Frustrated

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
1

I have been trying to embrace Scrivener but I cannot get the following to work or do not have the options:

  1. Cannot insert bookmarks
  2. Cannot add the preloaded character or sketch templates to my project. The only way I can do this is by creating a duplicate and moving it to the characters or places folders.
  3. Find and replace only works within a document not the entire project. Is this normal?
  4. Cannot print index cards.
  5. Page numbers do not print when printing - file>print>current document.

I am running Windows 7 64-bit and have the newest version of Scrivener 1.5.3.0 released 2/6/13 Any help is appreciated.

Thank you.

2

Sorry to hear you’ve been running into troubles. Have you gone through the interactive tutorial (in the Help menu) yet? It’s got a lot to it, but it’s a valuable step in learning the software.

  1. Could you clarify what you mean by ‘bookmarks’? There is no such feature in the software yet. We do have plans for a very simple bookmarking feature, but to be honest it’s a pretty niche thing. For the most part the design of the software itself mitigates the need for jumping around in huge documents, given how it sews everything together into one document when you compile. You can thus work in smaller more manageable pieces that better represent your thoughts. It wouldn’t be unusual for a book to have fifty or even a few hundred sections in it.
  2. That’s how you are meant to use the sheets at the moment. We’ll streamline that, probably for 2.0 so that anything in a special templates folder will be added to a handy menu that can be used to spawn copies in-place. What you might consider doing is keeping your boilerplate in the character folder so that when you duplicate off of the pristine copy, it is already right where it should be.
  3. Yes, that’s how it is designed to work. There is a separate tool for doing a global search and replace. Use Edit/Find/Project Replace for that. It’s a good idea to use File/Back Up/Back Up Now before doing that. Since it will run on every file in the project there is no way to undo it.
  4. What method are you using to print the corkboard? This shouldn’t require anything special from you. Just switch you view mode to Corkboard, then hit Ctrl-P to print, or use File/Print Preview
  5. It’s nearly always better to compile (”Print” is an option you can select instead of a file export), where you have full control over the output. Most of the starter templates and compile presets are already set up with page number output in the header or footer, but if you don’t have them, check the “Page Settings” compile option pane (click the blue arrow if necessary, to see it), and type in “<$p>” into the header or footer field.