Increasing the amount of text visible on the Corkboard

Scrivener Newcomer Central
21

So, you want to select some text, create a new folder in the binder, create a document in the folder and have the selected text placed in that document.

That is not likely to be something you can do in a single move.

It sounds like you are thinking of the workflow like this: 1) you select some text, 2) you decide where it should go — which sometimes means deciding that it wants to be inside a new folder of its own. This is why you now want a simple move to make the complicated thing mentioned above happen.

I think inevitably you will have to change the workflow. Selecting the text is not the first move. The first move must be deciding where the text you will select should go. If that wants a new folder, you make a new folder in your preferred way. Then select the target text and do exactly as you have been to get that into a new doc.

Now the only question is how smoothly you can create a new folder without a burp. There are key commands for all this business if you want to do it all from the keyboard (lock in place the editor, change focus to Binder and back, make new folder), but to really streamline this, you will probably want to lash some of these together with a keyboard macro utility — so making the new folder (and naming it) and getting back to the editor to make the selection can be done in one keystroke.

22

You could also take it from the opposite direction: create a whole bunch of texts, then create folders to sort them into.

Probably @gr’s method is more efficient if you have a good idea what your topical divisions should be. Mine might be more efficient if you don’t.

23

Except I was not suggesting a grand advance categorization, but rather something closer to the existing workflow. What the OP wants is a more convenient way to create a category on the fly when they realize it is needed to house a specific chunk of their source text. I was suggesting that they were making their job harder by literally selecting the chunk of text first before thinking where they wanted to put it (and whether that would require a new folder).

24

Hi everyone,

I am experimenting again with the Corkboard and trying to use it to organise my notes (as I would with a set of index cards on a desk). I am really grateful for the workflows and setups suggested above. However, I noticed that when I tried this method it does not really work when selecting more than one card at a time - selecting a second, third, fourth, fifth card on the corkboard does not get the editor to snap to that new card. The view on the right is thus ‘stuck’ on whichever card you first click on. This makes it very difficult - in general an issue I find with Scrivener - to see more than one piece of text at a time (a contrast say with an app like Speare where one can rearrange cards like on a kanban or trello board). Have there been any changes to Scrivener since last year which might have increased the functionality of the corkboard (i.e. by allowing more text to be previewed) or are there any other changes to my setup that might allow me to rearrange these cards? Thanks!

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25

If I understand you correctly, you want to use the Corkboard as a navigator once you have made a selection of items from within a larger group of cards?

Scrivenings is set up automatically as you add or remove items (assuming you are using the Navigate ▸ Corkboard Selection Affects ▸ Other Editor setting), but in order for the software to know you are done selecting cards in the left editor, you’ve got to tell it that (otherwise we would never be able to work with more than one card at a time, because after clicking on one card it would immediately focus on just it).

The menu command for taking your current outliner/corkboard select and focusing on it, or isolating it, is Navigate ▸ Open ▸ in Current Editor (it will say left/right/top/bottom). And now with both editors working with the same content you can click on individual cards to scroll the scrivenings view on the right. If you want to modify the selection, add to it or whatever, then simply hit ⌘[ / Ctrl+[ to go Back, with the previous selection retained for your convenience.

26

That is helpful but not quite what I had in mind.

Essentially, for me, this whole set up is a way to get round the fact that the corkboard view shows (for my purposes) relatively little text. So, ideally, while holding down ctrl each click on a new card would take the other view to that card (so that I can then decide if the content there fits that current selection). Instead, at the moment the ‘uppermost’ card remains in place in the other editor regardless of how many cards I click.

If I was doing this physically, I would want to be able to pick one index card on a table, be able to look at another card and then decide whether to add it to a running selection (something whcih seems to be very hard to do on a computer except for applications like those are mentioned above). I hope that makes sense - if not I can clarify further - thanks for your (continued) help!

1 Like
27

Okay, I think understand what you mean then, and what you are trying to do. That’s maybe not a bad idea, to scroll the other editor (when selection-affects is active of course) to the point where the selection modification is made. If to add a card, to show its contents, and if to remove it, to the divider where it was.

I’ll put that on the list for consideration. I can’t immediately think of any reason not to do that, it’s just that we never anticipated that usage and so left the implementation simple.

2 Likes
28

Thank you! Yes unless there is another way of doing this with a different function of Scrivener, I was quite surprised at how difficult it feels to rearrange parts of a text in the way one would with paragraphs or index cards laid out on a table (i.e. where you can, at a glance, read the content of that section of text, compare it to other sections and then move it around easily ). Unless I am being daft and missing something

29

I’m thinking a bit outside the box, and considering some of the workflow changes you’ve said you’ve incorporated since your original post and corkboard question.

Considering you are a recent newbie, and reading through your altered workflow with your use of documents/folders, it seems to me that utilizing collections might fulfill your ‘end game’ of

Collections can be static where you manually add/delete/rearrange items, or can be dynamic and automatically update (say if you create a collection using search by metadata, words, etc.)

You can view collections in Scrivening mode (or other modes, or split screen, or a QR panel(quick reference), and can rearrange static collections without changing your binder order to view things differently - much like rearranging physical index cards on a table, making stacks etc. Should you like your rearrangement, it can be made to affect your binder items.

This does work most efficiently when your work is more granular (which seems to be your case-usage I believe)

On another note, it seems like

I see this as a perfect use-case of a project bookmark. The benefit is that if you put the document (Examples…) with links to the sub-docs (or direct links to the original) into your project bookmark list, a preview shows in your inspector, and you can set them to open in a quick reference panel etc. There is also a method where the link is dynamic if your link points to an original doc- if you edit the original, the bookmarked link also updates so you wouldn’t need to update a bunch of copy/pastes. (This does require more granularity, but scrivener handles that easily.) There are some excellent posts related to how to do this efficiently while addressing multiple topics - both on a single bookmark doc or multiple docs.

