Hi all–sorry for a question that, I’d imagine, has been answered somewhere before. But I can’t find quite what I’m looking for in the tutorial, the video, or this forum, so here’s my question:
I want occasionally to be able to print out parts of a large project from assorted Scrivener files, and when I move those files to the “Draft” folder, they show up just fine in the “Compile Draft” menu (they print just fine too).
But then if I want to go back to continue to work on those same files in Scrivener (having now printed them from the Draft folder) do I in fact have to put them all back where they belong in Scrivener, or–to avoid the hassle of having to refile miscellaneous pieces correctly across the project–should I be duplicating text files for the Draft folder and keeping the “originals” where I want them to continue to reside, in various folders in my ongoing Scrivener project?
Bottom line: I’d like to be able to move assorted files to the Draft folder for printing without having those moves change my file / folder structure in the still-unfinished Scrivener project.
I hope this is lucid enough to make sense and to be answerable!
thanks for your help. I like the program a great deal, and I’ve been impressed, too, with the tone and quality of questions and answers in these various forums . . .
I do not understand what you want to do. Using compile draft doesn’t move anything. You simply click on what you want included in the compile draft window and then print. The files don’t move. They stay wherever they are in the draft folder. Are you talking about moving things in and out of the research folder?
Apollo16
Sorry for the confusion. If I have no files in the “Draft” folder, and then, with the selection bar in the Binder positioned anywhere under the “research” heading, I open the “compile draft” pane, I see no titles, no files listed in the “Include” section of that pane. There is only one folder to “choose” in the box above the pane–the “draft” folder. And the tutorial shows, I believe, files being selected and dragged from the “research” portion of the project to the “draft” folder. So I guess another way of putting my question is–can I select and process various pieces of a project simply / only by using the “Compile Draft” option, or must I drag each of those pieces into the “draft” folder manually, before working with the “Compile Draft” pane?
again, sorry this is harder to explain that it would be to show, and thanks for your quick reply,
and–one further follow-up: the second part of my first note-question, really: having dragged selected files into the “draft” folder from the “research” part of the binder, if I then want to continue to work on those files that I’ve moved from selected places in the research project, I have to return each file to the place from which it came in “research,” yes?
that was simply, given the complexity of projects, something that I was trying to avoid–resorting / filing the pieces that I’d temporarily selected out from the “research” part of the binder for printing as a partial draft. . .
If these are documents you want compiling into the draft, I’m not sure why you would want to store them in the Research folder at all - shouldn’t you just leave them in the Draft area? Compile Draft does indeed only operate on the files stored in the Draft folder; that is its whole purpose. Other than this one special purpose - which means that it can only store text files - it acts like other folders, so yes, of course you can work on files contained in the Draft folder. You just select them in the binder under the Draft folder and work on them as normal. In general, anything that you want in the draft belongs in the Draft folder. If for a particular print or export you only want some documents included, you can use the “Include” check buttons or the “Choose folder” button in Compile Draft to specify a subsection of the draft.
If you are working on different projects that will require entirely different sets of documents being compiled, then you should, of course, place them in entirely separate projects.
Hope that makes sense and helps!
All the best,
Keith
Yes, thanks very much, Keith and “Apollo16.” I think my problem was how I was considering the “draft” section of the binder, which I was inclined to use only at a fairly late stage of my project, rather than for all the earliest drafts of what will become chapters in the final book (I was keeping those under their appropriate sections in “research” until I thought they’d become polished enough to be put in “drafts.”)
In any case–thanks again for your help and for a terrific program,
yours,
John
You might also want to take a look at snapshots. It lets you save a “vertical” stack of drafts beneath each document. Early revisions can be saved as milestones, so that new revisions can be written directly on top if them with no fear of losing them. A single Scrivener file can hold dozens of wildly different revisions, if one were so inclined, all in the same Draft tree. Only the latest version will get printed (actually, that is stating things simply. Technically you can select an older revision of an file to be the “front” copy).