Formatting text on the corkboard; navigating levels

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
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Hi,

I love Scrivener! I am currently working on a dissertation chapter and experimenting with using Scrivener for outlining. I really like the corkboard, but there are a couple of things that I notice right off. First, if I can underline on my typewriter, I ought to be able to underline when typing courier on a corkboard card. This is important for me for readability: I want to be able to indicate book titles and foreign words as underlined. I can also imagine situations where I would want to be able to specify the font of individual characters, for instance, where the courier that I use as a standard font doesn’t contain the glyph that I want to use.

Second, part of the appeal of outlining with the corkboard is the seeming tactility of stacks of “cards.” With that in mind, I should be able to click on or do something to go down a level/open up a stack. Going back over to the binder and clicking and then having to hit cmd-2 again to get the corkboard view is distracting. It is just reminding me how handy real notecards are.

I have been using Scrivener off and on for some time, mostly for a distraction-free environment for writing a few paragraphs. The ability to create RTF-compatible footnotes that are in a separate pane now makes Scrivener something that I can consider using more regularly for larger parts of projects. Keep up the brilliant work!

P.S. I am still using Tiger, because I can’t afford to break Word 2004. I agree that this is a ridiculous situation, but I am not optimistic that Word will be upgraded (by which I mean improved) from the 2004 level anytime soon. So I hope that you continue to support the old platform for as long as possible!

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Glad you’re enjoying Scrivener! For the synopses, at the moment they are limited to plain text due to the way they need to be used throughout the interface and the technical limitations that incurs. Even though you can underline on your typewriter, computers can’t do it in plain text. :wink: However, you could try using simple Markdown instead for this, e.g. underscores or asterisks around a word or phrase that you want to be underlined/italicized. This still gives you a visual indicator, and with the next update, you’ll also have an option during compile to convert this to actual italics. (If you prefer underlines, you can also select to convert italics to underlines, the end result being that your marked up text will be underlined in the compiled version.) You can grab the latest beta to give this a try if you like.

As for drilling down in the corkboard, you can double-click the icon to the left of the title in the index card to open that document in the editor. Single documents will open with their text visible (the same as if you were to select that document in the binder); folders or document stacks will open in corkboard mode (if you have the navigation preference set to treat doc stacks as folders). Depending what you’re doing, you may also like the option to split the editor and then link the two by clicking the ⇄ button in the footer of the corkboard editor. When you select a card in that editor, it will automatically load in the second editor.

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That’s helpful–thanks! I’ll play around with it some more.