How to duplicate freeform corkboard?

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

When I want to duplicate a freeform corkboard : most of the time it doesn’t work. I mean, the original folder will be duplicated, but the order of the index cards on the corkboard will not be the same, it will be all messed up.
Sometimes it does work still, I don’t know under what circumstances, usually only the first time I will try it. But if I try it a another time, boom, impossible to duplicate the original order of my index cards on the freeform corkboard again.
Any idea on what is happening?
Am I the only one with this problem?
Thanks in advance for your help!

2

Maybe with a short screen capture, my problem will be easier to understand:
Scrivener_bug_241021_2
.

3

How is Scrivener supposed to know that you want the two Corkboards to be the same?

While the standard Corkboard directly reflects the structure of the Binder, the freeform Corkboard is more of an ad hoc, visual arrangement. It’s a view of the current folder, but it has no connection to the underlying Binder structure. (By design. The whole point of using it is that you’re trying to show non-hierarchical relationships that the Binder can’t capture.)

So, when you duplicate the underlying folder, you have duplicated the documents within it and their arrangement in the Binder, but there’s no connection to the original folder’s purely visual freeform layout.

1 Like
4

Thanks for your reply!
Well, I’m not of programmer, so I’m sure there are technical impossibilities I’m not aware of, but, as a user at least, I guess it would make sense that when you duplicate a corkboard you’ve created in freeform mode, the “visual arrangement” that freeform allows would be duplicated too with the duplicated folder. Because: why duplicating a “visual arrangement” you haven’t created?
To me, it would be usefull to be able to try different versions of a structure in freeform view very quickly, without having to rebuild the entire corkboard from scratch each time.
The good news is: I’ve found a workaround for this problem.
Here are the steps, if anyone’s interested:

  1. Create a new folder (corkboard 2), view it in Freeform corkboard mode, make sure that all the corkboard settings are more or less the same than those of corkboard 1.
  2. Open both corkboards in Split view mode.
  3. In corkboard 1, select all your index cards, and alt + drag’n drop them to corkboard 2 (make sure that “Option-dragging creates duplicates” is selected in the Global Settings…).
    WARNING: you’d better NOT drag’n dropping them on a border of corkboard 2, otherwise the index cards could be crushed (and you would loose the visual arrangement you were preciesly trying to keep). Choose instead an rather empty area. Then, if needed, Select All index cards and move them to make it look like corkboard 1.
    (This whole operation is not as tedious as it seems.)
5

Note that the Corkboard (freeform or otherwise) is not an independent entity. Duplicating a Corkboard also duplicates all of the underlying Binder items. And, again, the Binder structure is the ultimate source of the Corkboard structure.

1 Like
6

I understand.
Nevertheless, sometimes I manage to duplicate a folder’s Freeform corkboard structure just by “Duplicating” the folder. Usually it works just once, and when I do exactely the same thing a second time, it doesn’t work anymore. (Actually I did manage to do this again today - just once). To me, that’s a hint that THIS SHOULD BE possible under certain circumstances (but I really can’t understand those).

7

Thanks for the report! I can easily replicate the problem where duplicating the first time in a session works, but after that point it resets the card positions to default. The randomness is a result of how the bug seems to be in how too many entries for card positions are added to duplicated items. If you duplicate from a folder with invalid references to cards it doesn’t actually have on its corkboard, it fails. This condition isn’t super predictable (I’ve seen the original folder get “damaged” in this way, as well as the duplicated folders, and I’ve seen invalid folders get cleaned up on reload, which would make them work again once).

I’ll get it added to the list.

9

Thanks for watching this!