I regularly get together with other writers to critique progress in our novels. Each week, I need to compile about ONLY 4,000 words (usually 3 or 4 scenes). I cannot figure out how to do this. My current method is to copy the text of the desired scenes into another empty project and compile from there.
A related question: when I compile, if there was a way to turn ALL of the “include” checks off, then I could check only my desired scenes. I cannot figure out how to do that either.
Choose the Contents line in the Compilation Options on the left hand side.
You’ll see the outline of your project and you can include or exclude any document there by ticking/unticking. To select them all / turn them all off, hold down the option key while you click on one of the document tick boxes.
There are a few options which enable you to refine the selection easily and they’re self-explanatory, I think. E.g. filtering in or our documents meeting certain criteria (a certain label/status etc).
Brookter, thank you very much! Holding down the option key is of course not very intuitive, though. I hope the Scrivener user interface developer considers adding an “all” checkbox at the top of the column.
Another trick if you have “sets” of documents you compile (a small set vs. all). To do this make a collection in the Binder (Section 7.4 of the user manual, collections are subsets of your documents), and then simply select the collection you want at compile time, very quick and easy.
I’ve found the easiest way to go, is to use the “Filter” function at the bottom of the Compile menu, and chose “Current selection”. i.e. the selection I’ve made in the Binder, before I open compile (Cmd-Alt-E)