I have used Scrivener for years as a basic organizational tool but did all my outlining work in the Draft section, including text and images. I didn’t really see an overriding need to use the Research section until just now when I discovered that OCR versions of PDF files are not preserved in the Draft section, only the Research section! This leads to two basic questions: (1) Is there a way to convert the Draft section into a Research section, either globally or folder by folder? (I.e., what is the property of a Research section that enables it to retain OCR results?) (2) What are other advantages of the Research section over the Draft section and vice versa?
The Research folder can contain any type of file. The Draft folder can only contain text files. As their names imply, the Draft folder is assumed to include material that will ultimately appear in the output document, while the Research folder is assumed to include ancillary “research” materials.
No, you can’t convert one into the other. These two, plus the Trash folder, are the three fundamental folders that every Scrivener project has. You can, however, drag folders between them. (Subject to the caveat that the Draft folder can only contain text files.)
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Thanks for the input. Actually, I have found that I can intermingle text with multiple images in my Draft folders, which I find very powerful because it enables me to interrelate disparate images and text extracts along with notes of my own observations. I can also easily resize the images to make their scanned fonts comparable in size to other material in the same folder. So the only downside I find so far to Drafts is the lack of compatibility with searchable PDFs (though I am exploring how to link to searchable PDFs in the Research section as a workaround).
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To get images to appear in the Draft folder, you must embed them in a text document. Whereas the Research folder can house image files directly.
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PDFs cannot be put into the Drafts folder at all. Which likely means what you have been doing is making a text document and dropping a pdf into the text document. Unfortunately, all this does is place a preview image of the first page of the pdf into the text document. The PDF is not there. Complete PDFs can be dropped directly into the Research folder.
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If your use case is not working toward Compiling what is in that Draft folder, you probably ought to just move your whole operation to the more freewheelin’ Research folder.
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Let me see if I am interpreting your points correctly:
- I think what you are calling imbedding I am calling mixing/intermingling; that is to say, I can view my images and text on the same page, but move them around for flexible associations, which feels like a plus for my purpose in making initial connections that will later inform my writing. I associate “imbedding” with a more rigid placement that can’t be easily changed, but that may not be what you mean.
- Actually I can drag PDFs from the desktop into a Drafts folder, but it they not easy to work with there. E.g, the only way to resize it for better reading is to Zoom, but that zooms everything in the project, whereas JPG image can be individually resized without affecting other items in the same folder. Therefore when downloading items like a newspaper article I prefer to work with it as JPG rather than PDF.
- I still must be missing something, because the Research folder seems less freewheelin’ to me than the Drafts folder. In Research each PDF, JPG, etc. stands as a separate entity, so I can’t easily add notes, related images, etc. Yes I can manipulate the image easier, but that seems like more of a final publication step, and one which is more powerful to do in Photoshop or the like for importing into InDesign. For research purposes, the only advantage I have found in the Research section is that PDFs can be imported after OCR for word searchability purposes. If that were possible in the Drafts section I don’t see why I would need the Research section at all! Am I just using Scrivener in a totally different way than most people and need to better understand how to use it?
To be clear, if you paste an image or a PDF file into a text document, that document can then be placed in either the Draft or the Research folder. But you can only have an image or a PDF file as a standalone Binder item in the Research folder.
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Yes, I see that. But what to what end? I have only found two benefits:
(1) PDFs which have been made word searchable retain that capability as a Research Binder item
(2) JPGs pasted into a Research Binder have a few basic extra tools for resizing, flipping, etc.
Aside from those two things I find I can get much more use out of JPGs in the Draft folders. (PDFs are too unwieldy to resize there so I convert single page PDFs to JPGs for use in the Draft section.)
What am I missing? What other advantages are there to placing images and PDFs (and/or other file types) in the Research section where each must reside as a standalone Binder item?
See above comments and clarifications, especially from @gr:
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This is not true. Any document that can exist in the Draft folder can also exist in the Research folder. If you want to stick an image in a text file and make notes alongside it, you can do that anywhere in the project.
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No, you really cannot. The Drafts folder precludes this.
You can have a text document in the Drafts folder, and drag a PDF into that text document when it is showing in the Editor pane. This just embeds a preview image of the pdf into the given text document, as I said. The PDF document itself is not imported into the text document.
You cannot drag a PDF and drop it into the Draft folder in the Binder. Scrivener (by design) will refuse to do it.
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Thanks to all for the clarifications—I have seen the light (which raises one new question below)!
The beauty of all this is that I find I needn’t lose any of my prior work, as I was beginning to dread. I can simply drag all of my Draft folders into the Research section and they remain identical to their appearance and functionality. Then going forward I can choose to drag word searchable PDFs and JPGs (still my primary goal) into what had been my old outline and they now remain searchable ( albeit as standalone binder items).
NEW RELATED QUESTION: If I choose to insert an image Linked to File, how can I minimize the effort to recover the link if the file gets moved? By comparison, Indesign seems able to facilitate this process via its Packaging feature: restoring a link to one image then quickly locates the others. I find no comparable method in Scrivener; I don’t even see an easy way to locate one image, never mind multiple images.
— E.g., is it necessary to group copies all images of interest into a single folder? It so, this defeats the advantage of incorporating images from multiple hard drive locations.
I would like to ask you something in return: Are you fully aware that you are using Scrivener for a purpose other than the one it was designed for?
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Yes and no. I admit to using it for many of my projects solely as an organizational tool, applying it almost exclusively as a content-versatile outliner. I’ve been doing this since the first appearance of Mac outliners. When ThinkTank came out in 1984 I thought it was the greatest thing since the proverbial sliced bread. Then came MORE with its awesome cloning capability. The ultimate “Personal Information Manager” (remember the days of PIMs?) was Arrange (later WebArranger), which never has been matched in my estimation for its combination of outliner and relational database! But it died with OS9 because it was so powerful that people did not seem to know where to start with it … so Scrivener felt like a lifesaver when I realized it could fill most if not all of the void.
But in my defense I first used Scrivener as a bonafide writing tool (which is how I morphed into using it for generic to-do projects as well—why not put the learning curve to use?), and still have multiple fiction and non-fiction book projects in various stages of development on Scrivener. To date I have used Scrivener only through my final draft phase, then transferred my content to InDesign for print and eBook publication, having used Adobe layout since the days of PageMaker 1.04. But one of these days I should give Scrivener a try for publication … which I will be forced to do once I run out of funds to sustain Adobe CC!