I use Scrivener to organize my comments on student work over the course of the semester. In my paper comments document, there’s a folder with each student’s name, and then within that folder a document for my comments on each assignment. I have a folder with the title “Name” and each of the assignments in it, and make a copy for each student. When I do that, I’d like to be able to have the student name fill in a blank in each document title, so that the folder “Jane Smith” has a document in it titled “Jane Smith essay comments.” When I googled this, an AI response suggested that if used brackets in the document title, they would be filled in (e.g. “ essay comments” would become “Jane Smith essay comments” in the folder called “Jane Smith”). But that doesn’t seem to work. I’m not compiling from these documents–generally I print an individual document to a pdf with the document title as the pdf title, and then upload that to our LMS.
I’ve tried searching the forum multiple ways but can’t seem to find this–I see a lot on compiling, but less on the binder documents themselves.
Hi.
For starter, the bracket thing that was recommended to you is wrong.
The best way -I think- you could achieve something the likes, would be to create a document template of the master folder of a student, with the sub-documents (assignments) already in it, instead of copying it/them over and over for each student.
This would allow you to use project replace without damaging the original template, by instructing it to only affect the selected documents.
In your template, use something like @xxxx as a surrogate for the eventual student’s name. In each subdocuments too.
When needed, spawn a folder for a student from the said template, and with it and its sub files selected in the binder, have project replace (with the checkbox for only the selected documents checked) replace @xxxx with the student name. And then spawn another set of folder/documents for the next student.
HOW TO
(Above, I created the “TEMPLATES” template folder myself. You have to do it yourself, it is not there by default. Yet it is needed; whatever you name it. )
That should save you time IF you already know what documents will be needed per student over the course of your session.
If you plan on adding files per student as you go, this won’t help, though. And I’m afraid nothing will. Or at least not to the extent one would call it “automated”.
[EDIT] – Of course, I had to notice the spelling error only once I had taken all of the above screenshots.
Thank you! This is exactly what I was looking for–I already had the template set up, and I generally do know the list of assignments in advance. Even if I need to add one assignment later, that’s pretty easy to do as I go. But I didn’t know that I could limit Project Replace this way, even though I’ve been using Scrivener for years and years.
Thank you so much for the clear and detailed instructions–they’re extremely helpful.
As a teacher, I would imagine you are returning the student’s feedback for each assignment in real time. If you created collections for each assignment (ie search for “assignment 1 notes” in your student folder and creating collection “assignment 1 notes” ), then you would have a constantly updated individual assignment list of notes on one page to facilitate editing and printing. You could then compile by selection (this collection), printing all of them in one shot.
[Edit - I was apparently typing when you responded to Mark. I was not intentionally going against your workflow. ]
On further thought, I get @LisaG’s point about printing.
Although you could use a BetterTouchTool or Keyboard Maestro (AutoHotkey on Windows) keyboard shortcut to reduce the steps in compiling to PDF, one issue will still remain, at least on Mac… that is the compiler always defaults to the last filename and location used, so it is necessary to insert the filename needed and make sure it is being saved where you want it. Printing as @LisaG uses it, I understand, gives the PDF the title of the individual Scrivener document as its filename without any intervention.
As for using a collection, and compiling that, doing so would put everything from the collection in a single PDF, whereas my understanding is that she needs each one as a separate PDF for uploading to the LMS.
Yes–printing to pdf uses the document title as a default, which is why I want the titles to include the students’ names and the specific assignment title, so that I end up with “Smart Student essay 1 comments.”
I really appreciate everyone’s help–I only had a few comments to deal with this morning but I set up the next few folders I’ll need because I was so pleased with the solution. As I suspect those who’ve responded understand, these are small timesavers, and though they add up to more time over multiple courses, semesters, and years, the delight in getting this to work probably exceeds the amount of actual saved time pretty substantially. I am ridiculously pleased.
Many, many thanks.
The collection idea was actually a good one in a way. Because, even if you don’t later compile, it would allow you to have a sorted list by [Student name]-[Document remaining title], in which you could quickly go from a file to another (notes for one student and on to the next), rather than having to navigate the binder/student’s folder/desired file.
In short, even if you have pre-created “assignment notes” document 1,2,3…10, you could have only “assignment 5” displayed, in an alphabetical list, for all of your students, at once.
(You may also achieve the same result using project search. – Only without the recallability.)
Yes, that’s true and potentially useful, though often I’m more interested in going from a student’s first assignment to her second, etc. Each student has a folder so that I can pay attention to a student’s progress over the course of the semester, and when the assignments are stages of a larger project, so that I can see what I’ve commented on the previous stage of a student’s work and how she’s progressed.
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