empty scrivening file

Has anyone experienced empty files when switching to scrivening mode? The files show up in Index Card and Outline, but not in scrivenings.

It is impossible to show what you can see in Outliner and Corkboard, in Scrivenings mode, and vice versa. The latter is where you write and the former areas are where you plan and organise, using the Title and Synopsis areas to do so (along with other things like labels). Scrivenings mode itself is just an expansion on what you get when you click on a “card” all by itself from the Binder. The empty area here is where you write. When you view multiple items together with Scrivenings, you see the contents of this window stacked one atop the other as though all of these files were the same text file (save for the dividers and optional titles).

If you haven’t already done so, you should check out the interactive tutorial from the help menu, or run through the Quick Tour in the user manual (chapter six). These both address a few core concepts like this that are essential to how the program works.

So I may not have been sufficiently clear. My understanding is that by selecting files in the Binder and then switching to Scrivenings mode, I can bring up the content of those files and edit them. I thought that the whole purpose of Scrivenings was to allow one to select a series of files and then work on them as once documents. Am I wrong? Meanwhile, I’ll check out the tutorial and manual again. Larry

Your’re right. And that’s what AmberV pointed out in the previous post:

Are you not experiencing this? Do you see a series of stacked documents? Perhaps a screenshot of your binder/editor would help visualize what’s going on.

Just to add, in case this is part of the confusion, what you see in the outliner and on the corkboard are the synopses of the documents. In Scrivenings mode, you’ll see the actual text content of those documents. So even if you have “added text” to the documents in the outliner or corkboard, meaning you’ve written synopses for the documents, you won’t see that in the editor when you switch to Scrivenings. If the documents themselves don’t contain text yet, you’ll just see a blank editor with the divider lines separating the documents. If your inspector is open, when you click into the different sections in the editor, you’ll see that document’s synopsis on the index card in the inspector.

Have you opened the inspector? When I’m in Scrivenings mode the Synopsis is visible for whatever document the cursor is in because I clicked on the big blue i.