How to use Title Page <$projecttitle> and others

I’m doing a school paper and the title page looks like it has a cool feature that will place my project title, full name, and school name (I think), but I have no idea how to use this. Please help, as I know I need to use it for one of my papers because it impacts the header that appears on each page.

This is what I see in the Non-fiction APA template, but most projects seem to have something similar.
<$projecttitle>
<$fullname>
{School-Name}

Thank you. I really appreciate your help.

In Scrivener, anything in angle brackets starting with a $ is a placeholder tag which will be filled in with the right data when you compile the document.

So, when you compile the document, the project name and your name will be taken from the title of the project and your name in the Contacts book (unless you’ve changed them in Preferences in which case those details will be used instead). Finally, in the first Compilation pane (second tab on the right) you can enter such details separately.

As for {School Name} — it’s just a hint to you to delete it and type the real name of your school.

Hope that helps.

That does help. Thank you. Do you know how to find the contacts book and/or its preferences? It looks like I can change a lot in the meta data settings, but there is still some stuff that shows up in the headers of Undergraduate Humanities Essay template (for instance) that doesn’t show up in meta-data settings.

Here is what shows up in Title page:
YOUR NAME ({StudentID} - COLLEGE_NAME)
COURSE_NAME – SHORT_PAPER_NAME
ESSAY FOR SUPERVISOR_NAME (<$mediumdate>)

Student ID and Supervisor Name don’t show up in meta-data settings, but they populate in the header anyway. Sounds like your contact solution is the solution. I just need to find out where to do it.

Thank you.

By “Contacts” I now assume you mean the Contacts from within my Mac’s desktop contacts. In that case, I haven’t overridden anything on that (which is likely why it was pulling my name into the header even though I never put it in the document itself).

I still need to figure out where to update the rest of that info.

Yes, your personal details can be taken from the Mac’s Contacts app.

There’s basically a hierarchy of where the information is taken from for the Personal and Project details. Scrivener looks first at the Compilation Dialogue, and if there’s nothing there, it takes the information from the Project itself (eg. the project title, or the contacts details in Preferences > General > Author Information). If they’re not filled in, then it defaults to the Contacts book information.

Some other information (such as <$mediumdate>) is taken directly from your Mac’s system settings.

You can see exactly where any ‘Placeholder Tag’ (Scrivener’s name for metadata enclosed in <$…>) is taken from in the Help Menu.

But in your example below, {Student ID} — ie the data enclosed in {} etc are NOT Scrivener Placeholder Tags (they’re not enclosed in <$…> ) — instead they’re using the Replacements feature at compilation.

Cmd-opt-E to compile, then click on the rightmost icon on the right (ab>ac). Overwrite YourStudentID with your Student ID number etc and they’ll be replaced in the compilation process.

The other text (COLLEGE_NAME etc - ie, no {} or <$…> just needs to be overwritten in that document in the binder.

HTH.