I know the primary use case of Scrivener is to have a bunch of supporting documents that eventually contribute to a single work like a novel. So when those users compile or publish, they want a clean manuscript at the end.
My use case is that I’m building a fictional world, which incidentally has stories attached, but it’s more like a personal wiki of the people, places, and events of this fictional world. What I’d like is to have a way to Compile where everything is published, including the supporting material. I can imagine that my primary document is actually just an index or TOC for the various folders of material I’ve put together about this fictional world and its history.
Is such a thing possible? I was able to make a TOC that included the research material, but when I published those parts of the TOC weren’t links anymore, just text. As far as I can tell, Compile just won’t include that stuff, but I’m brand new to this software, so I don’t know.
So, the thing I’ve done after some experimentation is just to put all the folders into the Drafts folder. It’s not ideal, but I guess it’ll work. Is that the best way?
Yes and no. It depends what’s in the folders that you’re putting in the Draft. To quote from the Scrivener Manual (page 30 in my version):
“The Draft folder is where you place all of the pieces of text you want to include in your final manuscript. As such, the Draft folder is unique in that it can only hold text files and folders—it cannot directly hold image files, PDF files, QuickTime media or web pages as other folders can, though it is of course perfectly possible to embed figures into the text itself, much as you would in a word processor, at the editor level.”
Compile only compiles material from within the Draft folder (plus possibly stuff from dedicated Front and Back Matter folders). So, since you cannot put pdfs or webarchives and such into the Draft folder, no compile run can produce directly a compendium of such materials.
I can’t try it right now, but I imagine I could have a folder of attachments like images or whatever that I can then inline into draft folders. I’ll play with it, thanks!
Yes, getting (doc embedded) images in your Draft is not a problem. So, if mostly that is what you were wanting to flush into your compile (and you could use imaged versions of the few exceptions), you should be good to go.
gr
p.s. re: thread title: You really mean “compile everything”, not “export everything”. The latter indicates a different Scriv function.