Editing a novel for a cousin. He has written it in 62 chapters, so apparently I’m going to have to make 61 new folders and 61 new text files within them, and copy the chapters into the text files, before making it into a Kindle book.
Apparently there’s no longer a keyboard shortcut for ‘create new folder’, so I created one in the Keyboard section of the System Prefs, choosing cmd-alt-shift-f. But it won’t work. I’ve tried restarting Scrivener and restarting the computer, without any luck.
Hi,
“Create new folder” does already have a shortcut - it’s opt-cmd-N. If that’s not working, then it may be that you have that shortcut used for something else in your custom system preferences shortcuts (could that be the case)?
As for cmd-opt-shift-F not working, that’s probably because it is already assigned to Edit > Find > Find by Formatting. As the Edit menu appears before the Project menu (where “New Folder” is contained), that will always be used first (as OS X goes through the menus looking for shortcuts in turn). You would therefore need to assign a different keyboard shortcut to “Find by Formatting…” to free up the cmd-opt-shift-F shortcut.
Hope that helps.
All the best,
Keith
If you aren’t splitting the chapters up into scenes, but just creating a document per chapter… is it necessary to create folders?
I really don’t know, Robert - my understanding (possibly wrong) was that to get chapters, titled ‘Chapter One’, for example, you had to have folders. Don’t you?
Edit: I set up a test project in Scrivener, in Novel format, and copied in a couple of entries from Gwen Hernandez’ excellent Scrivener and writing-life blog posts, which I want to read anyway; I put these two as single files inside the folder called Chapter inside the main Manuscript folder, then I compiled this as an eBook in Kindle format.
No dice: what I got was an eBook for Kindle all right, but it consisted of a single chapter called:
Chapter One
Chapter
and with the pasted-in matter as the chapter’s text.
You have another thread going about this issue, but I think there’s a simpler workflow:
Get your cousin’s book in one single RTF file.
Start from the bottom. Scroll up to a chapter break.
Select what you want for a chapter title, or type one and select; then press Option-K
That creates a chapter unit with its title.
Do that all the way to the top.
All of those chapter units go into the Draft folder.
Add any needed front or back matter
Then follow the Compile instructions for e-books in the Help file.
I agree with this. Scrivener really doesn’t care what you do—you can use and onion-skin of five folders to hold each scene and then set up the compiler to handle that. It wouldn’t make any sense at all to do that, but you could. The example provided in the novel template was never meant to suggest that one needs to wrap each and every scene inside a folder, all by itself, but rather that one could write a half dozen or so scene files and group them into a folder, or what in most books is referred to as a chapter. If you are cutting the book into chapters, you might as well just use a long list of files and not bother with folders (in fact the default novel compile settings accommodate that too). But even if it didn’t, you could look at what is happening for Folders in the defaults, select that row in the Formatting compile pane, press Cmd-C to copy the settings, and then select the single file row and press Cmd-V to paste the settings so that files now act like folders. You do not want that right now, to be clear, I’m just saying—it is way more flexible than you are treating it to be.
Now that you have it the way you do, there is little sense in wasting a bunch of time changing it. Like I said, you can set up the compiler to work with nearly any scheme, and fortunately in this case the scheme you are using is already provided for so it doesn’t require much to change anything (and let us keep that discussion in that thread).