A feature I’d absolutely love to see:
in the corkboard, when you hover on a scene card, it balloons to (almost) fit the screen - to let you see the scene details fully - then if you click on it, you can edit the card in proper detail. When you click off it, or hover away from it if you haven’t clicked, it goes back to normal size.
I love Scrivener to bits, but ANYTHING that makes plotting easier would be a huge help.
I would suggest going into the Behaviors: Navigation preference pane, and setting Space key opens selected document in… to “Quick Reference Panel”. That will basically do what you’re looking for, I think? I don’t know quite know what “scene details” means. There is no such feature at any rate, as this program can be used by all kinds of authors.
If you mean the Synopsis text, then there are some things you can probably do to make that work better for you; let me know.
Thanks. I probably wasn’t very clear. I want to be able to use the corkboard to lay out a plot, with each card being a scene synopsis, rather than containing the full text of the scene. So any help on that would be marvellous. You can see how automatic expansion of scene card when you hover over it would make for a highly intuitive tool for detailed plotting. I’m aware of standalone plotting programs, but would love to have the functionality inside Scrivener.
Okay, thanks for the clarification. So there are three things that might help you out here:
Click the Corkboard Options button in the very lower right corner of the corkboard (it looks like four index cards). There are a number of settings in here that can help to make index cards more spacious than their defaults, but the two at the top will have the most impact. I know this isn’t dynamic, but if your synopses tend toward what is too long to show on average, you might as well make the average taller or larger in general, at least as a starting point, rather than always working with a rectangle that’s too small for how you use it.
The next tool is the inspector itself. Press ⌥⌘I / Alt+Shift+I, and click on the leftmost tab if necessary. By default the synopsis field here is about the size of an index card, but try clicking on the Notes heading to collapse it. Now you have a full sidebar to work with on any selected card, and the inspector itself can be made wider. Alternatively you can leave Notes open, if you do use them, and drag the relative size of them.
As for accessibility, the ⌃⌥⌘I / Win+Alt+I will move the cursor into the synopsis area of the inspector.
The last option is to ditch the corkboard as a primary tool for this, and switch to using the Outliner view instead. A unique aspect of the outliner tool is that it always shows the full synopsis, and thus each row dynamically expands as you type. It’s thus ideal for longer form synopsis work. And if you want a “summary view” it’s easy enough to flip between the two view modes with ⌘2 and ⌘3 (or Ctrl+). Note if you want a cleaner view, click the > button above the scrollbar and remove whatever columns you aren’t interested in. Labels and such can be great for plotting though!
I know none of these are precisely what you’re asking for, but I would tentatively say it’s worth getting used to one or some of them, because when we get down to it, the synopsis field isn’t designed to be used too heavily. These options above increase the flexibility of it and make it more possible to do so, and that’s why they are there—but that they are there is about the limit of our intended concession toward doing so, if that makes sense.
All good to know, thanks, Amber. I will see how I get on, and take your point about how far down this particular rabbit hole you’re willing for the program to go.
Have you tried splitting the editor left & right, putting the corkboard on the left, the editor on the right, and then click this little arrow at the bottom of the corkboard window:
When that button is on, if you click on a card in the corkboard, it loads into the editor on the right.
I will definitely try that - sounds really cool, thanks!
Liking this the most so far. Thanks so much, Popcornflix.