I have a question regarding writing a document that will essentially be a long-form outline, without a great deal of prose outside of the outline headings. I have read all the posts about compiling a numbered outline and I’ve done that. My question is a little narrower. Does anybody have advice as to how to write a document using scrivener that is just an outline. I suppose, I could just create a bunch of text files in the outline hierarchy and use the text files’ titles as “the text” and then compile the titles. But that seems a strange way to do that, especially because I might have a lot of text in the title and it’s challenging to work with on screen.
What I’d like to do, if possible, is move outlines from tools like Word and I have some old outlines in OmniOutliner that I’d love to migrate. I know that I can import these outlines, I’ve done that.
This is not a feature check, but mainly a brainstorming request. How can I do this elegantly, if possible?
If the answer is, “Well, you can’t really.” That’s fine. I’ll just keep my outlines where they are.
Thanks for any advice you may have.
P.S. I’ve used scrivener long enough and know sufficiently about outlining, the difference in how a Word outline works vs. a Scrivener outline. Etc. I just have to “produce an outline” as output.
I might as well drop a link to this post, here. While I don’t think you would have much use for the first three in that list, the fourth might be a good place to check, as it is aimed at those already well familiar with the genre of software.
I can’t say I’ve ever really thought of the rows in the binder as being “text files”. They are outline nodes with a seriously beefy text notes field.
As for long titles, in the Outliner view mode itself, keep the synopsis field enabled even if you don’t need it. That will enable word wrap on the title line. You might want to tune the display settings for the outliner as well, to better suit how you intend to use it. Its use of bold for the titles, for example, might be overkill. That’s one thing I tend to tone down. Have a look at Figure 8.28, in the user manual, for a look intended to mimic a bit how an outline appears in OmniOutliner. Turning off icons and tweaking the fonts can make a big difference in how creative the environment feels!
I was being cheeky with my terminology. I appreciate that they are outline nodes, but for the purposes of this project, they would be behaving as the text file (only in the sense that the text file is a container for the written content). Thank you for the link. I’ll take a close look through the post. Thank you also @kewms. Really, just having you confirm this is the Scrivener way is all I really needed.
If you will be compiling to Word, it may be useful to know that if you have compile maintain style name info upon compile, Word will recognize Scrivener’s Heading 1, Heading 2, etc paragraph styles. These are the special blessed styles in Word that represent outline structure.
This fact can be made use of for either getting the outline structure of your binder item (titles) or getting outline structure in text docs per se to wind up as outline structuring in Word.
For a reason that you mention (outline line items which have a lot of text), I often use a combination of these things. Superstructure is represented in the binder with nested folders and doc, but then text docs may also exhibit their own further outline structure. The latter is just a matter of defining some appropriately indented paragraph styles and assigning them handy key commands.
