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.
The thing with software design: Never make your users guess. If a critical difference exists, make that difference obvious and intuitively obvious. What you want is expectability. Otherwise, the user is left tripping over things in the dark. There are lots of ways in which the Draft folder is unique and regarded as unique by Scrivener. Same with the Research and Trash folders. Yet the only way that a user could ever know that it is unique is by its name or icon. Both the name and icon can be changed by the user. This is obviously results in many potential problems for the user. Don’t ever blame the user.
I agree that it would be nice for “DraftFolder” to appear in the info pane. It would clarify why the folder exhibits special behavior.
One idea (for a future version of Scrivener) is to simply “lock” the icon and don’t let it be changed. The user is more likely to desire to change the name of the DraftFolder (and certainly should be allowed to), but less likely to miss not being able to change its icon. So, if it appeared as, say, a manuscript inside a square box, that might be easy to keep track of.
I for one have a Characters project. I don’t need a Draft folder floating around, in the way and doing nothing. I changed the name and icon to make it fit for purpose. Scrivener is versatile enough to do that.
I’m sure there are hundreds around that do similar things without getting themselves in a knot.
This goes to show how versatile Scrivener is, and how many people use it differently!
I’m an academic writer, not a novelist, and I don’t even know what a character project is. (I would’ve expected that the characters would be kept in the research folder, while the developing manuscript would be in the draft folder.)
Not when you’re using characters over a series of books—it’s easier to manage them in a separate project, avoiding duplication, but most importantly steer clear of inconsistencies.
I totally agree to you. And understanding what makes these three folders special (or actually just two as “Trash” is self-explanatory and common) is one of the basics a Scrivener user must know about.
That said, every now and then somebody asks me to give them a tour of Scrivener. And sometimes I notice that these first impressions leave them a bit disoriented, wether because they are overwhelmed by the possibilities offered by the software, or because they are stuck to the idea that a writing app has to be exactly like Word while not being like Word (because they are not happy with it), which are the two most common reasons in my experience. (I’m not ruling out that I’m a lousy tour guide, of course.)
In that case one of my advices is to apply Show as Binder Seperator to Drafts, Research, and Trash to set them apart from the normal folders.
However, Show as Binder Separator can get set for any item in the Binder. And everyone using them that way will most probably refuse my suggestion. But in my opinion it would be helpful for—at least new—users if Binder Separators were exclusive for the three back-bone folders and everything on the same level (like Document Templates, Character Sheets, or whatever the user needs).
And if not exclusive, at least every Project Template should have Show as Binder Separator activated for these three folders, whatever they are called in the respective template.