Just for the record, you are using Scrivener in a fashion it was designed to be used. We wouldn’t have an Include in Compile checkbox if you weren’t meant to be able to easily store planning, research and notes directly in and around the stuff you are writing.
We wouldn’t have the Navigate ▸ Open ▸ with Compilable Subdocuments
menu command if you weren’t supposed to be able to have a mix of compilable and omitted materials in the same area (which I recommend putting a custom shortcut on if you work this way[1]). And I believe that is essentially the feature you are looking for, to solve your problem. This command works with any view mode, including Scrivenings. Sometimes it can be very useful to have all of your notes together with the text you are writing, in Scrivenings view, but this command will help sort out the times when it’s not desired and you just want to focus on the flow of the text itself.
You may also find these notes I’ve written on this way of working to be useful. Depending on how formulaic your outline is, you could even get away with setting up a default subdocument template cascade. For example, create templates for chapter folders, which have a default template of a section, which in turn has a default subdocument template of notes.
The trick to getting that set up is that a text item needs to have a child before you can access the Documents ▸ Default Template for Subdocuments
command, so you would temporarily put your “Notes” template in the “Section” template, pick it, and then move it back out to the same level. The reason for moving it back out is that templates also populate subdocuments on use, so you would otherwise get an empty notes subdocument every single time you pressed Enter in a “Chapter” folder (or ⌘N
/ Ctrl+N
, however you make new sections).
Here is a little demonstration project of a setup as describe:
notes_template.zip (227.8 KB)
Notes on the demo...
- I’m using a trick with the notes template, that has some text already typed in, and selected. Both of these conditions will carry over to newly created notes from this template, meaning you can overtype the starter text easily, and in a different font than the regular text (which helps it stand out in Scrivenings, when you do want them combined).
- I did leave the “Section text” template in the “Chapter” template, which means that whenever you make a new chapter in the Draft folder, it will automatically get one new section added to it. As it’s unlikely you’d ever want otherwise, it saves a step.
- The easiest way to add notes to a section is to toggle Outliner or Corkboard view on, which will initially come up empty. Any action taken to add a new item will use the Notes template as each new “Section text” item has that set as its default. Once you do have one though, you can make new note sections at the bottom of a Scrivenings section while viewing the text.
- By default, clicking on text sections will not automatically go to corkboard, scrivenings or whatever, so appending notes to the view is optional. There is a switch for that, in the Behaviors: Folders & Files settings pane: Treat all documents with subdocuments as folders.
Apologies, at the time of this writing, this menu command has yet to be added to the custom keyboard shortcut list, on Windows, and even more annoyingly, does not have a menu key accelerator. But this command is also available in the right-click contextual menu, which some might find easier anyway. ↩︎