) What I’d really like is a way to to show the document status in the binder somehow. Knowing at a glance whether something is a “scene” or a “chapter” is less useful to me than knowing whether it’s a first draft, second draft, final draft, or whatever.
Is there a way to show this right now, or am I pretty much limited to creating my own custom labels and doing it that way?
Only the label can be displayed in the binder, though you can choose to see status information (not color-coded, as status doesn’t take a color) in the outliner and corkboard, so depending what you’re doing maybe a split editor with outliner locked in one pane would work for you. Otherwise, yes, the best thing is to customize the labels–the chapter, scene, etc. examples are really just examples for what you can do with this, but people use the label meta-data for any number of things including tracking point of view, draft status, tension and plot arc. You can set these up by going to Project > Meta-Data Settings… to redefine the existing labels, delete them, and add new ones.
You might also want to create a new custom project template with these settings, if they’re something you’ll want in multiple projects. Get your project set up as you want it with labels, etc. then use File > Save As Template… to create a new project template that you can access from the New Project window for future projects. Everything in the project is saved, including all the binder documents, so if you’re setting this up in a project that already has a lot of work in it, you’ll probably want to create a stripped down version before saving it as a template. You can use File > Save As for this (name it something clear like “TemplateSetup” or whatever) and then delete all the stuff you don’t need; after you’ve used Save As Template, you can delete that TemplateSetup.scriv project. Then in Scrivener use File > Open to go back to your original copy of the project to keep working.
Thanks for the reply. I haven’t messed around too much with templates yet. I’ve been using Scrivener for a few months now, but have still been slowly learning all its nuances. I’m starting to get a decent handle on it though, so setting up some templates (and my own custom labels and statuses) would probably be a good idea for me at this point.
I would like to see the color code as well, without needing to fool about with formats or templates. The big one for me would be a different color for anything listed in the binder that is not included in the compile.