I’m working on a book where I have various charts and images that require to be labelled “Exhibit Aâ€
I am not quite sure what you mean. Have you gone through the tutorial and also checked the extensive Help file? To deal with the difference between Research and References:
Research is an area where you can import media documents into your project for reference whenever you want to.
References is a per-document area where you can link to documents inside the project or on disk.
As for inserting images into text, you can do so by dragging an image from the binder or from the Finder. I don’t understand what you mean by “tracking images”, though…
Best,
Keith
Yes, I read the manual… great one at that for a version 1.0. Kudos are in place!
The research folder is for disposable content, whereas references go into the document. Now, what about research content that becomes a reference for the document? When I add images through the references section I don’t have an overview about all the content added to the document in the same way I have it under the research section. I’d love to have a references folder in the same way I have a research folder, where I could create links to and move content around, say, from research to references or vice versa. Are you with me?
By “tracking imagesâ€
I need a function to label images as well.
Why can’t you just put the label under the image? Isn’t that what you do in most word processors? Or put both the image and the label in a table.
Best,
Keith
Keith,
To answer your question about captions: it is too complicated to position labels manually each time. Especially if I make changes to the text or move the image. What I envisage is an option whereas the caption would be positioned directly under the image, in a predefined font and alignment. Moving the image around in the document would adjust the prefix automatically, ie. from Exhibit A to Exhibit C or vice versa. So, each caption would comprise two parts: the prefix and the label (which could be the name of the image).
Given that even most word processors don’t allow anything like this (to my knowledge), this is waaay beyond the scope of Scrivener (unless Apple add it to their text system, that is).
Best,
Keith
Well, in Apple Pages you can define a style, so you can easily convert any text to a perfect image label (and also link the image to it).
You can define styles in any OS X text app, including Scrivener, via the ruler (cmd-R).
Actually, Word keeps track of captions… but don’t ask me how badly it is implemented. Not sure about Pages as I don’t use it.
I require lots of images and references in my work, which is why I revert to Word for writing. Having said that, and given the many non-fiction books in the market and non-fiction writers out there, I think some improvement on how references and images are handled within the text would be appreciated by many. I’m not yet registered and still testing Scrivener, so these are only my two cents on how to improve the app.
Suggestions are valued whether you are registered or not. 
It’s just that I don’t think this quite fits in at this moment, as Scrivener is not a word processor and I’m not sure how this would be implemented. That is not to say that I will not consider it in the future (2.0?).
Best,
Keith
I’m just starting to integrate Scrivener into my workflow, but I also write lots of documents with lots of figures and tables. Some of these are standard figures that tend to come up again and again, some are unique to a particular project. And, to make things more interesting, some publishers like inline tables, while others like them as separate files.
I handled this in Word with lots of cutting and pasting, using fields to keep the figure and table numbers straight.
In Scriv., the most natural way seems to be to put the table AND its caption (and its footnote, if needed) in a separate file, organized as a sub-file to the section it belongs with. (Another reason to let documents act as both files and folders.) In the main text, I use a callout with the name of the table (rather than a number) and a Scrivener Link to the file. Highlighting reminds me that the callout is there. I also stuff the caption into the synopsis or title.
When it comes time to assemble the whole thing, I can use the corkboard to assemble a “with figures” or “without figures” version, as needed. Here it helps that it’s easy to split sections on the fly, so I can easily add a new figure in the middle of a section.
Generating the numbers manually isn’t a terribly onerous task once everything is in its final order, and Word can use styles to generate lists of figures and tables if needed.
Again, I’m a new Scrivener user, but this seemed like a natural solution to the problem to me.
Katherine
I wonder if the linking method would be a good implementation? I am assuming that some of the code you wrote for MMD image linking could be re-used here, but in MMD you can say:
Where “K.Authur 01b” is the name of an image in the research section. Currently, you can drop an image link into a document, but what if there were a simple way to make this functional during export? The above syntax is not all that outrageous, and if retained would allow compatibility between the RTF/MMD systems. The only difference is that when you export with RTF, the export engine would assemble the appropriate RTF image embedding codes, and style the caption according to export format settings.
Another less “syntaxy” method would be to just drop the image link into the document, and pull the caption from the Synopsis, which on the surface is ideal, but you would still need some syntax to declare the difference between a functional and non-functional link.
del
By the way, numbering things so they’re always in sequence is easy - check out the autonumbering feature. <$n> will give you regular numbers, for example, and it can also do roman numerals and a few other formats. The code is replaced on export with the numbers/letters in order. You can either type them or use Edit -> Insert -> Autonumber -> (format). You don’t see the numbers while the document is in scrivener, but when you export draft, one of the things it does is goes through and replaces those tags with numbers, in order.
The full description is in the documentation (menus, edit menu, insert).
How does it handle multiple numbered lists, though? I need chapter numbers, figure numbers (of the form chapter-number, ie 1-1, 1-2, etc.), and table numbers (also of the form chapter-number). I saw the <$rst> command to reset the counter, but I’m not sure that helps in this case. Word does this kind of thing with /seq fields, and it’s tough for me to see how you’d accomplish it without some sort of tagging scheme. Which is fine, but takes us out of the realm of editing and into the realm of markup and/or word processing.
Katherine
The auto-number is meant to be very basic. It is just a tag you put in ready for export; the only concession Scrivener has to mark-up unless you are using MultiMarkdown. There was really no other simple way of doing this.
Because Scrivener isn’t a word processor, it simply doesn’t handle this sort of thing, I’m afraid - it expects you to do that sort of thing in your WP of choice upon exporting.
Best,
Keith
I think that is beyond Scrivener’s auto-numbering abilities, unfortunately. The different formats count up independantly, but I believe there is only one counter of each type. I’m afraid I don’t know how to get that sort of numbering in Scrivener, as I haven’t numbered anything since I learned how to use LaTeX…
As a workaround you could use different formats for the numbers (1-i, 1-ii, or I-1, I-2) then change them to the same number format in the formatting stage, but that strikes me as being somewhat tedious and prone to error.
I’ll simply insert pictures and label and number them later in Pages.
That’s what I thought. I’m pretty much resigned to either adding numbers manually or doing final formatting in a word processor. That’s okay. The other Scrively goodness more than makes up for that minor hassle.
Katherine