I’d really like to be able to manually input a Total Target value in the Ouliner view. The way the Total Target works currently it adds up the targets I set in that folder and all its children. For me this doesn’t work. Nor does it work for me to constantly subtract a sub-folder/-document target from the parent-folder target when I add another one. I’d like to be able to either set a hard target for folders/documents that ignores the targets of its children or manually change the Total Target Value of the parent folder.
Example:
Parent folder Target: 50k words
child folder 1: 25k words
child folder 2: 20k words
child document: 5k words
Total Target: 100k
The way it currently is, the total target for the parent folder would rise with every added folder/document under the parent folder, which is how it’s intended to work. The feature I’m suggesting would allow me to set the 50k of the parent folder as the Total Target and allow me to add as many children folders/documents as I’d like and assign each its own target without the total target of the parent folder getting manipulated and vice versa.
Basically, I’d like to be able to click into the cell of parent folders in the Total Target column in the Outliner and manually set the target. (Kind of how in V1 for Windows you could set a target for a folder and it not being impacted by the targets of its children, even though I’ve since been informed that this behaviour was apparently caused by a never addressed bug. For me it wasn’t a bug, it was a veeeery nice feature)
See here for a more in-length discussion of this and why the “workarounds” aren’t actually workarounds for everyone: Folder Total Target
For clarification, here’s another example with the relation of parent and child container-elements being expressed in levels:
Level 1: Act 1 (Target 50k)
Level 2: Chapters
Level 3: Scenes:
In my workflow, I create the Level 1 folder and know my target for that Act is 50k. Then I create the first Chapter folder and assign a separate target to it that plays into the Level 1 target but shouldn’t raise it. I take this one step further to Level 3 and again, the Scene target plays into the Chapter target but shouldn’t raise it. Rinse and repeat until that Chapter is done and then I’ll create the next Chapter with its own target again.
I don’t start off knowing exactly how many scenes a chapter and how many chapters an Act has. But once I create a folder/document on its Level I know how big it will be roughly. Just not how I’ll split that up precisely yet. An Act might only contain 5 chapters, it might end up containing 10. But this exemplary Act will probably be 50k words long.
In a fluid workflow like this, it would be very helpful to be able to set “hard” Targets if I want to, the additive Target system Scrivener has currently in place isn’t very helpful in a case like this because it requires me to constantly go back to the parent entity and subtract the child target from it until I’ve reached 0 just to keep the Folder Total Target at its proper value. Another workaround would be to just not assign targets to each chapter/scene as I go and only rely on the parent folder’s target. This isn’t a good method, though, since I need to switch between viewing the individual levels when working in the Editor and need to be able to see which target applies to which level when doing so. So when viewing a level 3 document, I need to see the level 3 target and so on and so forth.
Yes please. This has been discussed at some length in forum and I would love it if Scrivener ‘did the math’
It’s fine to have an overall project target of, say, 80,000 words. But then it’s really useful to see and balance up content and structure in the Outliner, based on the targets there for individual sections. and documents.
These should sub-total automatically and be reflected as a sum per chapter while the whole target column should show a running overall target based on what you have entered as individual section targets.
Collapsing and expanding the folder triangles should maintain the sum to view of the enclosed sections and documents.
The ‘Project targets’ window should show the overall manuscript target, but also a running total which is the sum of all your section targets.
At the moment I have a good structural map in the Outliner but no way of telling if all the section and document targets add up to anything like the manuscript target - without adding them up by hand.