Hi folks! I am looking for a way to create a templated document via the “new linked document” inline process ( typing “[[new person]]” → creates a new linked file “new person”). My problem is that this just seems to make a blank file, and I can neither select “create from template” at the time of creation, nor “apply” a template to the newly created file. I like to make fairly heavy use of the file template functionality to organize my thoughts, and don’t see a way to use them here. Has anyone solved this problem?
I apologize if this has been answered somewhere, my google-fu has failed me here. TIA!
There are a lot of conflicting terms at play here (e.g. project/document/file templates, how a new file is created, etc.), for clarification, I am referring to the process of creating a new file from typing “[[file name]]” in a file and having Scrivener take that as a cue to create a new file with that name and place a link to it in the current text. A very useful bit of functionality! Enabled by turning on Settings > Corrections > Data-Detection → Automatically detect [[document link]]
There are two ways that new items are created from a template:
One of the manual commands—so that’s of no help to you here since links just make new regular items.
If the location that the item is created within has a default template set to it. To see what I mean there, create a test folder somewhere in your binder, and with it selected, use the Documents ▸ Default Template for Subdocuments submenu to pick a template.
Now the extra ingredient there is that when you create a new item from a link, you are asked where it should be created. Thus if you select this test folder, it will be created with the template. You could keep things organised that way (a “Characters” folder wouldn’t be too crazy anyway), or reorganise them later, but by using these folders to create types of things you can at least streamline that process, rather than creating a new thing from a template, and then going back and linking to what you just created.
By the way, this setting “cascades” to subfolders, unless another folder within it selects a different template. So you can have “Major” and “Minor” subfolders both nested in “Characters”, and created items into any of those three would use the template settings.
Since you’re intrinsically making notes or character traits, create a sub-document in the documents you’re in and apply an inline link to that - Edit > Link to Document.
When not on the fly, take care of housekeeping by moving it to Notes or Characters or wherever else, giving it a meaningful name. The inline link will follow your ‘notes’ and it’s name changes.
By the same token, you can prepare a pre-set template (save it in the Templates folder) with pre-populated content like questions or categories and Add (green cross button) the template as a sub-document to your WIP and handle as above.
You can even add chunks of text from your WIP by highlighting it and selecting Edit > Append to Document…
@AmberV This worked perfectly, thank you! For now, having all of my new docs become Character Templates within the Character folder works perfectly, but it’s great to know about the subfolders! Knowing me, I’ll almost certainly wind up needing that in the near future