I shall refrain from details at this time in case these options are not of interest to you, but I am glad to elaborate. The users manual and tutorial (under your help menu) should guide you through too.

HTH

30

I guess it depends on where you are coming from with that. I have never found it difficult at all to shuffle the order of the text around, using the shortcuts in Edit ▸ Move, in either outliner or corkboard mode (and sometimes the binder), and would if anything consider that to be one of Scrivener’s strengths. But I’m not looking for the text itself as the primary interface for doing that, just the group views where I can move items around. The scrivenings view is for seeing the result of that, for how I work.

31

Yes so while moving items around you have to try and keep in your head/remember what that content in full was - again I’d see that as quite different to just being able to see the text itself (as one would on a Kanban or Trello board). But thanks for your help - I’m glad I’ve tried my best with Scrivener’s current features in any case.

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Thanks for the suggestions - I don’t think it will assist much with the current issue I am having of being able to ‘see’ the content of each scrivening, and comparing it others, while moving it around.

33

You could always break the text in Scrivener into smaller chunks.

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34

Just a final word on this - I’ve scouted around various other applications and decided to stick with Scrivener. I have little experience in software development, but is there any way (for my version of Scrivener) that I could increase the amount of text on the cards by even a marginal amount? (bearing in mind the caveats mentioned above regarding how that would affect re-rendering) Some part of the code I could edit? Sorry if that is a daft question! I thought I would pose it anyway

35

Nothing other than what has already been mentioned earlier. You can paste 50,000 words into an index card if you want, and make it as big as your screen. I don’t know how useful that would be, but you can!

36

Rather than 50,000 words, a future option for the text being able to simply occupy the space that Scrivener already permits in the UI would be good - given here I have not even set in the the maximum size Scrivener offers. A relatively minor change I thought, but I’ve looked through the forums and it clearly isn’t popular use case.

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37

Well that’s what I’m getting at, you are making use of a tool that is meant to generate a short and generic synopsis from the content, not reproduce all of its thousands of words. Nor does it generate text into a visual space, arbitrarily large or small. It creates a fixed quantity of text on the disk and stores that into a .txt file; same thing that happens when you type your own words into this space.

So it isn’t that it’s not filling the available space, it’s that you made the card bigger than the synopsis is. Or let’s put it another way, you had the software make a synopsis 50 words long (or whatever), so why would you expect the software to populate it with 75, and from what would it do so? Why should it assume anything for those extra 25 words to make the white space black and white instead of white? Why would it arbitrarily jam words into the card after your hand-crafted synopsis, just to fill “empty” space?

I think maybe that’s the point of confusion. The synopsis is designed to be a tool you can use to describe your section so you remember what it is, without having to consult large amounts of text to do so. If you typed in 17 words into a card, then wouldn’t it feel a bit odd for the software to just start jamming “random” text after the 17 words merely to make sure the card wasn’t empty looking?

Sure, in this case you aren’t doing that, you’re using an automatic generator to save yourself the time of describing things manually, but it’s still a fixed width description, even if the software comes up with it.

So to return to what I was saying: if you want more text, then select however much text helps you identify this section, from the other sections, and use the Documents ▸ Auto-Fill ▸ Set Synopsis from Selection menu command.

There is no limiter on that when you tell the software specifically which text to use, which is what I was getting at when I said you can have 50k words on a card. I don’t mean you have have that much, but that you can have one, fifteen, 75, or an entire series and everything in between. You aren’t stuck with the limiter that the software uses when you don’t tell it what to use for the synopsis and let it sort it out.

A relatively minor change I thought, but I’ve looked through the forums and it clearly isn’t popular use case.

I think it’s because in most cases the title of an item, and if that is not sufficient, a description by which one identifies a section, is enough to understand the contents represented by that card, in a symbolic sense like we would think of an icon representing the contents of a file on the disk. You are it seems coming from a different kind of software that affords one little or no such summary view, and thus one can only ever identify the structure of their work by skimming through vast quantities of text and moving those entire quantities around on large management boards.

That’s fine, to be clear, but that’s not the kind of software Scrivener is. Its design approach is rather the opposite, an attempt to get away from that necessity, and is premised on the concept that one can generate a shorthand for all of that, and come to understand the structure of their work through single sentences, short phrases even (often I just use titles to organise things, no synopsis at all!). You don’t need to see every word in the section because you know what is in the section from your hand-crafted summaries—same concept as a physical corkboard.

But again that’s kind of beside the point. If you want more text, put more text on the card. That’s really the dirt simple answer to your question.

1 Like
38

Apologies – and thanks for your patience!

I misunderstood and thought that, after having done the Documents > Auto-fill > Set Synopsis from Main Text - that there was a software limit to how much text a card could display. I had falsely assumed that the auto-fill function would have just taken the main text and put it direct the synopsis (managing to ignore, in the process, the meaning of that word ha!). Having just gone back and copied and pasted a chunk of text I now see my very daft mistake and see exactly what you mean. To put it another way, I somehow managed to miss - like a complete muppet - that I could just simply write/paste more text into the synopsis and hence the card.
This is really wonderful news for my workflow (most of my cards are only marginally over the synopsis limit). Thanks so much again!

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39

Glad it is making more sense now, and that this approach will in overall be a boost to your workflow. :slight_smile: