What tells Scrivener whether a folder is to be designated Front Matter or Back Matter? Is it simply the name? Is there a hidden attribute that Scrivener uses to set these designations?
Same question for the designation of the “Manuscript/Draft” folder, the Notes/Research/Etc. folders, the Trash folder. Etc.
Can I start with a new folder and simply name it “Front Matter”? What if another Front Matter named folder exists? Is this true of Manuscript/Draft folders? If there are more than one folder with the same special name, how does Scrivener decide which to designate?
Use of the Front/Back Matter settings is discussed in detail beginning on page 577 of the Mac Scrivener manual. The whole point is that you might want a different set for different output documents, and so the designation is made as part of the Compile set up.
The Manuscript, Research, and Trash folders are established when a new project is created, and those designations cannot be changed.
I did an extensive search of the Scrivener Manual and can not find any answer to my question. How does Scrivener designate special folders (Draft/Manuscript, Front/Back Matter, Templates, Trash, etc? The manual in one section refers to Draft folder’s being renamed by the user. So I would assume that there is some other (not name) way in which scrivener designates the Draft folder as special. There is a mention of asigning a special icon to the draft folder. Is it that icon that designates the Draft folder? There is no icon in the change icon menu that matches the icon present in the default draft or manuscript folder. There is no option in the new binder tool bar tool to add a manuscript of draft folder. There is no option to convert an existing folder to a draft or manuscript folder. If one can change the icon of the draft/manuscript folder to any icon, and one can change the name the draft folder to any name, how is it that scrivener maintains this special designation for the draft folder?
As explained in my previous post (and in the manual starting at page 577), the Front/Back Matter folders are designated at Compile time, by the Compile command.
The Document Templates folder is defined via the Project Settings, as explained in Section 7.5.1 of the manual.
These two folders are user-defined, and can be changed by the user at will.
The three special project folders – Draft, Research, and Trash – are identified as such in the .scrivx file used to build the Binder. Their titles and icons are attributes for the convenience of the user, not how Scrivener identifies them. As I said, these folders are defined when the project is created and cannot be removed, duplicated, or redesignated.
In the Scrivener User Manual, in the Draft Folder section, it reads:
“The draft folder can be renamed to whatever you wish. The key thing to look for is the special icon. Only one item can have that icon, so no matter what it is called, that is your Draft folder.”
However, the icon for the Draft folder can be changed in exactly the same way that icons can be changed for any binder item. So it appears that the “Draft” folder can be both renamed to any name, and its icon can be changed to any icon. The user is also able to create any number of new folders named “Draft” or “Manuscript” After a user changes the name and or and icon of the “Draft” (“Manuscript”?) folder, there is but one way to determine which folder is the actual “Draft” folder, and that is to go to the Navigate menu and choose the “Reveal Draft Folder” item.
I guess there is one other way to know that a binder item is the “Draft” folder, as the option to move it to the trash folder doesn’t exist (this seems to be true of the “Research” and “Trash” folders as well.
Oh, and the names of the “Trash” and “Research” binder items can be changed too! But strangely, of the two, only the “Research” folder’s icon can be changed.
What is missing here is some way for the user to see the metadata that is responsible for the special status granted to these three binder items (“Draft”, “Research”, and “Trash”).
Would helpful if the appearance and behavior of these three special binder items was demonstrably different in the binder (and elsewhere) such that this special status granted these items was obvious and emediatly intuited.
I’m not sure I understand why this is an issue. I can tell you that the number of users I’ve encountered who renamed and subsequently “lost” their Draft folder is tiny, no more than a handful in all the years I’ve been supporting Scrivener.
The folder type for these special folders is established programmatically by Scrivener at the time that a project is created. You can observe this by going into the .scriv package and viewing the .scrivx XML file in a text editor. The folder type is an XML attribute. While in theory this could be changed in the XML, Scrivener does not expose this through the user interface, and thus the “special status” of these folders follows them around no matter what they are named.