Drop sections on the desktop to make a pdf?

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

Good day,

Me being a student, I use Scrivener for my notes. (I’m loving it)

I’m taking 6 courses, and I’m migrating all of my notes into scrivener, (Including maths and logic subjects).

I often share bits of my notes with friends. In such cases it’s nice if things go fast. Notes don’t need to look extremely well compiled, just need to be shared out quickly.

It would be nice if one could select a group of notes and drag them onto the desktop. When doing so, it would be nice if Scivener would auto-compile the selected notes into PDF and place it onto the desktop. (as oppose to going though the compile process).

Thank you

Leo

2

What I would do is create a Scrivenings session with the desired files, then print it to a PDF file, as follows:

  • Select the notes you want in the Binder
  • Hit any of Cmd-1, View->Scrivenings, or the Scrivenings button on the menu bar. This will merge the files into one Editor view.
  • Choose File-Print Current Document, and select PDF in the printer dialog box that pops up.
  • Tell it where to put the PDF, and you’re done. Exact choices will depend on your system.

Katherine

3

Thank you for your reply.

Yah, that’s what I do at the moment. It’s just I end up doing this quite a lot

  1. , I.e, I can’t print on my notebook. I have to export everything to a pdf first, then send it around.
  2. I often send my notes to friends or send copies of the project to team members. Hence a drag & drop would kinda be kool.
    Not critical, but sort of nice to have :slight_smile:
4

Hi Leo,

This would actually be rather difficult from a technical perspective, I’m afraid. The trouble is that Scrivener would have to know when the drop happens on the desktop and then generate the PDF files on the fly and copy them across there at that point. Now, there is a “promised files” drag type in OS X that allows for that sort of thing, but it isn’t pretty. And on top of that, you might want these files to be PDF files, but another user might want them to be plain text or RTF…

All the best,
Keith

5

You can select the text and then drag it to your desktop (I think this works from Scrivener, it does for other applications). This should create a “clipping” file on the desktop. Now, if you look into folder actions and Automator workflows, there should be a fairly easy way to have the clippings automatically be converted to pdf, and optionally attached to a new email message (for instance), ready to be addressed to whomever you want to send it.