In attempting to make optimal use of Scrivener to produce an index and or glossary for a non-fiction book I am writing: I have been exploring the idea of making a separate document for each glossary/index entry. This would radically increase the number of documents in my project. What problems would this cause?
From my experience with Scrivener, it’s hard to say. What does “radically increase” mean and how much text is in these documents?
Generally, after many tests, I can confirm that Scrivener can handle many documents very well. I have tested projects with about 10,000 documents, RTF, PDF, web pages. The navigation and everything else works perfectly.
The only thing that no longer works is the search.
In addition, things like opening the project takes a little longer and so do backups. But that has never bothered me.
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Yeah I would say you would be hard pressed to make a glossary large enough to slow down your project in any noticeable way. If you open up the user manual PDF and flip through the appendices, you’ll find long lists of stuff formatting similarly to a glossary, such as the menu listings and preferences. These are all separate binder items, many of them no longer than one-liners. Most of the other places in the PDF that have similarly formatted lists, such as the compile format chapter, are also broken down to item lists. Overall there are around 2,500 items in the Draft folder for this project.
It’s a good way to work! You can easily keep them alphabetised with the Edit ▸ Sort submenu, and they can be linked to directly from other areas that relate to them.
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I recently created a Glossary of about 300 seperated items, linked with document links and backlinks to the original text. This has little effect on working with the Project, opening, saving, or compiling.
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Ok, well then creating the files for a glossary/index is the easy part. The problem I am trying to solve is how to get page numbers into each of these glossary/index entries when compiling or exporting my book. If Scrivener did this with its User Manual, how did they do it?
I use LaTeX to typeset the PDF (and Markdown to write with, which generates the .tex file), so that gives me a lot of options on top of what Scrivener can do.
If you’re talking about linking to a glossary entry from elsewhere, then you can make use of the <$p> placeholder for that. Select it, and then drag and drop the glossary entry onto the selection to link to it (or use whatever method you prefer to create an internal link). As with all document placeholders (like <$title>, which may also be useful to you in this scenario), linking the placeholder will pull the data from the link target instead of the document the placeholder is typed into.
For an index though, where presumably you would at times want to link to some paragraph maybe several pages deep into a section, there isn’t anything that will work for that. This method links to the page number the section you link to starts on.[1]
Indexing in Scrivener is possible, but only using Markdown (LaTeX is not necessary, I have built compile Formats for LibreOffice and Word that provide these capabilities).
Well, save for what can be deduced from above: that if this paragraph is in its own binder item it can be linked to directly. Since text can be compiled as seamless this doesn’t necessarily mean anything for the reader, but whether you want to break up your outline down to the point where glossary terms can be targetted specifically is another matter. ↩︎
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In my case, I am building a combined Glossary/Index, where each entry:
GlossaryTerm Interrogative [who,what,where,when,why,way]
Description/Definition [multi-line description]
See Also: [list of related topics]
Index: [list of page numbers where term is discussed]
Its the list of page numbers for each item that I am having trouble finding a solution for.
So there is no possible solution within Scrivener to build a standard book Index where each term item is followed by a list of page numbers corresponding to pages where the term is meaningfully addressed in the book being indexed?
Example:
Erasmus Darwin (who)
Polyglot, physician, botanist, poet. Introduced basic evolutionary concepts later explained in detail by his grandson Charles Darwin.
See Also: Charles Darwin, Evolution, Natural Selection, Gradualism
Index: 13, 35, 178, 302
It is the page numbers listed at the bottom of each entry that I need help creating and exporting during the Compile process.
Here is the thread on the methods that can be used to create an index, though that does describe creating a traditional alphabetic index of terms, rather than a hybrid glossary/index. I’m not sure how that would be constructed in any tool at all, without further research (at least not without laboriously wiring up hundreds of bookmark anchors).
Have never understood why Glossaries and Indices are rendered as separate sections. An index is the perfect place to place definitions for terms along with the list of pages where such terms are expanded in the text of the book.
It is perhaps something that can be accomplished in a more special-purpose tool. Those writing professional indexes aren’t going to be relying upon the basic features word processors provide, though what all they are used to is outside of my area of experience. It wouldn’t surprise me if the ability to annotate entries and format them into a nice list isn’t a nut someone out there has already cracked. Like I say though, I’ve never looked into it before though, so I don’t have a clue.
I do agree it’s a nice idea though.
Am I correct in assuming that the process you’ve explained (though I must confess that I am confused by your explanation), would only work if a particular chunk of text was only linked to only one particular index term? Or rather, would not work if there were nested index chunking (a paragraph linked to one index term, within a set of paragraphs indexed to another or several index terms)?
Probably because they serve different functions. I don’t need or want the definition of “whirligig” to interfere with my search for references to “Whitman, Walt.”
Probably also because they are typically compiled at different times by different people. An author can start work on a Glossary early in the first draft stage, while it’s not really possible to create an index until the manuscript is in more or less final form.
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