This seems incredibly basic, but I’ve searched the manual and these forums and can’t find the answer, so…
I’m writing nonfiction. Creating outline in the Binder, creating Synopsis cards that are mostly just titles, making extensive use of the “Document Notes” window for loose notes about what’s going to be in that section.
I’m also developing my bibliography, and making notes on each source, by making each bibliographic entry a single document (which I can compile later into a single bibliography document), and then entering all my notes on that book or article into the “Document Notes” window.
So, at my current stage of work, I have either nothing or almost nothing in the “editor” column yet. I can make the Binder go away; I can make the Inspector go away; but I cannot figure out a way to make the EDITOR go away, or at least minimize it to the point where it’s not taking up much screen real estate.
Push and pull as I might on the Binder and Inspector columns, I can’t get the Editor any smaller than about 30-40% of the screen width, and I can’t get the Inspector to go any wider than about 40% of the screen width - and that’s only if I crunch down the Binder column to an unreadable width, which I don’t want to do because I’m constantly referring back and forth to other parts of the outline. If I maximize both Binder and Inspector columns as much as I can, I’ve still got about a third of the screen width taken up by the Editor, and I’m doing vast amounts of typing in a narrow Inspector column, which gets annoying.
What I want to be able to do is to see on the screen ONLY the Binder (my outline) and the Inspector (where I’m doing all my text entry), and make the Editor go away for now, or at least become a small sliver. Especially when I’m working on my laptop, which has a small screen.
There’s no way to close the editor entirely, as it’s essentially the focus of the writing environment. What you could do, however, is to use the editor, in outliner view, in place of the binder. A lot of users do that regularly just to have a more detailed view of their structure, but in your case it sounds like exactly what you want. You can select to view the Draft or Research folder, and then close the binder and add documents in the outliner with all the hierarchy available when using the binder; you can also add synopses right there for those documents that you do want to add a little more to beyond the title. If you liked you could also view other meta-data columns (label, status, etc.) but that’s entirely option if you’d rather keep it simple.
So that would trim your view to just the single editor in outliner view, acting as the binder, and then your inspector for document notes. And if you want to go all out, you can always adjust the background of the outliner (in Preferences:Appearance under Customizable Colors) so it more closely resembles the binder…
Thanks for the speedy answers. I’m trying to work with the Outliner more so that I can get it to do what I want (if I can’t, I might have another question to ask, once I’ve articulated the issue to myself more clearly.)
In general, my suggestion would be that to accommodate diverse workflows, perhaps the Editor column does not need to have the privileged position of being visible at all times. I can envision other scenarios besides mine where the writer at certain times would be working exclusively in the Inspector, Binder, or both together, and not need the Editor at that moment, so more flexibility with allocating the screen real estate might be appreciated.
To use it, first unzip it, then select the View/Layout/Show Layouts menu command. Use the gear menu to select “Import Layout” and locate the downloaded file. Before using it, you might want to save your current layout, because this one is a little contorted.
